›› Tales from the Morgue: 1956: Roswell-Hondo Stars Win Little League World Title
Roswell, N.M., was the toast of the baseball world for one glittering moment in 1956. An all-star team from the upstart Roswell Lions Hondo Little League reeled off 12 consecutive victories that summer and won the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa.
Roswell is the only team from New Mexico ever to qualify for the Little League World Series. This year's series starts today and will conclude with the title game on Aug.
Johnson, 64, grew up in Roswell, played in the Lions Hondo Little League that year as a 10-year-old and knew the players on the championship team.
Blaine Stribling, the catcher, said he was part of a "no-name, underdog team and nobody expected us to do anything."
"We got back East, and a lot of people thought anyone from New Mexico was from the Wild West. Most hadn't heard of Roswell," he said.
The team had a handful of 11-year-olds but was mostly composed of 12-year-olds. It reeled off nine wins in a row
in the qualifying rounds and three more at Williamsport in the series. In those days each tournament was single elimination - one loss and your season ended."If you were a Little League team today, what would you have to have going for you to make the World Series?" Johnson asked. "Across America, some leagues have incredible facilities or coaches. But let's just say you need a couple of kids with outstanding ability and Roswell had two - Ferrell Dunham and Tommy Jordan."
They were Roswell's pitchers. Dunham was named Little League's outstanding player for the nation in 1956. Jordan, meanwhile, was acknowledged as the team's workhorse, Johnson said, and had a knack for hitting a home run or striking out a batter when a game was on the line.
Perhaps it was good genes. Jordan's father, also named Tom, played briefly in the big leagues as a catcher for the Chicago White Sox, St. Louis Browns and Cleveland Indians in the mid-1940s.
The younger Jordan hit a three-run homer in Roswell's 3-1 win over Delaware Township, N.J., in the Little League championship game.
He also pitched a complete game (six innings in Little League), yielding just two hits with 14 strikeouts.
Also during the World Series, Dunham and Jordan both hit home runs into the Susquehanna River, Johnson said. The commissioner of Little League had promised to give anyone who hit a ball into the drink a baseball that he would sign.
The two players thought there would only be one baseball awarded and argued about who hit it farther, Johnson said. Both ended up with signed, souvenir baseballs.
Dick Storey was an 11-year-old that magical summer and played first base and center field for Roswell. He was on base when Jordan hit his three-run homer in the title game. "As I tell people, it was a long time before aluminum bats and the designated hitter," he said.
Storey went on to play baseball for three years at the University of New Mexico. The highlight there was playing against stars Reggie Jackson and Rick Monday when they were at Arizona State.
Now 65, he is chancellor of the University of Montana Western.
Storey said his most vivid memory of the Little League World Series was batting leadoff in the championship final and being very nervous.
Lions Hondo Little League started after the more established league in Roswell, run by the Optimists Club, filled up with players born during the baby boom.
The newer league played in south Roswell, a poorer section of town, on a paltry dirt field. "We had the worst field in North America, and everyone seems to agree on that," Johnson said.
A picket fence ringed the outfield, but someone stole most of the pickets. "So it was mostly a droopy wire," Johnson said.
There were no restrooms or dugouts. Chicken wire served as a backstop, he said. Left fielder Harold Hobson said they were so poor they would have two baseballs to play with "on a good day."
"And that was if we could retrieve them from a minor-league baseball game (featuring the Roswell Rockets) the night before," he said.
This Little League team consisted of a bunch of kids just trying to have some fun, he said.
"There was never any stress put on us," said Hobson, a semi-retired farmer, who now lives about 10 miles outside Roswell.
Hobson, 66, also served as a Chaves County commissioner from 2000 to 2008.
He remembered the team being loose and carefree during its championship run.
While in Lubbock for a qualifying tournament, Jordan found a three-story building that boasted an elevator.
He enjoyed riding it so much that he was almost late to the final game, Hobson said. "But he showed up a half-hour before the game with a big milkshake, ready to go. That sums up our team," Hobson said.
Dunham and Jordan split time at second base and on the mound. When one was pitching, the other was manning the middle of the infield.
Dunham, 66, is a retired retail manager who lives in Amarillo, Texas. He said the team did not really comprehend the enormousness of what it was up against.
"We just went from tournament to tournament," he said. "We didn't understand what we accomplished until we got to Williamsport."
Dunham won a scholarship to Lycoming College in Williamsport as part of his national Little League award, but he never attended school there. Instead, he went to the University of New Mexico, where he played baseball for one season.
The Roswell team had to win tournaments in Los Alamos, N.M., Lubbock and San Antonio to get to Pennsylvania.
Dunham estimated that 5,000 people greeted their train when they returned to Roswell as world champs.
"I do remember getting a lot of kisses and hugs," he said.
Stribling recently turned 67 and lives in Security, Colo., outside Colorado Springs. He is retired after working for 30 years as a heavy equipment operator for the Security Water District.
He said the team's camaraderie and its ability to pull together were key qualities that helped it win the title.
He remembered the train ride from Roswell to Williamsport. The players got to visit Chicago and saw both the Cubs and White Sox play en route.
When they returned in triumph, so many people gathered to greet them that the train had to slow down several miles out of town to make sure no one was getting in the way along the tracks, Stribling said.
"They wined us and dined us for a couple of weeks," he said.
