Man finds major league ancestry
Vietnam protester has baseball bloodlines
Bruce Beyer was a senior citizen by the time he found out who his birth father was. For weeks he giddily told everyone he saw — friends, neighbors, strangers on the street — about the family secret hidden deep in his DNA.
“Hey, my father played in the World Series!” he’d tell them. “Can you believe that?”
Beyer, 68, could scarcely believe it himself. He loved his adoptive parents so much he’d felt no need to know about his birth parents. But in recent years he’d developed heart trouble, and his cardiologist asked about a family health history for which he could offer no answers. Child services agencies couldn’t help, by state law, so he spat in a tube and sent a DNA test kit off to Ancestry.com.
This Father’s Day, for the first time, Beyer will celebrate two fathers — the one who raised him and the one who sired him. They’re both gone now. He loved Bob Beyer, the man he called Dad, and is learning about Joe Tipton, a backup catcher for the
Cleveland Indians when they last won the World Series. That was in October 1948 — seven weeks after Beyer’s birth in Buffalo.
“Mine is an American story,” Beyer tells USA TODAY Sports, “about love, history and politics.” It is also a global story about identity, belonging and the ties that bind.
Ancestry has samples from roughly 4 million people worldwide. Beyer’s results showed several relatives, noted only by initials or partial names. He could contact them through the genealogy company’s customer-messaging system; they could respond, or not, as they chose. And, soon enough, Beyer had word from both sides of a family tree with roots as deep as colonial America.
Kathryn Tipton Burkes, 69, of Watkinsville, Ga., was listed in the range of close family to first cousin and turned out to be Beyer’s half-sister. (Close family, in Ancestry parlance, means aunt, uncle or half-sibling.) She told him all about their father, a journeyman who hit .236 in seven seasons of Major League Baseball for the Indians, Chicago White Sox, Philadelphia Athletics and Washington Senators.
Elizabeth Coble, 53, of Washington, D.C., was listed as a first cousin. Her initial thought was that can’t be — but then she remembered a family story, seldom discussed, about Aunt Pam, who’d disappeared for a time from her home near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in the summer of 1948.
For as long as Beyer can remember, the only clue he had about his origin was the name on his adoption papers: Earl Bruce Lazarus. Now the puzzle pieces of paternity were fitting together. Beyer found out first about Pamela Lazarus, his birth mother, who was 18 when she had him. And when Tipton’s identity emerged soon after, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to uncover a connection: Tipton played for the Wilkes-Barre Barons in 1947, when he was 25 and newly married to someone else.
He batted .375 that season, tops in the Eastern League, and was promoted to the big leagues the next year, playing behind Indians starting catcher Jim Hegan. Tipton batted .289 in 47 games for the 1948 Indians, who beat the Boston Red Sox in a onegame tiebreaker for the American League pennant and then the Boston Braves in six games in the World Series.
Tipton got one postseason plate appearance — and, as fate would have it, the Hall of Fame lefty who struck him out would later be his son’s favorite player.
“Warren Spahn was my hero,” Beyer says. “Every kid in Buffalo knew Spahn was from here.”
Nor was this the end of the astonishments. Coble, niece of Beyer’s birth mother, is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She told Beyer that their ancestor, Edmund Arnold, was a private in the Continental Army as well as third cousin of a general whose name rings hollow through history — Benedict Arnold. Beyer finds the irony of this breathtaking.
“I’ve been called Benedict Arnold for most of my life,” he says.
Fifty years ago, Beyer turned in his draft card in a mass antiwar demonstration at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington. That led to a chain of events — fist-flying arrest, sensational trial, bitter conviction — that made him a locally notorious Vietnam War resister. He fled to Canada and then Sweden rather than face prison.
Forty years ago, by then living in Canada again, Beyer decided to return to Buffalo, even if it meant serving time. So he walked across the Peace Bridge — an international span named for the state of harmony he holds dear — as a phalanx of supporters and reporters strode with him over the churning Niagara River on the 10th anniversary of his original protest.
Cameras captured it all. Beyer was regionally famous all over again, a prodigal son coming home by a bridge over troubled water.
‘THERE’S A PLACE FOR EVERYBODY’
What might Tipton have thought of a draft-resisting son? He served three years in the Navy during World War II. He was at Okinawa and Iwo Jima and served aboard the escort carrier USS Kadashan Bay when a kamikaze plane plunged into it amidships in 1945. The crew worked furiously for 90 frantic minutes to stem flooding and quell a fire that threatened the fuel tanks.
Tipton had spent the early 1940s playing in the Indians minor league system. His first postwar season was in Harrisburg, Pa., in 1946. Next, in 1947, came Wilkes-Barre. Tipton married Reva Jean Earls in March, just before that season, and Kathryn was born in November, just after it. Beyer was born the following August. Kathryn Burkes, who goes by Kathy, has done the math. She figures Beyer was conceived around the time she was born.
“I think about it a lot, and in one way it really hurts me,” Burkes says. “Then I think about it the other way, that this is the most wonderful thing because there’s a place for everybody in this world.”
Beyer got his results from Ancestry in mid-December. Burkes and Beyer spoke for the first time on Christmas Day. She hopped a flight to Buffalo in March and spent a week. They were long-lost siblings, talking deep into the night. Burkes gave Beyer a scrapbook chockablock with family photos and a handmade quilt covered in hearts.
“Bruce blubbered like a baby,” Burkes says. “The men in our family, they cry when they get emotional.”
