April means the beginning of baseball season, even though it will be put on hold, with much of everyday life this year, due to the coronavirus.
Baseball was still the sport of choice in 1946 and small areas like “Pinchatoully,” (always known as “Pinchy”)’in Graham Township, were able to round up enough guys for a nine-man team. Teams made up of girls and women, in 1946, were just not the norm.
Some town teams belonged to the Black Diamond or other leagues. Others, like the Pinchy team, just liked to play ball and usually on a Sunday afternoon.
Coaches organized their own team schedules and saw to it that players showed up for the games. As the photo shows, rural games were often played on an ordinary field with no frills.
Larger towns had better equipped fields with bleachers and possibly a concession stand. The Pinchy team made do with what they had.
Doreen Hubler Good of Graham Township supplied this photo. Her dad, Clint Hubler, nearly age 90, is shown second from the left side.
The team, shown in the photo, looked to be a family affair with James “Diz” Hubler, Clint Hubler, Harold Hubler, Dewey Evans, Glenn English, Roland “Bud” Hubler, Chet Smeal and Coach Floyd Hubler. Diz and Clint Hubler, as well as Dewey Evans, are living today.
The team deserved a lot of credit for raising money to buy their uniforms. They didn’t sell chances or hoagies, but rather Coach Hubler took them into the local woods to cut paper wood.
They then loaded the logs onto the coach’s coal truck and sold the wood to the paper mill in Tyrone. Their ingenuity and initiative bought them the set of uniforms, shown in the photo, from the old A&R (Adleman and Ratosky) department store in Philipsburg.
Diz Hubler remembers his Pinchy team playing against teams from Allport, Shiloh, West Decatur, Wallaceton and Hyde. They got to their away games in the back of the coal truck!
The team was once treated to a Pirate game at the old Forbes Field, in Pittsburgh. The put down hay and blankets in the back of the reliable coal truck and rode it to Monroeville.
The coach evidently didn’t want to drive the truck, prior to the construction of the Parkway and Squirrel Hill tunnels, through downtown Pittsburgh traffic so he parked it and the team rode a bus the rest of the way to the game. That would have been a big deal for those young men.
