Dakota Lifevisit us at www.capjournal.com e-mail us at news@capjournal.com FRIDAY 5.15.2015

Pierre Cowboys

1962

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Glory DaysCollege athletes chased major league ambitions around South Dakotas Basin League

By Lance nixonLance.nixon@capjournaL.com

Readers of the Daily Capital Journal on Aug. 7, 1962, knew some-thing big was happening from the way the headline shouted across the top right half of the page that day: G-Men Arrive to Check Area for Kennedy Trip.

Its only 10 days before President John F. Kennedy will arrive in Pierre, South Dakota, to dedicate Oahe Dam, and the importance of that event is reflected in the enormous size of the type.

But the most important story for Pierre that day? That would be the headline above that one the one that spans the width of the page in type just as large, with italics added for emphasis: Cowboys Are 1962 Basin League Champs.

A good year, 1962; its the fifth year in a row that the Pierre Cowboys a team in a league rich in players who will go on to play major league baseball someday, and even richer in those who will not have won either the pennant for their league or the playoffs that come afterward. Theyll win one or the other for two more seasons later that decade in what was called then the Basin League essentially a bunch of baseball-crazed South Dakota towns, and one in Nebraska, within the drainage of the Missouri River Basin.

To my knowledge, there has never been anything quite like it. For post-World War II, it was the epicenter of amateur baseball, a former Colorado sports editor, Don Dennis, told the Capital Journal.

The Basin LeagueThe Basin League sprang up in 1953, records of the era sug-

gest, with five teams: the Winner Pheasants, the Pierre Cowboys, the Mitchell Kernels, the Chamberlain Chiefs, and one Nebraska team the Valentine Hearts. The following year the Huron Elks, the Watertown Lake Sox and the Yankton Terrys joined. In 1957 the Rapid City Chiefs joined, and Chamberlain dropped out.

And so it went; from year to year a few teams came in or dropped out, and names changed; about 1958, Hurons team became the Jims.

In 1960, Valentine and Winner shared a team for the season the Twins.

Sturgis got in the game with a team called the Titans in 1961, and Winner went back to having its own Pheasants again.

The Sioux Falls Packers joined the league in 1964; the Mobridge Lakers in 1966; and the Chamberlain Mallards in 1968. But the Basin Leagues best days were over; by 1973, the last year, it was down to four teams: the Sturgis Titans, the Pierre Cowboys, the Rapid City Chiefs and the Chamberlain Mallards.

Of those teams, only the Pierre Cowboys had been in it and stayed with it from the beginning.

And oddly, sources tell the Capital Journal, people in all those small towns who came to the Basin League games very likely had no idea of the caliber of play that they were watching.

Premier gathering placeWhat they were watching was the very best college baseball

played in America in those summers from the end of the 1950s through the start of the 1970s. Baseball scouts were well aware of that.

Don Dennis, a newspaper sports editor and baseball promoter in Colorado, recalls being fascinated by the Basin League during the late 1950s and into the 1960s. He knew it in part because his wife is from Sturgis, and he sometimes had the opportunity to watch Basin League games while in Sturgis. He also took in games else-where on the circuit.

I was with the Grand Junction, Colorado, Eagles, Dennis said. I actually recruited the Basin League, looking for players for the next year for Grand Junction.

Though some regional leagues were older the Cape Cod League in the Northeast started in 1885 and the Valley Baseball League in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia started in 1923 there was more excitement, in Denniss view, in the Basin League. And it was the model that Dennis had in mind when he helped organize the Alaska League in the 1970s. The Basin League stood apart, Dennis said.

It was the premier gathering place of college amateur players.

See GLORY, C6

Top right: Designer Bradly Gills photo illustration, made to look like a baseball card of the era, features a photo of the 1966 Pierre Cowboys team. Team manager Jack Stallings is the first seated figure on the left; sitting next to him, second from left, is Gaylord Sonnenschein. Rusty Adkins, quoted in this story, is seated third from right. Bobby Bryant is standing, third from right. Geoff Zahn is standing fourth from left. Pierre residents are beginning to gather for a game in the Hyde Stadium stands in back.(Courtesy of Gaylord Sonnenschein)

Middle :Former batboy and catcher for the Pierre Cowboys Gaylord Sonnenschein shoulders a bat that once belonged to the team. It was given to him by his 1966 teammate, second baseman Rusty Adkins.

