The Mouth That Roared

by Dallas Green

  My father’s life, at least until his drinking got the better of him, centered on working. As I said, he owned a garage in Wilmington where he fixed and stored cars. That’s where I learned to drive—during the summer of my 13th birthday. I’d go onto the lot and move cars around until they were all squeezed in as close as possible. A lot of his customers worked at the nearby DuPont chemical plant. Because the apartment building they lived in lacked parking, they left their cars with us. Every morning, we’d pick a few of them up and drive them to work. At 5:00 pm, either my dad or I would ride down and pick them up.

  When he wasn’t shuttling workers to and from the DuPont building, my dad fixed up cars. I’d sit and watch in amazement as he completely disassembled and reassembled vehicles without missing a bolt. I always admired him for that, partly because it was a talent I never developed.

  Other than summers at the garage, my dad and I didn’t spend much time together. Our only shared activity was hunting. On a pretty regular basis, he, my grandfather, and I would go railbird shooting down at the Delaware Marsh. My dad would pole the boat through the marsh, and my grandfather and I would sit and wait for the birds to pop up. I came to be a fairly good shot on those outings and maintained an interest in hunting for the rest of my life.

  In fairness to him, I didn’t exactly seek out my dad for companionship. The truth of the matter was I wasn’t around that much. If I missed dinner, my parents knew I was out playing ball. My mom would put a platter in the refrigerator for me to eat when I got home. Every now and then, I’d catch hell about not being home for a special dinner, but for the most part, my parents let me do my thing. They recognized that I could take care of myself, including in the classroom. I took college prep courses and usually made the honor roll.

  To earn a little pocket money, I mowed lawns in the neighborhood. My only other break from sports came on Saturdays, when I headed to the local movie theater to catch a Western or war movie. The theater was a mile from my house. To stay in shape, I ran there and back. Sitting in the dark theater, I watched in awe as John Wayne or another leading man of the day took on the bad guys.

  My mom, Mayannah Green, was a saint. She kept the family together. My sister Thelma, who passed away at the age of 89 in 2012, was 11 years my senior. My younger sister, Carole, is four years my junior. Despite the financial difficulties that arose as my father’s drinking problem worsened, my mom kept the household running. Whatever we needed, we usually got. She was a church-going gal, and I grew up going to Bible school and Sunday services. After I signed a professional baseball contract, I remember her saying, “Dad’s not keeping the bills right. We’re struggling.” That was news to me.

  After he lost his garage, my dad ended up with a paper route. To compensate for my family’s lost income, my mom waited tables at Newark Country Club and New Castle Army Air Base. She never cried poor, and she made sure my sisters and I were never lacking for food or anything else.

  * * *

  Two of my high school coaches helped mentor me. My football coach, John Chanowski, encouraged me to stay on the team even though I wasn’t a naturally gifted football player. “Don’t quit,” he told me. “It’ll help you with your other sports.” He was right. Frank Loucks, my basketball coach, took me aside after my junior year and told me he would work with me to make the all-state team my final season. He did, and I made all-state.

  When I became a senior, several major league scouts took notice of me. The Phillies, Philadelphia A’s, Giants, Boston Red Sox, and Pirates all came to see me play. I attended a three-day try-out camp with the Pirates in Elkton, Maryland, the summer I graduated high school. I still have the invitation from Pirates scout Rex Bowen that reads, “Boys are asked to pay their own expenses to the school, but if they are ever signed to a contract, all of their expenses will be refunded.”

  In my senior yearbook, I listed a straightforward future ambition: “To go to college and make myself a career in the sports world.” While others in my class of 148 students hoped to “raise a herd of Hereford cattle” or become a “first-class plumber,” I knew my future was in sports. I was voted the most popular male student in my graduating class. So, yeah, I guess you could say my high school years were pretty special.

  I wasn’t disappointed that I didn’t get offered a professional baseball contract out of high school, because Bob Carpenter, a Delaware businessman who preceded his son, Ruly, as owner of the Phillies, offered me a pretty inviting alternative.

