The Shadow
Mention the name Babe Ruth, or Joe DiMaggio, or Jackie Robinson, and someone with even the most basic of baseball knowledge should be able to tell you that those fellows were, in fact, professional baseball players.
But what about Johnny Humphries?
Who?
Johnny Humphries?
Although he is now a long-forgotten figure from what’s commonly known as the Golden Age of Baseball, and his statistics have been relegated to the bottomless pit of baseball’s endless facts and figures, in his prime, New York Yankees Hall-of-Fame Manager Joe McCarthy said of Johnny, “The kid is great. I wish I had him. What a future!”
He looked so much like Lou Gehrig that he was almost cast to play Gehrig, in the film “Pride of the Yankees.”
And when he broke into the majors on May 8, 1938, he was said to have the best fastball in the American League.
Despite all of the fanfare that heralded his signing by the Cleveland Indians, I would be willing to bet that you didn’t know Johnny was a native Clifton Forge, Virginia.
If not, don’t feel bad.
Not a lot of folks around the Alleghany Highlands have either.
Johnny exists mainly in the memory of the few, if any, of his remaining Clifton Forge contemporaries, and, more prominently, in the yellowed and crumbling pages of The Covington Virginian, which are stored in the newspaper’s morgue.
So, today, taking the mound one more time, is Johnny Humphries.
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Now, I love all things baseball, especially Major League Baseball.
And if it’s the Atlanta Braves, I love it even more.
It’s not just about the Braves, although that’s a big part of it.
I love baseball’s rich history and how, it seems, baseball has ebbed and flowed through the river of time — through wars, economic disasters, racial integration, all the way through a turbulent 1960s and onward toward the present.
Collectively, baseball history is a story of perseverance.
Baseball struggled following the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, until Babe Ruth came along and brought it back to prominence.
Baseball struggled during World War II, when the star players of the day — DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg — were volunteering to fight and were being shipped off to Europe and the Pacific.
But when the war was over, soldiers traded their guns for baseball bats and, for probably a 15 or 16 year period, baseball flourished like never before.
Baseball really struggled following the 1994 strike; that is, until Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles came along with his march toward besting the consecutive games played record set almost 60 years earlier by “The Iron Horse” Lou Gehrig.
Unfortunately, even though I count myself as fairly knowledgeable in baseball history, I was one of those who had never heard of Johnny Humphries until I was researching back issues of The Covington Virginian for my Echoes of the Past column recently and stumbled across an article from April, 1938, about a guy by the name of John William Humphries, who had started for the Cleveland Indians in a spring training game and Clifton Forge’s overwhelming pride at its local-boy-made-good.
So that’s where my investigation into Humphries’ life began, with a short article in a 82-year-old issue of The Covington Virginian.
A June 4, 1938, article reported, “He has done some nice relief pitching in recent appearances for the Cleveland Indians and numbers among his strikeout victims Joe DiMaggio and Jimmie Foxx.”
Striking out “Joe D” and Jimmie Foxx?
Not too shabby, Johnny.
Another article, this one from June 8, 1938, added, “Mention the name of John Humphries before any in Clifton Forge’s baseball fans today and watch a broad smile break out on their faces, for they are proud of their young rookie.”
In another article, I found where he was a standout football and baseball player for Clifton Forge High School from 1930 until 1934. He was the son of Ernest O. Humphries and Lillian Humphries of Clifton Forge.
I found a 1930 census report that listed Johnny, Otho, Virgil and Jewel as children in the Humphries household.
That’s nice and all, but nothing I found really helped me understand Johnny’s place in baseball history; so I turned my search toward one of my favorite websites — Wikipedia.
Where else could one turn these days for information on long-forgotten people?
The Internet, right?
I love Wikipedia.
What other site can you go to and learn about everything from forgotten Major League Baseball pitchers to the definition of a fortnight. (Sadly, I didn’t know what a fortnight was until I looked it up on, of course, Wikipedia. A fortnight is a 14-day period, by the way).
When I typed in “Johnny Humphries,” I did, in fact, find a listing for our Johnny Humphries.
It wasn’t much, but here’s what I found:
“John William Humphries was born on June 23, 1915, in Clifton Forge. He died June 24, 1965, in New Orleans, La. He was a pitcher in Major League Baseball from 1938 until 1946. He played for the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and Philadelphia Phillies. When Humphries joined the Indians in 1938, he was thought to have the best fastball in the American League.”
And that’s it.
The Wikipedia search, though, did lead me to another website, findagrave.com.
That site is even more intriguing than Wikipedia. The difference is there are fascinating pictures of the person’s grave along with his or her biographical information.
And findagrave.com doesn’t just list the graves of famous folks.
It lists cemeteries and internments in large and small cemeteries from around the world.
Heck, even my parents, who are buried in tiny Waiteville, W.Va., are listed on findagrave.com.
But I digress.
When movie producer Samuel Goldwyn began looking for someone to play Lou Gehrig in “Pride of the Yankees,” he searched through not only the ranks of Hollywood’s elite leading men, but also throughout professional baseball.
The Sporting News polled fans and their pick was Humphries because of his strong facial resemblance to the late Yankee great.
Unfortunately for Humphries, Goldwyn settled on some guy named Gary Cooper.
Dems da breaks, as they say in the movie business.
Humphries was a baseball star for the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill when he left following his sophomore year to sign professionally with the Cleveland Indians.
That signing would begin a nine-season professional career, which would see him record a 3.78 earned-run average, a 52-63 win-loss record and 317 strikeouts. He also pitched nine career shutouts.
Following his time with the Indians, he was traded to the Chicago White Sox, where he spent five seasons.
On December 7, 1945, he was purchased by the Philadelphia Phillies.
He made only 10 appearances for the Phillies and played his last major-league game on July 28, 1946. He was released by the Phillies the following year.
Johnny then played for southern independent baseball teams, spending time with both the New Orleans Pelicans and the Douglas Rebels of the Class D Georgia State League.
He left the mound for good in 1948 at the age of 33.
After baseball, Johnny resided in the New Orleans area, where he married and lived until his death, after a brief illness, on June 24, 1965, the day after his 50th birthday.
Now, I could go into great, arduous details about his statistics and how many games he appeared in and the like.
But why bother?
I’ve never thought the true measure of a person could be whittled down to something as simple as a number.
In the 1930s, Johnny Humphries was an idol for many in the Alleghany Highlands and, yet today, very few people have ever heard his name.
Reintroducing people and events from our area’s past is the biggest reason I began this column.
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Next week, let’s jingle those bells and hang around Clifton Forge one more week as we stop by Mayor’s Court, presided over by The Tower of Justice, as we sit in on a case that shows what happens when a rooster gets way too many hens in his coop.
Until next time…
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If you’ve got comments or questions you’d like to send along, or if you have ideas for cases I can investigate in the future, feel free to e-mail me at David@wvdn.com.
You can also write me at:
David S. Crosier
c/o The Virginian Review
P.O. Box 271
Covington, Va. 24426
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Clifton Forge, Va., native Johnny Humphries broke into Major League Baseball in 1938, struck out the likes of the great Joe DiMaggio and was even in line to play baseball legend Lou Gehrig in the movie “Pride of the Yankees.” Now, over seven decades after he walked off the baseball diamond for the last time, Humphries has become a long-forgotten figure.
