With the opening of the new Smokies baseball stadium, I thought we’d take a look at some of the early local teams of “the Fork,” the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, where folks have never been an exception in enjoying America’s favorite pastime.

Back in the day, men in their twenties were the stars on the community diamonds. However, one of the regular Tuckahoe community players, Ben Bolin, was outstanding at age 52 in 1948, when baseball was the warm weather weekend pastime in the Fork. Other players for Tuckahoe included Max Mount, Ken Stiles, and Aubrey and Burl Russell. Tuckahoe’s field was behind the old Ed Jennings store at the intersection of Midway and Curtis Roads.

Early Mt. Harmony’s teams, named for the nearby Baptist church, had “boys of summer” who also had played for Carter High or in the Volunteer League. The roster included Jack and Ken Oglesby and Charles Burkhart sharing first and second bases, Carl “Goob” Lusby on third, Lynn Rudder as catcher, and Jack Brogdon as short stop, with Charles Sellers, Jerry Lee, Bill Cruze, Carl Horner and Bob Odom sharing the outfield duties. Big hitters Charles Branch and Cornick Perry also played. Jimmy and Archie Bell were pitchers, and Sam Cash was a manager. My childhood neighbor, Jabo Branch, was another manager, and our other neighbor Walt Pilant served as an umpire.

Mt. Harmony’s ballfield was established with Callie Oglesby’s tractor in an unused mule pasture behind my Kitts grandparents’ property off Osborne Road in the Fork. Any ball hit over the left field line was an automatic double because of the dangerous barbed wire fence along my grandparents’ border. The ballfield’s access was a dead-end dirt drive that quickly filled with cars, but a lot of players and spectators arrived on foot from nearby neighborhoods. Mt. Harmony played against other Fork teams, such as Riverdale, Tuckahoe and Ramsey, as well as others, and by mid-August the 1950 Mt. Harmony team had taken the season’s second-half title with five wins and no defeats.

Fork residents can’t talk about earlier local star baseball players of the late 1930s and early 1940s without mentioning L.D. Lusby, whose brother Jack was also a good player. Other Fork standouts of that era were James Cunningham, Roy Merriman and Charles Kennedy. Families were commonly larger then, and brothers from just a few families could sometimes complete a roster. Norwood brothers Jim, T.W. and Roger often played together for Riverdale, but they also played independently on other teams, too. The young men were eager to play wherever they could on whatever team they could put together.

Besides sporting the names of churches and school communities, early Fork teams also represented grocery stores, barber shops, gas stations and other businesses. John Learn and Abe Mays of L-M Garage, sponsored Ramsey teams whose uniforms bore their name, but having players on the same team with different uniforms was not unusual. Curt and Cal French played for L-M, while cousins Carl “Goob” Lusby and Bill Clabo at times played for Kodak Trading Center.

The author would love to know the names of these players!

My dad, Carl Loveday, pitched and played right field for an earlier Mt. Harmony team, as well as for the Knoxville Wrecking Company with neighbor John Luttrell, who also pitched. Even in his later years during the 1970s, my dad sometimes played in the “old-timers” games, reliving those glory days.

We were a baseball family. My brother, Kenny, was officially left-handed, but he was an accomplished switch-hitter and pitcher, who also had a good arm for playing outfield. We went wherever he played. I have a vivid memory of having a snow-cone (the icy forerunner of a Slushy) explode in my face because of a foul ball that was hit into the spectators where I sat with my parents. Ballfields make good platforms for life lessons, such as “keep your eye on the ball,” even if you’re not batting. “Suck it up” and “walk it off,” were certainly catchphrases of personal development for our generation.

It wasn’t a matter of “if you build it, they will come.” The ball players were already there in the community, often playing in back yards and cow pastures as kids. Yes, dried cow patties made good bases at times, but of course they had to be repeatedly replaced. Those old ballfields are just a few more memories forgotten in the Fork.

Jan Loveday Dickens is an educator, historian, and author of Forgotten in the Fork, a book about the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, obtainable by emailing ForgottenInTheFork@gmail.com.