Stribling said his personal highlight was hitting two homers in a tournament game in San Antonio.
Mike Sandry was an 11-year-old bench player on the Roswell team. Now 65, he is a retired teacher and coach living in Albuquerque.
"I was just along for the ride," he said of what happened in 1956.
Sandry saw some action in the qualifying rounds but did not play in Williamsport. Today, every player must get in Little League World Series games. Even from the bench, the series left a big impression on Sandry.
He said it set the stage for continuing his athletic career. He played organized baseball until he was 18 - in Roswell and then after he moved to Maine.
He returned to New Mexico to attend college at the University of New Mexico. Instead of baseball, he lettered in gymnastics for four years. In 1963, he became the first Lobo to earn a medal in the sport at a Western Athletic Conference tournament.
He went on to coach gymnastics at Eldorado High School in Albuquerque, leading the school to 13 state team titles and numerous individual state championships. The school dropped gymnastics in 1989.
"The most important thing I learned in that year of baseball was what a coach is supposed to do," he said.
The manager of the Roswell team was the late Richard St. John.
Sandry made the all-star team again in 1957 and said that team might have had better overall talent than the one that won it all the year before.
But they "got big heads" and lost 8-0 to Tucumcari in the state tournament, Sandry said. Two players from the 1956 team have died. Randy Willis died of cancer after high school. Guy Bevell was returning from a tour of duty in the Vietnam War and was killed in a car wreck on his way to Roswell.
For more than 20 years, players thought teammate David Sherrod had died in Vietnam. Then a magazine wrote a story on the team's 50th anniversary. Sherrod surfaced afterward, writing a letter to the editor saying he was alive and well, said Johnson, the author of "Summer of Champions."
Johnson said he has spoken to Sherrod once since.
"He said he was never in much danger in Vietnam and was safer there than working as a detective in Florida," Johnson said.
Hobson said he was not sure how the story about Sherrod dying in the war got started, but he found out three years ago about its inaccuracy.
That's when Sherrod's brother visited Roswell and contacted him.
"I told him, 'We're all sorry that your brother died in Vietnam,' " Hobson said. "'Died?' he said. 'He just retired as a police officer.' "
Players and Johnson also remembered radio announcer Stan Gallup. Gallup could not afford to travel with the team to Williamsport.
So he hid in his home, then re-created the final game for listeners with information from Western Union telegrams.
To keep up appearances, Gallup met the team at the train station in Clovis, N.M., and returned to Roswell with them on the final leg of the journey, Johnson said. David Burge may be reached at dburge@elpasotimes.com; 546-6126.
1956 Little League World Series champions
Lions Hondo Little League team, Roswell, N.M.
- Guy Bevell
- Ferrell Dunham
- Teddy Garrett
- Harold Hobson
- Tommy Jordan
- Albert Palomino
- Mike Sandry
- David Sherrod
- David Smith
- Dick Storey
- Blaine Stribling
- Billy Turley
- Jimmy Valdez
- Randy Willis
- Manager - Richard St. John
- Coach - Pete Ellis
Sources: Little League Baseball's website and Dewey Johnson.
The Little League World Series
Origins
Williamsport, Pa., was the birthplace of Little League baseball and the site of the first world series in 1947. The Little League World Series complex shifted a few miles in 1959 to the suburb of South Williamsport.
TV history
The series was televised for the first time in 1953. Jim McKay did the play-by-play for CBS.
First international champion
Monterrey, Mexico, in 1957 became the first team from outside the United States to win the series. Monterrey's Angel Macias pitched a perfect game in the final, a 4-0 victory over La Mesa, Calif.
Legendary Lloyd
Lloyd McClendon managed the Pittsburgh Pirates, but he became famous much earlier, as the shining star of the 1971 Little League World Series. McClendon, playing for Gary, Ind., hit five home runs in five at-bats. Opposing pitchers intentionally walked him in his other five plate appearances. Gary, the first all-black team in the series, lost the championship game to Taiwan in extra innings. But McClendon's excellence at age 12 brought him a nickname - "Legendary Lloyd." He now is a coach with the Detroit Tigers.
Girls win right to play
Little League was for boys only until 1973, when Carolyn King of Ypsilanti, Mich., challenged the system. She wanted to play, and her hometown league president let her take the field. Other Little League executives fought the movement to include girls but relented in 1974, settling a lawsuit by the city of Ypsilanti and King's family. At that point, girls were formally admitted to Little League. Krissy Wendell of Brooklyn Center, Minn., was a starting catcher in the 1994 Little League World Series. She later played on the U.S. women's hockey team in the 2006 Winter Olympics.
Asian dominance
Teams from Taiwan won the series from 1971 to 1974, and were challenged in only one competitive game during that stretch. Little League executives eliminated international teams from the competition in 1975. They soon reversed that decision, and teams from Taiwan or Japan won the series each year from 1976 to 1981. U.S. teams have won the last five series. The structure of the tournament now guarantees the American champion a place in the series final against the international champion.
El Paso connection
El Paso has never qualified a team to play in the Little League World Series, but it does have a tie to it. Former major-leaguer Carney Lansford, a member of the Texas League's Diablos in 1977, played in the series in 1969. His Little League team was from Santa Clara, Calif.
Texas in series
Seventeen teams from Texas have qualified for the Little League World Series. Teams from Houston have won it twice, in 1950 and 1966. Five teams from Texas have finished second