  Mr. Carpenter ran the Friends Foundation, which for all intents and purposes was the University of Delaware’s scholarship program back then. There were no baseball scholarships at the time, but Mr. Carpenter knew my ability on the hardwood and got me a basketball scholarship. The idea was for me to play basketball for the Blue Hens in the winter and baseball in the spring. As far as I was concerned, it was an ideal situation.

  Mr. Carpenter’s generosity made me feel even more positive toward the Phillies. Growing up in Delaware, they became my favorite major league team. I never attended a game at Shibe Park, or Connie Mack Stadium as it was later renamed, but I listened to games on the radio. As a pitcher, I looked up to Robin Roberts and Curt Simmons, the aces of the 1950 Whiz Kids team that reached the World Series when I was in high school.

  By my junior year of college, I was co-captain of the Delaware basketball team and made the All-Middle Atlantic Conference team. I knew I wouldn’t go any further than the college level, but I enjoyed the opportunity to play a few more years of organized basketball. It was exciting to play against a lot of the Philadelphia schools and a few East Coast powerhouses.

  * * *

  The university was very much a football school at the time. Baseball was treated like a red-headed stepchild. Unfortunately, my baseball coach at Delaware turned out not to possess much acumen. He was a professor who got the coaching job because nobody else wanted it.

  Mr. Carpenter was a big fan of all the university’s sports teams and even traveled to some of our away baseball games. He was in the stands for a game I pitched my junior year at West Chester University, which had a couple of players the Braves were looking to sign.

  I took a one-run lead into the bottom of the ninth inning. We were one out away from wrapping up the win when a West Chester player hit a bomb to center field. The ball would have cleared almost any fence in existence, but luckily for me, this field didn’t have any fence at all. Still, it looked like a certain inside-the-park home run. I turned around and watched the ball sail over the open field. I also watched as our center fielder, Jimmy Zaiser, started closing ground on it. Jimmy stuck up his glove and speared the ball about 450 feet from home plate to preserve the win. After the game, Mr. Carpenter slapped me on the back and told me he had just witnessed the best performance he’d ever seen from a college pitcher.

  Thanks in part to that amazing play by Jimmy, I went 6–0 with a 0.88 ERA my junior year.

  The same scouts who looked at me in high school periodically checked in with me during my college career. But the Phillies had an obvious edge over the rest of the pack. Not only were they the closest thing I had to a hometown team, but their owner had paid my way to college. If the Phillies offered me a contract after my junior year, I was going to sign it. And in the spring of 1955, at the age of 20, I did just that. My signing bonus was $4,000.

  Harold “Tubby” Raymond, an assistant football coach for Delaware and a friend of the Carpenter family, gave me a ride that day to Mr. Carpenter’s Philadelphia office. Raymond went on to coach baseball at UD for eight seasons and was head football coach at the university for 36 seasons.

  I split my first year of professional baseball between Mattoon, Illinois, and Reidsville, North Carolina. I got off to a bumpy start at Class-B Reidsville, going 1–1 with a 10.06 ERA. That earned me a quick demotion to Class-D Mattoon. I fared better there. On my 21st birthday, I fanned 15 hitters in a game against the Hannibal Citizens. To
that point, I had struck out 40 hitters in 23⅓ innings of work. Over my entire time with Mattoon, I went 4–3 with a 3.44 ERA.

  My ambition was to make a career for myself in the sports world. I knew I had to make the most of this opportunity, and it felt great to get the journey started.

  4

  In the fall of 1955, back home after my first year of professional baseball, I cruised over to my old high school in a new yellow-and-black Mercury I had just bought with my signing bonus. I felt like some kind of conquering hero as I drove around the grounds of Conrad High.

  I was making a loop around campus when a petite brunette on the field hockey team caught my eye. As the petite brunette would later tell it, she and her friend saw me, too. “Look at that car!” her friend exclaimed as I drove by. “Look at the guy driving that car!” my future wife responded.

