They’re Well Over Fifty—And The Party’s Still At The Blacksmith
HUGO - Every second Monday of the month, the former Nifty Fifties soft ball team and their cheering squad congregate at The Blacksmith Lounge in Hugo for dinner.
The tradition fits them like an old leather glove, especially since “Carla,” their waitress (Mamie Jungmann), first began taking their dinner orders thirty years ago when the restaurant was the hangout aft er every game. “They’re always funny, always give me a hard time, and they’re always easy to wait on,” she said.
Carla isn’t her real name—she was named after the feisty waitress in “Cheers” by her ball-playing fans—but she’s at the top of her game, this Monday night in June.
“Broasted chicken and baby reds, broasted chicken and fries,” she announces briskly over the yakking and laughter, a plate in each hand.
“We came here every time we played a game,” Orval Frieler of White Bear Lake told The Citizen. “I got on the team by accident—they were short a player so they recruited me. I was supposed to play for the other team.”
While some of the individuals gathered around the long table hail from Hugo, others have roots in Centerville and many now live in White Bear Lake—but they all have a story to tell about the days when the Nift y Fift ies men’s over-50 team, managed for years by the late Art Thornquist of Hugo, played within the White Bear Recreation Department.
“One night Bill LeMay was playing third base,” Frieler said.
“He yelled, ‘Hit to me!’ and they hit the ball so hard, you could read ‘Spaulding’ on his chest. He was hurting for awhile.”
Sitting near Frieler is umpire Jim Carlson, a young guy at 61. “I umped a lot of their games,” Carlson said. “I enjoyed doing the over-50—they didn’t get mad!”
“Slow pitch was called the ‘old man’s game’ in the ‘50s,” Ray Cummings says. “[But] in the 60s, we younger guys discovered that slow-pitch soft ball was fun. Town baseball was kind of going away about then.” Cummings, who says he was “a bit young” for the Nifty Fifties group, suggests that the disappearance of town teams was due to the emergence of professional baseball—and affluence. “People had more money to go up north to cabins on weekends,” he said.
Things were a little less rigid back then, too. Former Hugo resident Viola (Vail) Brisson holds the distinction of being the only woman to ever play on the Nifty Fifties team. Brisson, a former women’s team pitcher, played “until they told her she couldn’t play anymore,” Danny Bever says. “So then she kept score.”
There was a lot of rivalry, too. “White Bear and a lot of the Hugo and Centerville guys had it in for us,” Bever says.
Sometimes that rivalry had a non-secular tinge. “Father Jack Donahue played for a team in White Bear,” Bever adds.
“Being that there were a lot of Catholics on this ball team, in playing him, we had a lot of badgering going on.”
And although many of the catcalls are still familiar, Brisson laughs as she recalls one line oft en thrown at a pitcher who tossed a wild pitch: “‘You might as well roll a watermelon out there!’”
Not everyone now enjoying The Blackmith’s broasted chicken played for the team. Some, like Helen Brownander Peterson, Betty Pelletier and Joyce LeMay, cheered on their husbands from the bleachers.
That cheering paid off: the team won the over-50 championship twice, earning a couple of trips to Las Vegas, team shortstop Deane Vail says. (“We got creamed,” adds Brisson.)
Jerry Hauble of Hugo, who played center field, says he was honored to play on the Nift y Fifties softball team with Ken Barett of Centerville—a former professional baseball player.
“Kenny didn’t make many errors,” Hauble said, jibing, “I was humbled to be able to stand out there when he made an error.”
Barett, who left Centerville at 18, said he was paid $5 per game to play for the New York Yankees’ farm team in Fond du Lac, Wis. From there, he was sold to a team in Quincy, Ill., where he was then draft ed by the Brooklyn Dodgers—just before Uncle Sam drafted him. This time, he headed for Korea and his ball-playing years were over—at least, until he decided to join the Nifty Fifties.
“I was looking for someplace to go and get a good laugh,” he told The Citizen.
It appears Barett succeeded.
Lifelong soft ball player Dick Parenteau of White Bear Lake leans over to say that he was the team pitcher. Parenteau jokes, “Were there others? They weren’t any good, don’t listen to them.”
And then, more seriously, “All those years, they were a great bunch of people to play ball with… “I just had to carry them, that’s all.”
Clearly, the Nifty Fifties are still laughing.