The Pecan Park Eagle

The Larry Miggins Caricature
by Amadee
St. Louis Post Dispatch
March 18, 1951

Yesterday I received an afternoon call from my dear old friend, former Houston Buff and St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Larry Miggins. 89-year old Larry called to let me know that he would not be free to attend our monthly SABR with me due to a family birthday celebration that had slipped his mind.

“That’s OK,” I told Larry, “we all know the priority lineup at Miggins Manor. – God and Family are the only considerations that always land ahead of baseball – as they should.

Larry did ask me to stop by the house on my way to the SABR meeting anyway. He and Kathleen had accidentally found a cartoon from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by the famous St. Louis cartoonist of that era, a fellow named Amadee, who so beautifully characterized the young Cardinal outfielder as an up and coming prospect for the Cardinal lineup. Larry and Kathleen were especially elated to find it because of its 63-year submergence among items that they both thought had been totally destroyed with everything else during their tragic house fire of many years ago. It was a fire that took away all of Larry’s most treasured artifacts from his early baseball career – along with the house and that “once gone, always lost” sense of security about home that belongs to all of us who have never had to survive a house fire.

Larry and Kathleen wanted me to have an autographed copy of the Amadee creation and I couldn’t wait to see it. So, I stopped by their house on the way to SABR to visit and pick up my copy. As per always, my brief visit with Larry and Kathleen was another golden moment of sheer uplifted spirit for me. And the cartoon is wonderful.

Today’s column IS the cartoon – first as a whole piece that will be hard to see in the small photo frames available to us here at The Pecan Eagle. Then by a much easier display of its carious components as individually excerpted pictures.

Enjoy! And thank God, or whomever or whatever else you use to express gratitude, for the presence of people like Miggins family in our lives. If it weren’t for former players like 89-year old Larry Miggins, 72-year old Jimmy Wynn, and another dear friend, the late Jerry Witte, I don’t where my peace of mind with humanity would be today, but it sure wouldn’t be the place it now resides – because of them and a few others that must go unmentioned here in the name of time and space.

Thanks for this wonderful signed cartoon, Miggins family! – It’s time its resurrection is now shared with everyone!

IT READS: “COCO-NOTES by AMADEE… AT CARDINAL TRAINING CAMP…ST. PETERSBURG…FLORIDA…STRAPPING SON OF ERIN FROM THE SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK  CELEBRATED ST. PAT’S DAY BY SINGING IRISH BALLADS ON THE STREETS”

IT SAYS: …A FEW YEARS BACK “MIGG” STOOPED TRAFFIC ON THE DOWNTOWN STREETS…
LARRY MIGGINS SINGS: “MAVOURNEEN…MAVOURNEEN…”

CARDINAL TEAMMATE ASKS: “WHAT’S ON THE HIT PARADE?”
MIGGINS ANSWERS:”HOW ABOUT A HOMER TWO TRIPLE?”
(92 RBI’S AND 18 HOMERS ARE INSCRIBED ON HIS BATS)
…COLLECTOR OF RECORDS…HAD A GOOD RUNS-BATTED-IN RECORD LAST YEAR…

HITTER MIGGINS SAYS: “GROOVY…LIKE A TWENTY CENT MOVIE!!”
RHETORICAL COMMENT: ” …(MIGGINS) … TALKS BE-BOP…”
…GOOD HIT AND RUN MAN…
…HANDY WITH THE LEATHER…
COULD GIVE CARDS THAT NEEDED RIGHT-HAND BATTING POWER”
…AND OUTFIELD WITH GOOD THROWING ARM…
…DOUBLE PLAY MAN…
IN A NUTSHELL: “IS MIGG IN??”

LONG LIVE LARRY MIGGINS ~ THE MOST HONEST MAN IN THE HISTORY OF BASEBALL!! – JUST ASK SOLLY HEMUS ABOUT THAT JUDGMENT. – SOLLY AND LARRY WERE TEAMMATES ON THE COLUMBUS REDBIRDS BACK IN 1950. TOGETHER THEY PROBABLY HAVE FORGOTTEN MORE BASEBALL THAN MOST PEOPLE EVER KNOW.

It reads: “To Bill McCurdy – My biographer has to have a copy of this piece which we found after 63 years. – Larry Miggins.”

Thanks, Larry! I am so honored by your words and this wonderful gift. I can still see movies in my mind from 1951, when I sometimes got to make a Sunday home game at Buff Stadium with my dad. We sat on the first base side whenever Dad came with me. He liked to watch the many right handed batters and point things out to me as the game played on. Of course, I remember you and Jerry Witte more than all the others.

Jerry Witte hit 38 of those Ruthian blows over the double decker wall in left – and with the kind of force that quickly converted a Bob Turley fastball into a a tiny, climbing white missle dot in the heavens of blue that lay somewhere short of forever in the skies up, up, and way north of Houston. And you would hit those blistering line drives that clothes lined their way over the same wall or into the boards for extra bases on the sound vibrations of a bomb that had just exploded against the fence. You had 27 or 28 homers yourself for the’51 Buffs, depending upon which stat head one cares to believe. As hitters, you guys, Witte and Miggins, were the right handed Ruth and Gehrig of the 1951 Houston Buffs.

The neat things about all of our memories from the early mythical periods of sandlot hope is that these vivid movies almost always seem to be ready for us, anytime we cared to run them in our heads. I think the truth is that the good times memories I hold of both you and Jerry Witte are always playing at the 24/7 movie theater of my mind.  All I do for a pleasant baseball feeling is simply to open that section of the memory and watch the film that is already showing. – And I’m not the only one, by far, that has a 24/7 baseball memory movie going. I think most people who read The Pecan Park Eagle know exactly what I’m talking about. – Anyway, Larry, thanks for being one of the major stars of my real life baseball movie productions of the mind. Now, thanks to Amadee, we have a cartoon caricature to show between features.

AND THANK YOU AGAIN, AMADEE WOHLSCHLAEGER, FOR MAKING THIS SPECIAL COLUMN POSSIBLE.

When Amadee Wohlschlaeger died in St. Louis at the age of 102  on June 24, 2014, he left this world as a renowned artist, illustrator and cartoonist of St. Louis history, with much special notice to baseball and weather for over 70 years, from the Cardinals of the Gas House gang to the rookies like Larry Miggins to the old Browns of Satchel Paige and Ned Garver to the great Cardinal clubs of Whitey Herzog. In deference to his rather long and hard to pronounce and spell surname, “Amadee” alone became his solitary signature on works like this ironically found treatment of a young Larry Miggins in the same year as Amadee’s departure from this life.

Thanks for doing something with your art that now raises our spirits in Houston once more, Amadee. – Your caricature sequence of Larry Miggins had been lost among the Miggins family’s stored materials like a sadly missed soul for 63 years – but now – it has been found and resurrected for the pleasure of family, friends, and fans of baseball who never laid eyed upon it in the past – not since it’s birth in 1951 – and not since its accidental internment in the wrong storage box back in 1961.

As providence often works, we are incorrect to assess that the caricature of Miggins was inadvertently stored in the wrong place. Had it not been placed exactly where it was placed, it might well have perished too in the very awful home fire that destroyed almost all of the other memorabilia from the early playing days of Larry Miggins’ early baseball career.

The Minor Miracle at Miggins Manor is a smiling thing today!

Tags: The Minor Miracle at Miggins Manor

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