Va. Beach Field Holds Memories of Old-Time Baseball
The remains of dry cornstalks wave in the breeze along a winding road in Pungo, behind a brick one-story, next to a white frame house.
Back in the 1930s, if you traveled here, you'd see farm fields that stretched for miles in all directions. This was a rural part of a rural county, but this patch of Princess Anne Road, in what is now southern Virginia Beach, was different.
It had a baseball stadium.
The ballpark loomed over its surroundings – its sides painted with advertisements for local businesses. On weekends, cars packed with spectators lined the two-lane road that ran nearby.
The stadium was the place where families enjoyed each other's company, where the community banded together, where onlookers forgot the Great Depression's troubles.
Boys in the stands dreamed of wearing the thick, white jerseys with maroon curlicued letters that spelled out "Charity," for the Charity Red Jackets.
Now, decades later, the ballpark is gone, replaced by a farmer's crop, but there are those who still cling to the memories of what went on here.
And there is one who can still hear the crack of the wooden bats, the roar of the crowd. He was there for the Red Jackets' glory days.
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Lloyd Murden Sr. was 18 when he and other boys started a pickup team in Pungo on the lawn of their school, known as the Charity School.
They were called the Red Jackets, and they were pretty good. They faced off against other local teams in a farm field near the Norfolk Southern train tracks.
After high school, Murden went on to play baseball at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, now known as Virginia Tech. He was called the Blonde Bombshell, and he pitched the school's first no-hit, no-run game.
In 1932, he received an engineering degree. But the Depression wasn't the best time to find a job, and he'd ended up back in Pungo, working first as a motorcycle policeman, then taking the reins at his father's general store.
And he started playing baseball again with his old teammates. By then, the Charity Red Jackets had joined the Eastern Virginia Semi-Pro League, play had become more competitive and the team was adding more professional players to its roster.
In 1936, the Red Jackets got their stadium, heralded in The Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch as making "everything more pleasant for the home folks." The team's manager and a group of local farmers had joined together to build it, about 1½ miles south of the main intersection in Pungo.
Everyone marveled at how they'd done it. High wooden walls enclosed the field, dugouts offered benches for the opposing teams and a roof topped the bleachers behind home plate. The seats on the first- and third-base sides were open to the sky. The only thing the ballpark didn't have was lights.
The newspaper praised the club as the "most feared club in the league." Murden was second in the pitching rotation, after a hurler who'd once had a trial in the majors with the St. Louis Cardinals.
In 1937, Murden got married. He and his wife had three children, and by the time daughter Barbara was born, the team was no longer.
World War II had arrived, along with the draft. Baseball took a back seat.
Throughout his life, Murden never talked much about the past – or about his triumphs.
So about 20 years ago, Barbara – who had married and was then Barbara Henley – gave her father a notebook.
"Daddy," the Virginia Beach councilwoman told him, "please write down your memories."
Murden, a man of few words, merely smiled.
But Barbara hoped that, with age, he might be more forthcoming. Which is why she was dismayed when, after his death at 91 in 2000, she found the notebook, its pages blank.
Her treasure hunt, however, wasn't over.
While cleaning out her dad's garage, she found another notebook, this one faded and bound in leather. On its pages, written in meticulous script, were the scores and lineups of the Red Jackets' earliest games.
She discovered that her father had led the team in hitting in its first year with a .430 batting average.
She felt like she'd opened a window to the past. Here was a glimpse of the world she'd always wanted to know, and it was full of men whose names she recognized.
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Norwood Land was one of the team's batboys from 1937 to 1939.
He used to go with his parents to the ballpark for games on Saturdays and Sundays. He'd watch, held back from playing because of a knee injury.
When he was 11, Norwood discovered that the team was looking for a new batboy. He talked to some players, or they talked to him – he can't remember – but either way, he landed the job.
Norwood's compensation was a uniform and any broken wooden bats that he could cart home. He patched them up with electrical tape so he could use them.
The Red Jackets played most games at the Princess Anne stadium, though every once in a while they'd travel to Portsmouth or Elizabeth City.
Admission was 15 cents, and the stands were always packed. Norwood remembers one fan who cheered so intensely that he embarrassed his wife.
The team played hard, and rivalries were fierce, especially the one with the Lynnhaven Crabbers. Off the field, the Red Jackets worked regular jobs, and some traveled long distances to get to games.
He was almost high school age when attendance started to wane. Then, in 1939, the team moved to a field near the beach in an attempt to drum up ticket sales. That put an end to his batboy career.
Life moved on, and after high school, Norwood worked in the Navy shipyard, married and had four children. His wife had a long bout with cancer, and he nursed her until her death.
Twenty-eight years later, he still wears his wedding ring.
Until earlier this year, Norwood lived close to where he'd grown up in Pungo. Then, he sold the house and moved into a retirement home.
There, he discovered a woman who was a former neighbor, and they've spent many a morning catching up on old stories. The Red Jackets, of course, have come up more than once.
That time in his childhood, when he was part of something bigger than himself, isn't far from Norwood's mind.
So when Barbara Henley called to ask questions about the team's history and her father, he was quick to answer.
He talked about the stars, like Harry Murphy, the best base stealer, whose uniform was always covered in dirt. Like Walter Marshall, a pitcher who threw a curveball that would drop a foot.
And, of course, Eddie Fraim.
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Fraim was a talented first baseman and one of the Red Jackets' leading hitters. An accomplished athlete, he'd been recruited from a semi-pro team in Norfolk.
His family had moved to Tidewater from Philadelphia in the 1930s. He earned money trimming trees for the family florist shop.
He met his wife at the Belmont restaurant, where she was a waitress. They married in 1939, about the time the Red Jackets moved from the Princess Anne field.
They had three sons, and then, in 1949, twins – Paul and Kathryn.
But Paul, who would grow up and become Norfolk mayor, never got to know his father. When Paul was 3 weeks old, Eddie dropped off two of his sons at school and collapsed outside his car, dead from a heart attack. He was 44.
Paul's mother held her husband's funeral and the twins' baptism on the same day, determined not to let the tragedy define her family.
To Paul, his father exists in memories. He remembers his mother's tales about what a good man – and good athlete – Eddie was.
There were physical reminders, too, of his dad's baseball career – uniforms, a hitting trophy.
They help Paul imagine his father in his youth, the star of summer afternoons, heralded by cheering crowds.
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On a mild summer evening, Norwood Land made his way from his retirement home on Princess Anne Road, past farm stands loaded with produce, past the turnoff for his old home.
At dusk, the 89-year-old drove up to the field where the stadium once stood, hoisted himself out of his car and gazed into the distance.
He is the only one left.
He finds it sad, in a way, that fewer and fewer people remember the Red Jackets and the time when baseball was all the community had.
He was standing in the field when, suddenly, his reverie was broken by the farmer who works the land.
"You're trampling on my soybeans," he called after storming out of his truck. "I just planted them."
Then the farmer recognized the man who was standing there.
"Oh, hey, Norwood," he said.
The two chatted, and the farmer recounted a story he'd heard his father tell, about how after a rain, they'd spread gasoline on the stadium's field and light it on fire to dry it out for the next game.
The farmer said goodbye, and Norwood kept his post in the field of his childhood dreams.
Perhaps, he thought, the memories will live on.