Bottom: A cap on a seat at Hyde Stadium carries the logo of the Pierre Cowboys. It was given to Gaylord Sonnenschein by his former teammate, Rusty Adkins.

Background: A bat that carries the mark of the Pierre Cowboys.Photos by Joshua Penrod

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Gold standardAnd in some ways, Pierre

was the star of the show.Speaking as an outsid-

er, I think Pierre was kind of the gold standard in the league for a number of years, Dennis said. Pierre would either win the league or the playoffs in every one of those years.

It went that way in no less than seven seasons. Valentine won the pennant in 1958, but Pierre defeated Valentine in the playoffs; pulled the same trick against pennant-winning Rapid City in 1959; defeated Watertown in the playoffs in 1960 after Rapid City won the pen-nant; defeated Rapid City in the playoffs in 1961 after Watertown won the pen-nant; and won both the pen-nant and the playoffs against Huron for the title in 1962. In 1965 Pierre beat Sturgis in the playoffs, though Rapid City had won the pennant; and Pierre won the pennant again in 1966, when no play-offs were held.

The Pierre Cowboys were Indians

With a record like that, small wonder the Pierre Cowboys had a major league team watching them for tal-ent and occasionally helping with items such as uniforms something guaranteed to provoke questions, given the circumstances.

I can still remember my confusion, says longtime Pierre baseball fan Mike Kelley, who was a boy at the end of the 1950s and start of the 1960s. The Pierre Cowboys were a farm team for the Cleveland Indians. So at one time they all had uni-forms that said Indians on them the Pierre Cowboys were Indians.

Thats clear from one photo taken in that banner year, 1962. Not that the insig-nia on the uniforms mat-tered that much to a boy in Pierre, South Dakota. There were giants in the earth in those days, and the main thing was to see them play.

There were some who came back year after year. They were superstars, as far as we were concerned. It was like, Yes! This is going to be a great summer! Kelley remembers.

And it all happened at Hyde Stadium, which might as well have been the Center of the World if you were 10, 11, 12 years old. Some nights it would be blue with smoke over the seats and you would look at those players through a haze of glory while the summer sun fell down into the Missouri River; and that was just right for the kind of magic that was there.

The baseball itself was great. You were sitting down there close you could hear every word those players would say. I can still remember the smell of the peanuts and the tobacco smoke. The cigar and cigarette smoke just permeated the air on a still night.

Its a feel-good time in the history of Pierre when we had the Pierre Cowboys. Nobody had TVs. And when we did get TVs, you couldnt see anything any-way. To have a slice of that American pastime here in our own town was huge, Kelley recalls.

I think everybody shared their dreams with them and we were torn between hoping they would get called up to the major leagues and hoping they would be back next year for Pierre.

I dont know how many of those games there was a scout out watching them. Those guys had to wonder as they walked out onto the dusty field, I wonder if this is going to be the night if theyre sending a scout out. Because I feel like Im going to have a good one.

This was just summer-time entertainment for us. But those guys on the field were working their guts out to get to the next level. And the next level was playing for the Cleveland Indians. They were hoping against hope for that tiny chance they might get called up.

That was the whole purpose of the farm team, to get guys ready to move them up some did, some didnt. But they all had a dream. It came through Pierre, South Dakota, for some of them. You kept

track of all the players and you felt like you knew them personally.

And if you were fortu-nate to have a grandpa and grandma named James and Viola Kelley, with a big old, three-story house on the 100 block of Highland, maybe you did know them personally; because James and Viola Kelley helped out the community by board-ing a few baseball players for the summer.

They were young men, probably 19 or 20 years old, living their dream. They were renting little sleep-ing rooms on the upper floor, Kelley remembers. I had the chance to bump into them at my grandma and grandpas house not by accident. Id ask my Grandma, What time do the Cowboys go to the field? Id make it a point to be hanging around in the hallway when theyd come down.

