Volume 13 , Issue 27

NW Okie's Ancestry Corner

[Identities of the 1909 Guthrie baseball team in photo on the left: backrow, left to right: Herman Leuttke (captain), Clare Patterson, Bill McGill, Norman Price, Clyde Geist, Thomas Reed; Middle row: Red Davis, Tony Anderson, Howard Price (manager), Ted Waring, Milton Pokorney; Seated: Floyd Willis, Jesse Clifton, Clarence Nelson.]

On this weekend as we celebrate Independence Day with our special comfort foods across American, we remember an old saying from our youth that went something like this, "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. They go together in the good 'ole USA." Do you remember what year that advertisement came out?

Back then, Mom really did make apple pie from scratch in the kitchen. Grandpa and Dad played ball in the yard with the kids, and everyone ate a hot dog or two at the ballpark. AND . . . there seemed to be a Chevy parked curbside, as Americans were living what seemed to be the American dream back then.

What could be more American than baseball? Is baseball known as American as apple pie? That brings us to our topic this week . . . baseball in pre-world war I and II.

The photo above, on the left is a group shot of the Guthrie baseball team taken around August 1909, in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Grandpa Bill McGill is on the backrow, third from the left. We have also included the names of the rest of the team that we have recently run across.

We heard from a baseball historian at Oklahoma University, who is compiling another baseball book on small town professional baseball in Oklahoma before World War II. The historian tells me that the book will follow the format of Territorians To Boomers that was released on June 4.

This Oklahoma baseball historian wrote to ask if he could include a couple of photographs that I had of the 1909 Guthrie baseball team, of which my Grandpa William "Bill" J. McGill was a pitcher. I have included those two photographs here.

The photograph on the right is another postcard dated around mid to late August 1909 that Bill McGill sent to his sweetheart, Constance Estella Warwick, who was staying in Colorado Springs around that time when Bill McGill was playing baseball with the Guthrie baseball team.

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