The Kansas City Athletics are NOT forgotten!

On the weekend of July 29-30, 2011, the Kansas City Historical Baseball Society (check out the link to their site found on our Home page) hosted a reunion of players from the Kansas City Athletics. Almost three dozen former players and personnel came for a terrific banquet of food, reminiscences and hilarity. Most of them stayed over for the Saturday night event, which as a “Kansas City Athletics” Night hosted by the Northern League Team, the Kansas City T-Bones. It was a GREAT weekend!

(For our younger readers, the Oakland Athletics you know today used to be in Kansas City. From 1955 through 1967 they played in Municipal Stadium in Kansas City. Of course, before that time they were the Philadelphia Athletics!)

Many of these guys had not seen each other in a while, and it was fun just watching them greet and razz one another. It did not take long at all to begin to see what baseball “used to be” in the trenches before free agency made most guys teammates for a year or two at best. These guys spent years together in the minors, maybe years (or months or days or innings) together in the majors, and their friendships have lasted a lifetime.

A special treat for many was the fact that so many of the men were able to bring their wives. They were delightful ladies, and most of them more than endured the baseball talk. Many of them told stories of their own! In fact, one wife, Kathleen Lockwood, has even written a book about being a “Major League Wife,” and MLB Memories will be providing a review of that book soon. Of course you can find out more about her book immediately at majorleaguebride.com.

We will be sharing a few photos and thoughts from this awesome weekend over the next few days. There is so much we could say (and some stories from the players we could NOT repeat!), but for now enjoy some photos of men like Chuck Dobson, Ned Garver, Dick Green, and Jim Landis graciously sharing their autographs. These old warriors have aged well in our opinion. And you have GOT to see Ned Garver’s special shoes.

Enjoy these for now…and more will follow over the next few days.