Other towns, other heroes

Pierre wasnt alone in the adulation it gave to its baseball players. Other Basin League towns felt the same way.

I grew up south of Kennebec 15 miles, and as the crow flies, we were only about 25 miles from Winner, says Herb Sundall of Kennebec, now himself a member of the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Association Hall of Fame. A couple of times each summer my dad would take me to Winner to see a Basin League baseball game. It was the highlight of my summer.

Sundall agrees many South Dakotans prob-ably had no idea they were watching the best college players in the nation.

If they went and com-pared it to other baseball they would have seen, they probably realized it was better, Sundall said. But I dont think they realized how good some of these kids were going to get. I remember an outfielder picking up a ball very, very deep in the outfield and throwing a one-hop strike to home. That takes a heck of an arm. You dont see that every day. It was prob-ably similar to what you see in major colleges today. They were big-time play-ers.

For example, future Hall of Famer Jim Palmer was working his way toward the majors by playing for Winner. Another future Hall of Famer named Bob Gibson was throwing for Chamberlain. Don Sutton pitched for Sioux Falls. A slugger named Frank Howard hit them out of the park for Rapid City.

And in Pierre, a pitcher with a great arm and daz-zling speed is headed for the big leagues, too only it will be the NFL, in his case. Bobby Bryant will end up choosing football, his first love, over baseball.

But in 1966, hes in Pierre, South Dakota, playing base-ball for the Cowboys.

All of a sudden Pierre just popped out of the Plains

And the way that hap-pened was this.

Bobby Bryant later a cornerback for the Minnesota Vikings in their glory days in the 1970s was a pitcher in the mid-1960s for the University of South Carolina. One day after hed pitched a heck of a game against Wake Forest, the Wake Forest coach, Jack Stallings, approached him.

He came over and talk-ed to me and said, Bobby, you want to come over and play some baseball this summer?

Bobby was interested over where? So Jack Stallings told him about the Basin League out in South Dakota, and a team he coached out there the Pierre Cowboys.

They flew us out, Bryant recalls. I got to fly into Pierre. All of a sudden Pierre just popped out of the Plains.

Pierre was a small town, but it was a great atmo-sphere to play baseball in. The players could work a couple hours a day with the city electric company or one of the businesses there just to make a little extra money. Rusty Adkins and I lived at the St. Charles Hotel and ate at a little caf down the street.

It was different country.

But it was a fun summer. That was the summer of 66. Pierre was one of the better teams. There were a couple other teams that were in the same caliber. But we were one of the bet-ter teams in the league.

Bryant said he has no idea how the Basin League came to be. I guess the right people got behind it and supported it in the cit-ies where we played.

It was a good season for him. But Bryant though drafted to play professional baseball elected to go with the NFL instead.

I was lucky to have a chance to play football or baseball. Football was my first choice and it worked out really well, Bryant said.

But nowadays he won-ders if a career in baseball wouldnt have been easier on his body.

And he recalls that some of the names he knew from the Pierre Cowboys, such as his 1966 teammate, pitch-er Geoff Zahn, went on to play in the major leagues. Zahn played in the majors for 13 seasons, from 1973 to 1985, including several seasons with the Minnesota Twins.

Prairie rattlers and culture shock

Jack Stallings got around. He was one of the great coaches in the Basin League, where others, such as the colorful Harry Wise of the Winner Pheasants sometimes a scout for the Baltimore Orioles were also well known.

In 1965, Stallings recruited a kid named Rusty Adkins from South Carolina.

Rusty Adkins played for Clemson; and Jack Stallings, at Wake Forest, noticed.

I just hit .444 that year, my sophomore year I just tore it up. And he said, I want that boy to play for me, Adkins told the Capital Journal.

Adkins did; for two sum-mers as a Pierre Cowboy.

I played second base. I was there in 1965 and 1966. I stayed at the St. Charles. This was before air condi-tioning and it was rough it was rough.