  I didn’t stop to introduce myself to Sylvia Taylor but later I did some asking around about her. In a small town like Newport, Delaware, you didn’t need to work too hard to find out about someone. I learned that Sylvia attended Conrad, where she was a varsity field hockey, basketball, and softball player, as well as a drum majorette. As luck would have it, her cousin worked with my sister Thelma at the DuPont Company in Wilmington. I asked Thelma if she and her co-worker could fix me up with Sylvia, and a few days later, Thelma said Sylvia would be expecting a call from me.

  I phoned Sylvia and invited her to go out to the movies with me that weekend. She agreed. When I picked her up for the date, she asked what movie we were going to see. She probably wanted to catch Rebel Without a Cause, Picnic, or Guys and Dolls, all of which were box-office hits in 1955.

  The car had cost a lot of money, and I was running a little low on cash, so I had to dash Sylvia’s hopes of sitting in a movie theater balcony and watching James Dean, William Holden, or Marlon Brando.

  “Actually, I thought we could go and watch home movies with my friends,” I told her.

  I’m lucky she didn’t get out of the car and run back inside her house. She stayed, and we ended up having a great time. She got along well with Hoddy and Sandy, my married friends who hosted the movie night. At some point during the evening, Sylvia told the room full of 21-year-olds that she was a 15-year-old sophomore. That came as a surprise. Sylvia carried herself like a college girl, however, so our difference in ages didn’t really bother me. We arranged to go out on a second date, and pretty soon, we were going steady.

  Sylvia’s parents may have had a different take on our respective ages. They were wary of me. One night that fall, I didn’t bring her home until 2:00 am. The moment Sylvia opened the front door, her father, a big man, came hurtling down the stairs. “If you can’t get my daughter home at a more decent hour, then you’ll have to find another girl!” he barked at me.

  I assured him it wouldn’t happen again.

  Fortunately, Sylvia’s father liked baseball. To make up for bringing their daughter home late some nights, I got into the habit of bringing Mr. and Mrs. Taylor hoagies and a half-gallon of ice cream every time I came over to pick her up.

  When I left for spring training, I had to put my burgeoning relationship with Sylvia on hold. It was difficult at the time, but I think the separation served a purpose. For one thing, she needed to focus on finishing high school. Her mother, the first person in her family to graduate from college, worried that our romance would distract Sylvia from her studies. To keep the relationship alive, we wrote tons of letters back and forth while I was off playing ball.

  * * *

  In February 1956, the Phillies became the second major league team to open a “rookie school” in Florida (the Red Sox were the other). The idea was to give the organization’s top prospects a chance to work out in Clearwater with Phillies manager Mayo Smith before the start of regular spring training. I was one of 39 players invited to take part in the program.

  It was at the rookie school that I hit it off with Paul Owens, a 32-year-old player-manager for the Phillies’ Class-D affiliate in Olean, New York. Paul loved the game and still played it pretty well, but for reasons not entirely clear to me, had long since abandoned hopes of pursuing a major league career.

  After a year at Rider College in the early 1940s, Paul enlisted in the Army and went off to Europe to fight in World War II. He returned home to finish his degree at St. Bonaventure University, where he played first base on the school baseball team. Then, at the age of 27, he finally took a crack at professional baseball. He signed a contract with a then-unaffiliated Class-D team in Olean, which wasn’t far from his hometown of Salamanca. He hit .407 to lead the PONY League. The St. Louis Cardinals took notice of his performance and signed him to play at Class-B Winston-Salem the following year. He went out and hit .338, but then Paul suddenly gave up professional baseball to take a government job in Salamanca.

  When I met him, he was giving the game another go, with an eye toward getting into baseball management. Back with Olean in 1955, he hit .387. A couple of years later, he surpassed the .400-mark for the second time in his career.

  In Clearwater, Paul picked up on the fact that I was a hard worker. At the end of rookie school, Mayo Smith selected four minor leaguers to stick around to throw batting practice to the major leaguers. I’m pretty sure Paul had something to do with me being one of those four. It was an honor. A batting practice pitcher is supposed to throw low-velocity fastballs right down the heart of the plate, but out on the mound in Clearwater, my adrenalin kicked in, and I found myself trying to throw the ball past the likes of All-Stars Richie Ashburn and Del Ennis.

