Team reunion honors real, embellished feats

(Columbia Missourian, September 6, 2004)

In 1954, the stories were already great. At the MU baseball team’s 40-year reunion in 1994, they got a little bit better. Now, after 50 years, some have gained legendary status.
“The older you get, the better you were,” said pitcher Emil Kammer, who really did win eight games for the Tigers’ 1954 national champions. “I think all of us have gotten a lot better, all of us were 5-for-5 every game.”
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This past weekend, all but one of the team’s surviving members, now mostly in their 70s, gathered in Columbia for the 50-year anniversary of that magical season. From listening to them, though, one might think they were still in college, on a road trip or joking around after practice.
Norm Stewart, a pitcher for the 1954 squad who went on to coach the MU basketball team from 1967-1999, approaches pitcher Bert Beckmann and outfielder Lee Wynn at a Saturday morning breakfast and starts another round of jibes.
“Now I’m going to tell you the truth,” Stewart jokes. “Bert pitched three no-hitters, Lee had 17 consecutive hits, until (hall-of-fame pitcher) Bob Feller got him out on a hard ground ball. Bob Feller, he was a pretty good pitcher, but he wasn’t as good as Beckmann.”
Then, Stewart adds, “I’m their agent.”
“Hey, I can throw 95 (miles per hour),” Beckmann says from across the table. “On two throws, 47 plus 48.”
The table erupts in laughter, as it does so many times when Stewart gets going with his fibbers.
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Seconds later, Stewart has returned to the table to announce that shortstop Dick Dickinson was the first player to cork a bat, another joke that gets the table giggling.
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[Coach John "Hi"] Simmons died in 1995, but most of the team lives on. Bob Schoonmaker, Jerry’s brother and later an executive for Southwestern Bell, is one of only two ‘54 Tigers who has died.
Catcher George Gleason worked for IBM for many years. Beckmann was a teacher. Jerry Schoonmaker was a union representative for Ford Motor Company. But the championship has kept them together.
“Nobody’s ever (won a championship) before in the history of the university,” Dickinson said. “So, right there, that says, ‘Hey, if you did it back then and you’ve lived 50 years, you deserve to be honored.’ Because, hell, just being around talking about it is an accomplishment.”
Friday afternoon, the team was presented with national championship rings, a common award for champion teams in present times, but something for which these Tigers had to wait 50 years. The team was also honored at halftime of the MU football game against Arkansas State on Saturday night.
For the players, though, the gifts and honors aren’t what this reunion was about. It was about the friendships and the memories.
“It’s great,” Schoonmaker said. “They’ve got memories that I don’t have, they saw things that I didn’t see, but now I remember them, and they bring back a good memory of events that took place in our times together.”