Though there were almost no Atlantic Coast Conference players in the Basin League in his first year, in his next year Adkins noticed there were more for good reason, he said.

The Basin League was by far the best college league when it was going on, Adkins says. If any-body aspired to further their career in baseball, then they wanted to go to the Basin League. The quality of the pitching was excellent.

The quality of the hitting wasnt bad, either.

I hit for a pretty good average in the Basin League, Adkins remem-bers. I had a 41-game hit-ting streak in college, which is still an ACC record. The record for the Basin League was 21. I got to 20 and my last at-bat, I swear I beat that ball but the umpire called me out. So I ended up one short of the Basin League record. I had 20. I didnt lead the league in hit-ting but I figured I was in the top 10, maybe.

I thought it was at least good Double-A ball. I thought it was an excellent league.

Double-A ball would be, except for Triple-A, the highest level of minor league baseball.

The Pierre Cowboys trav-eled all over. They saw the Badlands, Rapid City, the Black Hills, the Days of 76 Rodeo in Deadwood.

Louise Hackett, she and her husband would drive us to every game, and then get up the next morning and go to work. How they did that, I dont know. They lived in Fort Pierre. They came to every game and they drove their car to every game Sturgis, Valentine, Rapid City. She was a fine lady, Adkins said.

And she showed them what a peculiar country South Dakota was.

You could go a hundred miles and not even see a tree there. You could go a hundred miles and not even see a filling station, Adkins marvels. Now that was pretty much culture shock there.

Some of those young baseball players explored the culture in other ways.

There was a bar in Fort Pierre, Adkins says. They had what they called the Prairie Rattler. If you

could drink two of them, theyd give you the second one free something like that. Or maybe it was if you could drink three of them and walk out the door standing up, theyd give you all of them. And they had Grain Belt Beer I never heard of Grain Belt.

Adkins agreed with those who say the quality of play in the Basin League was known to the players, but maybe not to the fans.

They certainly didnt appreciate the quality of the players who came through, because when they came through, they werent known. They just got better and better and a lot of them went on to the big leagues.

Adkins loved the support of the fans in the Basin League. He liked playing for the Pierre Cowboys so well that when he left Pierre after the summer of 1966, he took one item of gear with him his bat, stamped Pierre Cowboys. He kept it for years and years; until he gave it away to someone with even closer ties to the Pierre Cowboys.

Catching a dreamHe gave it to just the guy

youd expect, the Pierre Cowboys former batboy who grew up to be a catch-er for the home team that same year of 1966 Gaylord Sonnenschein.

How it came about for me is, we lived up here on the corner of Capitol and Adams growing up. My dad had a ranch and I worked out there but he was a big baseball fan. His dad died and he never got the chance to play much sports he had to save the ranch for my grandmother, his moth-er. But he always made sure that my brother and I could play sports, Sonnenschein told the Capital Journal one day down at Hyde Stadium. He made time available, so I just kind of grew up down here.

Baseball was intertwined with life on the ranch, too.

Every day my Dad and I would come in from the ranch and wed stop where La Minestra is now. There used to be a bar there, and hed run in and pick up the scores on the ticker tape. And I would get a grape pop or something he wouldnt let me have a beer, obvi-ously. It would be a hot summer day and wed be coming in from working at the ranch.

Baseball he loved baseball. Baseball was a big thing to those people back then. They had their teams and they wanted to know how they operated, how they were doing in the season.

His father didnt mind if he helped out at the ballpark. Out in left field, Gaylord Sonnenschein helped man the old score-board with the painted numbers you hung up on hooks.

I graduated from that to batboy and I was batboy for a long time. I was probably 10, 11, 12 years old, maybe even younger than that. I just kind of idolized those

guys because I knew how good they were.

And he knew who made that baseball happen in Pierre, South Dakota.

Gordon Stout and John Maher were the two guys who did a lot of scouting to bring the boys to town. Gordon Stout used to own Automatic Vendors. He was a successful business-man. Theyd go down in the spring and watch these guys play their spring ball. That was a big sport in the South still is.