  Over the next several years, Paul and I ran into each other every spring in Clearwater. He was a natural when it came to teaching and relating to young players. He loved to grab a bat and ball and work with the guys from the minor leagues. In that regard, he separated himself from a lot of his peers and superiors. Most managers and coaches at the time were aloof. Rather than instructing young players, they allowed us to sink or swim. With a major league season to prepare for, they didn’t have time to waste on kids.

  Several years later, Paul became “Pope” to everyone who knew him. Soon after Paul VI was elected to the papacy in 1963, Phillies clubhouse manager Ted Zipeto remarked how much our friend resembled the new pope. Ted dropped to his knees and kissed a ring on Paul’s finger. “Pope Paul, you’re my boss!” he joked. A nickname was born. Over the years, the resemblance between the two men only grew.

  On that subject, my high school nickname, “Spider,” fell by the wayside after I entered the Phillies organization. By my second or third year in the minors, my body had really filled out. I was now “Big D.”

  * * *

  In my second year of pro ball in Salt Lake City, I struck up a friendship with fellow pitchers Jerry Kettle and Tom Cronin. Each of us was 6'5", which gave the sports editor of the local newspaper a good photo opportunity for a story about the size of our pitching staff. He had us stand next to Salt Lake manager Frank Lucchesi, who stood about a foot shorter than the three of us.

  I missed Sylvia a lot. When Kettle and Cronin found out she loved horses, an animal I’d rarely been around, they decided to help out this girl they’d never met by giving her boyfriend riding lessons.

  We drove out to a ranch at the base of the Rocky Mountains, where we rented some horses and headed out for an afternoon on the riding trail. At least that was the idea. My teammates quickly got their horses to gallop along, but mine refused to budge. I nudged the horse a little bit and let out a “giddy up,” hoping the animal would get its act together. The horse finally started moving—in circles.

  I called out for help, and the guys returned to lend me a hand. Armed with a few tips, I figured out how to make the horse walk straight. Trotting, cantering, and galloping would have to wait for another day.

  To this day, Kettle remembers the incident well. He says I looked like someone out of a movie—not a John Wayne movie but a comedy Wester
n. I guess I’m lucky I didn’t return from the outing with a new nickname like “Hopalong.”

  Over the years, I’ve heard time and again that I remind people of John Wayne, my favorite actor of all time. My tough-guy persona and commanding presence prompt the comparisons. The difference between us is Duke rode his horse off into the sunset, while I rode mine in circles.

  Fortunately, my pitching that summer was better than my horseback riding.

  In a June game against Billings, I earned a complete-game victory and helped my own cause by hitting a grand slam. For the year, I went 17–12 with a league-leading 226 strikeouts. That performance earned me Pioneer League Rookie of the Year, a strangely named award considering not many guys spent more than a year in the league before moving up—or down—the minor league ladder.

  My pitching mechanics were still a work in progress. I had a real big leg kick at the time that helped me throw with a lot of velocity but not much control. I walked way too many batters in Salt Lake City, 187 in 239 innings. I led the league in that category, too.

  * * *

  I was all set for my third year of pro ball when I got a telegram that changed my plans.

  Back in the 1950s, there was only one kind of draft, and it didn’t involve major league teams selecting the best amateur players in the country. It was Uncle Sam calling you to service. In 1957, four years after the end of the Korean War, I got that call after Congress reinstated the draft to keep America prepared for any potential conflicts.

  Instead of traveling from spring training in Florida to North Carolina, my next scheduled stop in the minors, I took a bus to an Army office in Philadelphia.

  I couldn’t really process what was happening. My name had started to pop up in newspaper stories in Philadelphia about the top prospects in the Phillies minor league system. Just a few days earlier, I had been throwing batting practice to major league stars. Now my baseball career was about to go on hiatus.