San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Cafémen played strong amateur baseball
My father, George Meehan, was a right-handed pitcher for the Public Service Utilities team, among many other teams he played for in the City Major League and other semipro teams
throughout the 1930s. I have many clippings he saved from the San Antonio Light sports sections when he pitched for the Nu-Grape Bottlers, Meggs Filling Station, Harlandale Athletics, Floresville and Beeville teams, among others — whichever team would pay the most or lead to a job. Times were tough during the Depression, and jobs were hard to come by. The teams would take up a collection from the attendees and split up the proceeds. At Beeville, he was given a job with the Highway Department building a bridge in town, lived at the home of the fire chief and pitched for the city team on the weekends. In 1934, the San Antonio Missions went down there to play an exhibition game, and George was the starting pitcher for Beeville. He liked to recall that during this game he struck out Larry Bettencourt, who played for several years in the American League with the St. Louis Browns, on three straight pitches. George got a full-time job with Southern Pacific Railroad in 1937 and pitched on their City League team for a few more years. He retired from SP in 1972 and passed away in 2005 at the age of 98.
I am attaching some of his clippings and a picture of the 1936 Bob Jones Café team, taken where they played at Barrett Field, located on the current site of Harlandale High School. A couple of years before he passed away, I asked him to identify the players in the picture, and these are the ones he could remember. In the back row is first baseman Russell “Bull” Curry, third baseman Brian Holder, right-handed pitcher Alcie Hayes (second from right) and George Meehan (far right). In the front row are right fielder Ed Schaefer ( future longtime South Side constable), shortstop Leroy Epp, center fielder
Jack Brieseke, catcher Eddie Brieseke and left fielder Beverly Otterside.
I do not know for how many seasons they played as Bob Jones Café, but several were also with the Harlandale Athletics and Nu-Grape Bottlers during the
’30s, according to newspaper clippings my father saved.
The City Major League was formed in 1931, “scrapped from the old City and Saturday leagues,” according to the San Antonio Light, March 28, 1931, with the so-named because nearly everyone else in the amateur leagues played on Sunday afternoon. The new league joined four other amateur leagues — the Parish, Industrial, Commercial and Sunday Morning — and its first teams were the Public Service Utilities, Carmen’s (streetcar operators) Union 694 Bushmen, Texas Chiropractic College Hawks, Missouri-Pacific (Railroad) Specials and Pierce Tire Masters. Teams from the former Saturday and City Senior Leagues had reformed under the banner of one of the “weaker leagues,” which made up a City Minor League whose champion would meet the Major League winner for the city title.
Amateur baseball during the 1930s in San Antonio was a citywide pastime, maybe even a passion, since any local organization with at least nine young or youngish men seemed to be able to raise a team and join a league. Because most players had day jobs, they played baseball on weekends, and some loved the game (and the slightly shady compensation) enough to play more than one day or daypart a week, either regularly or as a substitute.
Some of their diamonds – found on as-yet undeveloped private land, high school fields and in city parks — were pretty rough, with undergroomed fields and unshaded seating for the spectators. Support was hyperlocal, with sponsors and fans coming from the area around the ballfield, although players might divide their time between two teams in different leagues, sometimes playing under an assumed name on Team 2 (an offense punishable by not being allowed to play under that name on that team).
“Meehan on the mound” was a highlight worth noting of games your father pitched. From 1932, he was with the Harlandale Athletics, a team often described as “powerful,” with lengthy winning streaks. Their home diamond was Barrett Field, usually said to be “in Harlandale” or “on the Pleasanton Road.”
In 1936, the team acquired a new sponsor, the Bob Jones Café at 5040 S. Flores St. (later 4903 Roosevelt Ave.) Yes, it’s Bob’s café, not Bud Jones Restaurant. Robert Lester “Bob” Jones (1900-1986) was already in the café when future restaurateur Raymond Lester “Bud” Jones (1924-2018) was born, as noted in a Jan. 22 column about the family’s connection to Wednesday lunch enchiladas in the Harlandale Independent School District.
The Cafémen, as they were called, still called Barrett Field home. It seems to have been unsold land owned by and named after Marcus Thurman Barrett (1889-1967), a lawyer turned real estate magnate. After serving as an infantry officer in France during World War I, he returned to San Antonio, where he practiced law with his brothers, A.P. and Grady Barrett. In 1919, according to his obituary in the Express, Aug. 29, 1967, he “branched (in)to the real-estate business establishing subdivisions in the Harlandale area.”
As of the 1931 San Antonio city directory, Thurman Barrett, as he preferred to be known, was simultaneously a partner in the law firm of Barrett, Barrett & Taylor while serving as president of Harlandale Building Co., Harlandale Properties Inc. and Barrett & Co. Investments, all at 429 N. St. Mary’s St. As principal developer of Harlandale ( discussed here Sept. 28, 2019) after its founders withdrew, Thurman Barrett kept a field office at Southcross and Pleasanton. Although I haven’t found documentation, it seems possible that the Harlandale Athletics were sponsored by Barrett, who was still platting and selling new subdivisions in the area at the time the amateur powerhouse got started.
As the Bob Jones team, the Harlandale nine — so-called before and after the name change — played teams representing Frenchy’s Black Cat Café Cats, the Orange Crush Bottlers, Richter’s (Bakery) Butter-Krusts and the Mission Furnitures; teams representing military installations or units such as Normoyle and Duncan fields, the Fort Sam Houston Military Police and the Kelly Field Civilians; or town teams such as La Coste and Pearsall from the Highway 90 League.
With only a handful of teams in each league, it could be hard to fill a solid, fivemonth schedule. It was common for teams looking for opponents to fill out a double header to put a notice in the sports sections of the daily papers — with stipulations about the quality of their rivals and sometimes specifying the teams they’d like to challenge, including both the Athletics and the Cafémen. Unfortunately, as the latter, they don’t seem to have made it beyond the late ’30s — and World War II would soon curtail the amateur baseball scene anyway.
During the early 1940s, Bob Jones would sponsor a girls’ softball team and a men’s basketball team.
Barrett’s influence is still felt in Harlandale, where Rayburn Drive — and indirectly, Rayburn Elementary School — was named after his longtime employee, Ruth Rayburn, and even in Harlandale Memorial Stadium, to which his company donated construction materials. Barrett Avenue, blocks away from the site of the old Barrett Field, is another memorial.