So they would recruit these guys to come up and play. It was a 50-game schedule 25 home and 25 away.

It wasnt just play-ers with South Carolina accents slow as melting but-ter that would show up at Hyde Stadium. The Pierre Cowboys brought them in from California, Utah, Arizona all over.

Most of them stayed at the St. Charles thats where they put them up. And let me tell you, the 5th of June or whatever day they started coming in, I was at the St. Charles, meet-ing them all. It broke my heart when they had to go back.

But in the meantime, in the summertime, he ran his legs off as a batboy. It paid off one year.

Gordon Stout really appreciated how hard I worked as a batboy and Ill never forget it: At the end of the season he gave me a $50 bill and a Brownie Scout Camera. I thought Id died and gone to heaven. Fifty dollars, back then that was a lot of money.

He might have thought hed gone to heaven again in 1966, playing baseball for South Dakota State, when the Pierre Cowboys asked Gaylord Sonnenschein to catch for them that season that same team on which hed grown up as a batboy. He was friends with Rusty Adkins and Bobby Bryant.

Several of the guys found jobs around town. They couldnt get paid for playing ball in college. So theyd get jobs. A lot of them worked over here at the DOT. Me and Bobby and Rusty and several other guys, we worked on the grounds crew, getting the field ready to go for games.

And then after the games, theyd clean up the next day, the Southern boys wearing shorts and flip-flops, musing about last nights game, talking way slower than they knew how to pitch and run.

AftermathSo why did it end, if the

Basin League was such great baseball?

Partly because the math after every season was tenuous, hanging on a little black line in a ledger book would they make money or not?

Even in that banner year of 1962, when they won both the pennant and the play-offs a report in the Daily Capital Journal on Aug. 2 makes it clear that its touch and go: Verly Wosepka, treasurer, stated that finan-

cially, the club appears to have made it over the hill and will probably finish in the black, Jim Lay reports.

But the directors of the board behind the Pierre Cowboys are calling for a league meeting to Bolster Basin Operation in New Season. And though theyre having their best season yet, the report notes that attendance at the games that year a little more than 400 people per game is actually down from 1961.

The weather, the Pierre Cowboys leaders speculate.

But as Jim Lays report goes on to say, The status of the Basin League as a whole was brought up and it was learned that sever-al of the clubs are facing financial difficulties The directors felt that the spon-sors of these clubs often have themselves to blame in the lack of public rela-tions with the citizenry of the towns.

Maybe; but the citizenry of the towns may be weigh-ing new options. Theres more on television and the reception is getting better. And it is August 1962, after all; the president will arrive later that month in Pierre to dedicate a dam that will give South Dakota better boating, better fishing, than it has ever had in history.

At least down in Yankton, the river may have been a factor. But before that, base-ball was big.

It was real noisy and fun and people got very excited about it. They had good crowds most of the time there was nothing else to do in the summer, remembers Roger Smith of Yankton, a longtime base-ball fan. They had a ban-ner they hung across the street: Baseball tonight. People would see the ban-ner and go to the game.

Colin Kapitan, a former batboy for the Yankton Terrys, blames NCAA regu-lations for dialing down the quality of baseball played in places such as South Dakota. But he, too, notes that the Missouri River with its new lakes and rec-reation possibilities was a factor. Baseball in Yankton may have been partly a casualty of Gavins Point Dam, which was being built from 1952 to 1957.

All of a sudden weve got a hell of a lake at Lewis and Clark that wasnt there before the dam was built, Kapitan observes.

For those in towns across South Dakota and northern Nebraska, the memory of those glory days is starting to dis-sipate like the thin blue haze of tobacco that once hung in the air above Hyde Stadium.

When were young, things are so romantic and have so much more magic to them than when we get older. Hopefully we were good role models for them we tried to be. Pierre was a quiet town, so there werent a lot of shenani-gans going on, remem-bers Bobby Bryant. We just kind of walked out of the cornfields, and there we were.

Bobby Bryant went on to play for the Minnesota Vikings .Image of Bobby Bryant card courtesy of the Vintage Football Card Gallery

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