At the 2007 Texas Baseball Hall of Fame Banquet: Former Big Leaguer Don Baylor; Houston Black Buffs Founder Son, Frank Liuzza; Dr. Sue Hepler-Liuzza, Spouse; & Frank Liuzza Grandson, Randall Taliaferro.
Houstonian Frank Liuzza died in St. Luke’s Hospital this past Saturday, January 2, 2010, at the age of 80. With his passing, Houston surrendered one its genuinely caring citizens. Frank was a man of great integrity, outspoken honesty, and clear passion for life, family, true friendship, the history of this city, the arts, music, and everything that had anything to do with fast cars.
Like his father, John Liuzza, and his uncle, James Liuzza, before him, Frank loved the great game of baseball. He was a fine hitting and fielding lefty first sacker for St. Thomas High School, St. Thomas University, and the University of Texas in the years immediately following the end of world War II. He had hopes for a professional career, but those were dashed by injury and a greater call to military service duty with the U.S. Army during the Korean War. After the war, Frank used his undergraduate degree work in accounting at the University of Houston to embark upon a successful lifetime career as a commercial real estate broker.
In the short late-in-life time I knew Frank Liuzza as a personal friend, and he was just that, a true friend, I learned how driven he was personally by the business life and everyday living experiences of his Italian immigrant grandfather and family in the Houston fifth ward. Frank had an outstanding head for detail, great respect for the work ethic, total loyalty to the idea of family, and complete love for everyone before him and after him in the Liuzza family bloodline, from grandfather to grandson.
Frank Liuzza and I bonded as friends in 2007 on the wings of circumstances that now still ring like the plotline of a twilight zone story. All you may need to know to more fully appreciate the tale is this fact: All of my adult life, or so it seems, I’ve been looking for documentation on an old Negro League baseball club that once existed here as the “Houston Black Buffs.” All I’d been able find through the early fall of 2007 were a few scattered box scores and game action reports from the Houston newspapers of the 1930s.
Then one day, in the fall of 2007, I received a phone call from a former Tulane University graduate school friend and colleague, Dr. Sue Hepler. We probably had not talked in fifteen to twenty years and our relationship had nothing to do with baseball. Sue had just wanted to reach out and see how I was doing. Even she had no previous idea of how my recent years have become so immersed in the fields of baseball writing and research. We are both mental health field professionals by trade.
When Sue learned of my baseball passion, she said, “You know, Bill, the funny thing is, I’m married to a guy here in Houston whose family once owned a local black baseball team. I think they were called the Houston Black Buffs.”
You could have knocked me over with that proverbial feather.
Dr. Sue Hepler-Liuzza was married to Frank Liuzza, whose father and uncle founded the Houston Monarchs (later known as the Black Buffs) in 1924. The family owned the club through its final straw year of 1954, when Frank Liuzza himself came home from Korea in time to close the books on an era that had ended.
I was Board President of the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame back then. We recognized Frank Liuzza and his family history with the Houston Black Buffs at our November 2007 banquet. And that’s how Frank and I met – and how the history of the Houston Black Buffs came out of the shadows.
I last saw Frank Liuzza in September 2009, when we both went over to TV Channel 55 to record some material for Houston baseball and community history with Mike Vance, one of our local media’s foremost historians. Even though we didn’t see each other often or know each other for long, I will miss Frank Liuzza as the good friend and great Houstonian he truly was.
Footnote: This article was published by The Pecan Park Eagle blog on WordPress.Com on Tuesday, January 5, 2010. It is dedicated, henceforth, to the deserved and lasting memory of Mr. Frank Liuzza and also equivalently to the ongoing, soaring soul of his life partner, Dr. Sue Hepler-Liuzza.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
January 5, 2010 at 10:50 pm |
Thanks for writing this, Bill. I read Frank’s obituary yesterday with great shock and sadness. It was a pleasure to meet him and hear some wonderful tales of Houston’s past. I wish I’d had the chance to visit with him a bit more. The good news is that much of the visit we had is on tape, and it won’t be lost to posterity.
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