The Pecan Park Eagle

Lloyd Gregory and a Houston female fan were responsible for hanging the nickname of "Ducky" on early 30's Buff Joe Medwick.

Things seem to have hit a deeper lull than usual in the Houston media these days. With Richard Justice now suddenly gone from the only print rag in town, the Houston Chronicle now leans most heavily upon columnist Jerome Solomon and beat writer Zach Levine to fill in the blanks on the wipe’s coverage of baseball without soon filling the rather large hole that remains from the disappearance of Houston’s writing pyre.

Don’t get me wrong. I like both Solomon and Levine. I just don’t think that either fit the mold of the nitpicking, fiery, and irritating man who is now inexplicably gone from the Houston print media scene. Justice used do a public job review of Astros owner Drayton McLane about three times a week, at least. Solomon is also capable of the acerbic critique, but he’s more of a cobra to Justice’s wolverine. We’ll have to simply wait to see who receives his first poisonous bite.

Back in the 1920’s, on the date that the Houston Buffs opened Buff Stadium for the first time, April 11, 1928, Lloyd Gregory of the Houston Post-Dispatch, Kern Tips of the Houston Chronicle, and Andy Anderson of the Houston Press were all over the coverage of this major new step in the city’s growth into first class as a minor league baseball operation.

Gregory, and first Buff Stadium game broadcaster Bruce Layer of KPRC were even still around twenty years later when I was a kid and television was a baby in Houston. By this time, Gregory, Layer, and a younger hot baseball writer named Clark Nealon were all doing the new double take as print-electronic journalists, covering baseball in print and broadcast airways, principally on TV after 1949, when the medium first came to Houston.

This time of year, “The Hot Stove League” was a weekly half hour show on Channel 2, starting for a while in the early 1950s. Hosted by Lloyd Gregory, it was sort of the early version Channel 13’s Saturday, 6:30 PM show with Tim Melton. Gregory led Layer and Nealon and a rotating group of other local journalist on an annual discussion of the upcoming season chances of the Houston Buffs in the Texas League.

The show’s prop was a literal black hot stove that had been moved into the Channel Two broadcasting studios for the guys to sit around as they talked, whether they actually needed the heat or not. And this was still Houston back then. Most of the time, extra heat was not needed and, even if it were, it wasn’t coming from the hot stove. Had they fired up that thing, the trapped studio smoke would have driven everyone outside before their half hour air time was up.

Mostly, the guys did some great storytelling about times past. They had to. And they wanted to. The season prospect talk was always limited to qualifiers like “if the Cardinals send us so-and-so at the end of spring training.” – The Buffs were a Cardinals farm team back in the day. Their whole season ahead of them hinged largely upon which Cardinal major farm club city was going to get the best talent over the upcoming season. Would it be Houston, Texas? – Columbus, Ohio? – Or Rochester, New York?

It’s too bad we didn’t have videotape during the era of the TV show, “The Hot Stove League.” The now largely lost storytelling by some of Houston’s greatest early storytellers could have been preserved.