Hickory sticks

Sporting News, The, August 15, 1994 by Pat Jordan, Mark Newman

"You see that picture of Ruth and Gehrig?" says Paul Thomas, 80, sitting at the bar in the Crawdads' Restaurant. "I'll bet you 95 percent of the people here don't know who they are." Paul sips from his beer. He hasn't missed a Crawdads game in a year and a half. As with most fans, he often comes to the stadium at 6 p.m., when the gates open, just to sit in the beautiful park even before the players take the field. Paul was a standout baseball player at the University of Illinois in 1936, and shortly after he graduated, he moved to Hickory to work in real estate and for North Carolina Blue Cross. He remembers "The Rebels" and their old stadium. "I was the official scorer," he says. "Oh, it was a terrible field. People had to sit on these wood planks and got splinters. The lights were so bad in the outfield that one night a fan hung a lantern on the center-field fence. No, the old park wasn't very conducive to families. In those days, just baseball fans came. Maybe about 700 a game. (In "The Rebels'" last season, 1960, they drew only 14,503 fans.) The Hickory fans didn't miss that team."

An hour before game time, Jack Clark, 67, a cigar stub clenched between his teeth, is dusting off the stadium's plastic seats. Jack is a Crawdad usher, recently retired from his Western Auto Store in nearby Granite Falls.

Jack looks up, a grizzled old-timer, to answer a question. "Would they come if they hadn'ta built it? I don't know. Maybe the fans come here because the stadium's a novelty. They'll even cheer a pop fly. One night, we were getting beat, 8-0, and we scored a run in the eighth inning, and the fans went nuts. This here's a threering circus."

Jack also remembers "The Rebels" from '60, and a lot of Rebel teams before them. The name went back to 1939. It seemed such a perfect name for a Hickory team. "The Rebels," with all the name implies, both good and bad. It was a name linked with prejudice and injustice and domination, but it also was linked with romance. Brave soldiers fighting a losing cause, and a lot of those Rebel teams fought losing campaigns with such records as 18-80, 38-73 and 28-79. Men with colorful names and even more colorful pasts, such as one Alabama Pitts, who played for "The Rebels" in 1940. Pitts, a man of dubious character, was a "helluva baseball player," according to his manager. But he was also a helluva ladies man even if he did have a wife and child stashed away someplace. Which was the cause of his early demise. It seems that one early morning, Pitts, according to a local writer, Mike Clark, "was quite drunk -- attempted to dance with a young lady, Miss Mildred Deal of Valdese. She had come to Valdese's most notorious roadhouse in the company of Miss Kate Smith, and the two young ladies were escorted by cousins Roy and Newland LeFevers. Newland LeFevers was dancing with Miss Deal when Pitts decided to cut in. According to the News Herald report, "Some difference was heard in reports to actual details and as to whether Pitts was starting to hit LeFevers with his fist. What wasn't in dispute is that Newland LeFevers slashed Pitts with a knife ..." and two hours later, Alabama Pitts was dead at the age of 30.