Doyle community stalwart Clifton Pfeiffer, a retired KISD social studies teacher and coach, recently entertained two dozen local residents with a key history of baseball in Kerrville’s African-American world.
Pfeiffer will be doing something of a double-header with Borne area historian Richard Butler Jr. speaking to interested baseball fans at the Butt Holdsworth Library on Saturday, June 22.
Pfeiffer, along with guests Raymond Hardy and Sylvia Lewis, regaled attendees with inside stories about the Kerrville All-Stars, Negro League baseball and notebooks of old newspaper articles, while Butler spoke about his as-yet-untitled book detailing Depression-era baseball in the Texas Hill Country.
A lifelong baseball fan, Mr. Butler moved to the Hill Country in 2022 after completing a 36-year career as a local government attorney in Michigan. Mr. Butler has been a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) since 1983 and is also a member of the Kendall County Genealogical Society.
“I first became interested in Hill Country baseball when I toured the old Kendall County Jail and saw a photo of the Vaughn White Sox,” Butler said. “That led me to look up articles about teams in other areas and several people told me to look in Clifton for information about the Kerrville team. I learned a lot about the All-Stars and found a treasure trove of information in Clifton.”
“The All-Stars were a big topic in the black community. People would leave the church at noon while the pastor was still speaking and go watch the All-Stars play. Baseball was a big event in Kerrville and people would come to Carver Park to watch the games,” Pfeiffer said.
“My dad was the team manager at times and I was a bat boy for the All-Stars. I got paid 10 cents for catching a foul ball, but more than anything, I’ll always remember the All-Stars as a great bunch of guys and my heroes,” Pfeiffer said.
“The Juneteenth Game was truly a special event. From hotels to schools, everyone had the right to play baseball even though the rest of society was segregated,” Pfeiffer said.
Hardy is an all-star center fielder who knew he wanted to play baseball since he was a child growing up in the Doyal community.
“He used his mom’s old broom and mop handles as bats and old tennis balls instead of baseballs,” Hardy said.
In 1962, Hardy was invited by the Colt 45’s to attend a three-day tryout for the team that would later become the Houston Astros. He was a day late for the tryout because he missed a train, and so was not offered a contract, even though the team’s scouts were amazed by his abilities.
“They said it wasn’t right to give me a contract over someone who’d only been in the job for three days. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t missed that train, but that’s the way it was,” Hardy said.
One thing Hardy plans to do soon is visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., which has on display a baseball autographed by another All-Star, the late Joe Louis.
Lewis’ widow, Sylvia, attended on behalf of her husband.
When the All-Stars began to disintegrate, Hardy was moved to another team, the Kerrville Indians.
“The Indians were black, brown and white,” Hardy said.
During his research, Butler found evidence that the All-Stars were descended from several other teams that had played as part of the professional Negro Leagues for many years, along with teams from Texas and Oklahoma. One of the most famous teams was the Black Athletics.
“Baseball was so important to the community that sometimes there would be doubleheaders where the white team would play first and then the black team would play,” Butler said. It was known that the Black Athletics played against the Legion Cubs in 1933, but more information was very hard to find.
“Due to ‘Jim Crow’ notions, information was often not mentioned, and newspapers of the time rarely published box scores of black teams,” Butler said.
But there was one All-Star game against the Kerrville Braves in 1932. The Braves won, 7-6, and the Kerrville Mountain Sun published the entire box score, complete with at least the players’ last names.
For the All-Star game, Dimery, Brown, Blanks, Edwards and Colander each had two hits. For the Braves, Pankratz, Klarner and Bieber each had two hits. Pankratz also scored four runs.
According to an article in the Kerrville Mountain Sun, “The game was notable for being officiated by a black umpire, Jack Frost. While it is not uncommon for black umpires to officiate games between black teams, this game was between a white team and a black team. More significant was the fact that Jack Frost had been hired by the Comfort Broncos to officiate a game against a white team.”
In the same article, Comfort pitcher Clemen Heinens said Frost was highly respected as an umpire: “I was a pitcher then, and I always thought Frost was fair and impartial,” Heinens said.
“The All-Stars joined the Hill Country League in 1950. It was a whites-only league at the time, but there’s evidence that having blacks and whites playing in Kerrville erased some of the discrimination that existed at the time,” Butler said.
Butler said a closer look at Hill Country baseball has uncovered several other treasures.
“Baseball has a long history in Texas. After the game traveled from north to south, records show it started in Galveston in 1867. From Galveston, the game spread to the Hill Country, and German settlers quickly took to the game. In fact, the document ‘100 Years of Bandera’ states that in an 1891 Kerrville vs. Bandera game, Kerrville won 94-0. There was obviously no run rule back then,” Butler said.
The first reported “town” team in Kerrville in the 20th century was born in 1917 and went by the names Tourists, Athletics and Braves, but also changed to several other names around the time of the Great Depression.Butler said a more serious reporting effort would have allowed him to research box scores and find compiled statistics.
The Hill Country League (HCL) teams for the 1930-1932 seasons were Kerrville, Fredericksburg, Llano, Bohne, Comfort and Mason. Brady and Junction had joined the HCL by 1932. When the standings were tallied, Kerrville was usually in the middle or below the pack. It wasn’t until the Mountain League (ML) was formed in 1933 as a response to the lack of involvement from cash-strapped communities during the Great Depression that Kerrville was able to perform decently.
In the final standings in 1933, Alamo Heights topped ML with Kerrville and Comfort tied for second. Bohne and Bandera were the teams that remained in the first season. Fredericksburg joined ML in 1934 and Legion formed a team in 1935. Legion was a small community located in the area where the VA hospital in Kerrville is now located.
They eventually returned to the HCL, but the All-Stars finished sixth with a 5-9 record in the final HCL standings in 1962. Kerrville’s Cats finished last in the eight-team league, which also included the Helotes, with a 2-12 record.
“Unfortunately, the whole concept of baseball in town died by 1970 because of television and other professional sports and things like that,” Butler said.
Butler, who uses his analytical skills and baseball knowledge to write about Hill Country baseball, would especially appreciate photos of the Kerrville team. He also has photos of some of the other teams featured in the book. Butler’s book, published by Texas Tech University Press, is expected to hit stores in 2025.
“There are two titles for the book: ‘The People’s Game’ or ‘Town Ball.'” The title of what I intend as a comprehensive history of baseball in the Hill Country is ultimately up to the publisher, Butler said.
