‘A SEASON TO REMEMBER’
Film plays in Mon City 70 years after baseball glory and heartbreak
For a long time, Scott Frederick viewed the saga of Monongahela’s 1952 Little League and ’54 PONY League teams as two separate stories. He later found out it was actually a trilogy with a middle chapter marred by tragedy.
Chapter one is pretty cut and dried: That Monongahela squad won the 1952 Pennsylvania state championship and barely lost in the finals of that year’s Little League World Series. It ends with many of the players from that team staying together and winning the 1954 PONY League title. In between is the murder of Raymond Smith, a 19-year-old Monongahela man who was killed while in Williamsport,
Pa., preparing to watch his hometown team take the field.
Frederick, 70, of Monongahela, was aware of the two legendary Mon City teams growing up but didn’t find out about Smith’s death until 2016, when he stumbled upon a news reel about it at the World of Little League Museum in Williamsport. He came to realize that the two teams’ stories and Smith’s death were “really the same story” and began perceiving the whole thing “as one book with three chapters.”
He eventually brought this emotional roller coaster of a tale to WQED producer and writer Beth Dolinar, who turned it into the 28-minute documentary “A Season to Remember: The Baseball Boys of Mon City.” Her film debuted on WQED in October and featured many of the surviving players and their families discussing the highs and lows they experienced over that tumultuous two-year period.
On Wednesday, Dolinar is bringing the documentary back to where it all began for a special screening at Ringgold Middle School in Monongahela. Those who attend will see a director’s cut of “A Season to Remember” and take part in a Q&A afterward featuring Dolinar and Frederick — both Ringgold graduates — alongside other special guests.
The screening is free, though anyone who wants to attend needs to register via eventbrite.com. “A Season to Remember” is currently available on YouTube.
Dolinar spent most of May and June 2021 tracking down players from the 1952 and ’54 teams.
“It was really important that we find these men because the best tellers of history are the ones who were there,” she said.
She and her team conducted interviews with players and their families, as well as spending time in Williamsport and at PONY League headquarters in Washington, Pa. They filmed all through last summer and edited it all together in September to ensure it was ready for an October premiere, Dolinar said.
As Dolinar put it, the 1952 squad was “one heck of a Little League team,” featuring players like superstar pitcher Ed Kikla and slugger Rich Sacane. She tracked down Kikla in Florida and interviewed teammates Gary Wassel, Pete Hoosac and Tom DeRosa. She even captured DeRosa
and Hoosac having a catch at Mounds Field in Monongahela shortly before Hoosac died.
All that life- affirming nostalgia, though, is interspersed with recollections of how Smith’s murder affected both the 1952 Little League team and the entire Monongahela community.
“That’s life, isn’t it?” Dolinar posited. “You can have the most glorious day of your life, and that doesn’t inoculate you from horror.”
To Dolinar, the PONY League team emerging victorious in 1954 after the Little League team fell short and their community suffered such a horrible loss was like them saying, “Well, there you go. We came back and we triumphed.”
In Frederick’s estimation, Dolinar did an “astounding job in her research” for both the WQED version of “A Season to Remember” and the director’s cut, which features even more information about the 1952 and ’54 teams’ place in Little League and PONY League history.
Frederick was born in 1952 and thus was too young to appreciate the excitement in the Mon Valley at the time.
The retired American history teacher, who taught at Ringgold High School for 36 years, still can’t believe that he didn’t have the whole picture of what happened back then until that game-changing trip to Williamsport. He loves the idea that bringing “A Season to Remember’ here will help educate other locals about the full scope of what went down.
“From my perspective, it’s good overcoming evil,” he said. “It’s a much bigger story than the Monongahela area or even Southwestern Pennsylvania. ... I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our community to know the whole, completely story.”
This screening is a sort of mulligan for Dolinar, whose WQED feed of “A Season to Remember” was interrupted by tornado warnings during its debut in October. Even though it’s been out there for a while, she promised that “you’ll be seeing a new film” at Ringgold with all the added content in the director’s cut.
As someone with deep roots in the Monongahela area, Dolinar is proud to be bringing “A Season to Remember” back to where those two youth baseball teams captured the imagination of an entire region all those years ago.
“Those are my people,” she said. “That was my place where maybe I started all this interest in telling stories and writing. I’ll be happy to go back, and I hope that the community is proud of me. I hope it’s a proud moment not just for me, but the town and the people who come to see the show.”