OLD NEWS: 'Heinie' ye homer also threw some heat

In June 1917, outfi elder Edward Barney joined the Little Rock Travelers, a professional team that played at Kavanaugh Field, site of today’s Little Rock Central High School.
In June 1917, outfi elder Edward Barney joined the Little Rock Travelers, a professional team that played at Kavanaugh Field, site of today’s Little Rock Central High School.

No sports reporter wants to be called a "homer" even though Homer tops the roster of humanity's great storytellers.

The homer doesn't try to be honest; he tries to please the home team and its fans. Off the page, he bores his buddies with "our boys" and "we was robbed," but meanwhile he's thinking up sneaky ways to avoid those pronouns in print -- because, in 2017, even the homer knows typing we-anything in a sports story is podunk.

But some sportswriters could survive a round or two or 10 against capital-H Homer. Reading something funny in the June 6, 1917, Arkansas Gazette, I wondered which I'd stumbled over -- a clear and honest mind or a team-marketing tool?

Big Boy With Big Punch

Coming to Help Travelers

Edward Barney, a fast and classy outfielder and a slugger of ye baseball, is en route to Little Rock to join "Buzz" Ware's Travelers. He is expected in time to get into the game this afternoon.

The Little Rock Travelers were a pro club owned by one Bob Allen. They competed in the Southern Conference, and Kavanaugh Field -- site of today's Little Rock Central High School -- was their field (see bit.ly/2s1f3zY).

A year ago Barney hit .273 with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was traded the following winter to Louisville of the American Association and last winter he went to Columbus. He was with Joe Tinker's club on the Pine Bluff training trip last summer. He took a fancy to Arkansas and recently when he bought his release from Columbus he telegraphed Prexy Allen for a job. Terms were agreed on and Barney telegraphed acceptance yesterday, saying that he would report as soon as possible.

Barney is expected to prove the punch that has been lacking in the Traveler line-up.

He acquitted himself well in his first game but didn't change the outcome when manager Clyde Ware's Travelers met Norman "Kid" Elberfeld's Chattanooga Lookouts, as somebody reported in the Gazette on June 7:

Pitchers Fail, Travelers Can't Win With 7 Runs

The Travelers made a lot of runs yesterday afternoon, but the Lookouts made a lot more, and the final game of the series went to the Elberfeldian gang, 10 to 7.

A rainstorm that threatened the greater part of the day culminated in a deluge of base hits off George Baumgardner and Omar Hardgrove, who threw 'em up for the Lookouts to hit. And hit 'em they did -- for 15 solid blows. Meanwhile our Travelers did some considerable hitting, but their efforts were discounted by the manner in which George and Omar yielded base blows to the enemy.

Ineffective pitching is the complete explanation for yesterday's defeat. For some unaccountable reason George Baumgardner simply can't pitch in the home lot. Every time "Bummie" goes out he gets a beating. Then the club goes on the road and the fans hear how "Bummie" pitched a great game on a foreign field. When the club gets back home "Bummie" ventures out again and the fans see him soak up another drubbing.

Ouch! Here's another example from the same pen, three days later:

Here's Some Luck at Last;

Our Travelers Get a Draw

A ninth-inning rally that produced one run was all that saved our down-trodden Travelers from the third straight defeat at the hands of Roy Ellam's climbing Volunteers. That rally didn't win us anything, but it averted defeat and gave Little Rock a 3-to-3 draw in the final game of the series. Any time our ball tossers get away without a beating it is occasion for celebration.

See? A sportswriter can write "our" without pandering.

Umpire Moran called time on the clinched combatants at the end of the ninth so that the Travelers could make the rattler [slang for a railway car] that started them on their jump to New Orleans, where they open up a long road trip this afternoon. We were quite fortunate that there was sufficient time for that final round, else the Vols would have gone home with a 3-to-2 win, making it three together and leaving us nothing but our ballpark.

Yesterday's battle was in many respects a duplicate of the affairs of the two previous days -- everything breaking beautifully for the opposition and nothing much coming the way of the Travelers. Also the Vols again made the most of their few opportunities while the Travelers flivvered many of their numerous chances. ...

I recognize this voice again in reports of big efforts by small-time players and small efforts by the likes of Babe Ruth, who trained in Hot Springs and played exhibitions at Camp Pike in North Little Rock. As were almost all local reports in the Gazette then, the work was unsigned. Who wrote it?

Line up dead sportswriters and one by one fan them out using a bunch of sources, from the oral histories at pryorcenter.uark.edu to obituaries and other articles in the Gazette ... I even looked in a book or three.

Long story short, my winner is Henry M. "Heinie" Loesch (1891-1964). So who was he?

Among other things, he was adept at spinning feathers into prose, which means he wrote quickly. Dec. 28, 1920:

Henry Loesch, sporting editor of the Gazette, when interviewed last night by himself, said:

"It ain't so."

Which is very bad grammar even for a sporting editor, but perhaps the managing editor and the other editors and Governor Brough will pardon him on the strength of alleged extenuating circumstances.

Seven column inches later we understand he had been accidentally listed via typographical error on the program for a minstrel show at a Lion's Club meeting.

H. Loesch will not sing tonight.

From the incisive, creative and seemingly fearless 20-something sporting editor of 1917, Loesch became in time an ailing but adamant, green-eyeshade-included news editor, enforcer of Gazette word-choice standards. Here's how the paper's public affairs director (and former city editor) Sam G. Harris remembered him in the 150th edition in 1969:

Use of nicknames, synonyms and slang in a sports, or any other, item literally, infuriated him. He was wary of adjectives, contending that in a news story they tended to be editorial opinion. ... He insisted, loudly and with heat, that a punt was a punt and not a blankety blank boot; that a pass was a pass and not an aerial; that a homerun was a homerun and not a roundtripper.

After repeated heart attacks forced him to retire in 1951, Loesch wrote his own obituary.

The Gazette finally published it Oct. 7, 1964. It said he was born on a farm 30 miles west of Kansas City, Kan., and began hanging around newspaper print shops at 10, delivering a route, working the mailroom and as a printer's devil -- a newsboy and a go-fer. He reported for Kansas papers straight out of high school.

Aug. 20, 1915, he joined the Arkansas Gazette.

When illness forced me to call it quits in 1951 ... I had done almost everything there is to do in the news room, including a 15-year stretch as the one-man sports staff of the Gazette, followed by 17 years on the news desk. ...

I never established any claim to fame and now that I will be returning to dust I only hope there is someone left to say at least "He tried." I think those two words would make all that I deserve as an epitaph.

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of a sportswriter who tried. Rest in peace, Heinie Loesch.

cstorey@arkansasonline.com

ActiveStyle on 06/12/2017

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