She told Beyer something else on that trip, too: He isn’t her only half-brother. There’s another in New England, she says, a retired firefighter who, though also adopted, grew up knowing that Tipton was his birth father. She was 12 when her mother told her about this out-of-wedlock child and that she wasn’t to speak of him while her father was living. She says her late mother never knew about Beyer and she doesn’t think her father did either.
Burkes has four brothers, counting the two she grew up with and the two she’s found along the way. “I’m the only girl, evidently,” she says, riffing on a running family gag. “We talk about all the cities Daddy played in, and it’s sort of a joke, who else might be out there. But at the same time it’s serious as a heart attack.”
Beyer had one of those some years ago. He has had eight stents placed in his heart since and takes daily medication, which is why his doctors wanted to know about his family health history. Burkes told Beyer their father struggled with heart issues for decades.
Tipton died in 1994, at the age of 72, in Birmingham, Ala., where he’d sold cars at a Ford dealership.
Tipton loved to hunt and fish, and he had a weakness for pecans and pretty women.
“I hate it for Mama, but I bet Daddy’s in heaven laughing his butt off right now,” Burkes says. “He’s saying, ‘You’re not ever going to forget me because I keep showing up in other people.’ ” ‘SHE LOST HER CHILD’ Beyer’s birth mother never had another child, though she married twice. Pamela Lazarus Thomas died in hospice five years ago at 82.
Elizabeth Coble, a foreign affairs officer for the U.S. State Department, says when she was 13 or 14 she asked her mother why Aunt Pam sometimes seemed sad.
“She will always be sad,” Coble recalls her late mother saying. “She lost her child.”
Coble was 16 years from being born when her aunt left home to have her baby in Buffalo, nearly 250 miles away. That’s how it was for unwed mothers oftentimes in that era: Go away quietly for a spell and return as if nothing had happened.
“It isn’t as if she was sad all the time,” Coble says. “But sometimes there was an underlying sadness” when around the nieces and nephews she doted on. “I guess we reminded her.”
Her obituary notes she was a volunteer for a half-dozen organizations. Noted among her survivors were “several beloved nieces and nephews.” They’d soon divvy up lovely Christmas ornaments their aunt had cross-stitched over the years. Coble framed hers. When Beyer’s adoptive mother died, he found a one-page, single-spaced, unsigned letter among her papers. It appears to be a missive from his birth mother to his adoptive parents, though Beyer can’t be sure it isn’t something they kept from some other source because it spoke to their circumstance.
“I’m thinking about how happy you must be because now you have a little baby boy, a boy I love more than life itself,” the letter says. The writer says she wants her son to know that she wanted him more than anything in the world but that he “needed the love of two people” — two is underlined — “to grow into a person who can later give love.”
The letter cites something the writer once read about how real love is letting go: “I’ve done what the line says, and years from now you two will do the same. Thank you for having the love you do. I know the beautiful pink flower I held now has all the love he’ll ever need and that’s all I ever want for him.”
The imagery of a teen mother holding a pink flower at her moment of surrender is vivid and fragrant and heartbreaking.
“God knows it hurts to let go, though,” the letter ends. “My thoughts and love will be with you three forever. Take care.”
BASEBALL JOURNEYMAN
Tipton never played for long in one place. He had that rookie season in Cleveland, then got traded to the White Sox, only to be dealt a year later to the Philadelphia Athletics, where he played 2 1⁄2 seasons. He got picked up on waivers and played 1 1⁄2 seasons back with the Indians before yet another trade, this time to Washington, where he finished his MLB career in 1954.
His trade from the White Sox for Nellie Fox is remembered as one of the most lopsided in baseball history. Fox is enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, while Tipton can be found only in the clip files of the Hall’s library. (Beyer’s adoptive father is in the University at Buffalo’s athletic hall of fame for football.)
Tipton’s clip file reveals glimpses of his temper. He took a swing at teammate Ken Keltner for a mysterious slight at a champagne-soaked victory party after the Indians beat the Red Sox in that pennant tiebreaker in 1948. The team denied it at the time, but Tipton confessed when he returned to the Indians in 1952.
“It was the biggest mistake of my life and I’ll never stop regretting it,” he wrote in a first-person piece that suggested this was why he’d been traded to the White Sox. “I missed — but somebody didn’t miss. I really had a fat lip the next morning.”
RESISTING THE DRAFT
The Buffalo Courier-Express ran a big Sunday spread in 1949 about tests done on babies to measure health and aptitude before adoption. It featured seven photos of a 6-month-old boy whom the newspaper called Johnny but who was actually Earl Bruce Lazarus — and who would soon be Bruce Lindsay Beyer.
The caption said little Johnny passed all of his tests with an Aplus, though his adoptive father noted it as A-1 in the family scrapbook. Flash-forward 18 years, and Beyer’s draft board would classify him 1-A.
He graduated from Buffalo’s Bennett High School in 1966 — future Basketball Hall of Famer Bob Lanier was a classmate — and a year later he was on the steps of the Justice Department when his draft card was among 994 left on the desk of U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark in one of the largest collective acts of civil disobedience in modern American history. (The law required draftees to keep the cards in their possession.)
Norman Mailer would win the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction for The Armies of the Night, his book about a weekend of antiwar protests in Washington in 1967. “By handing in draft cards,” Mailer wrote, “these young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration, or at best, years where everything must be unknown.”
For Beyer, it would be all of the above.
Months later, when Beyer refused his Selective Service induction, he and another draft resister took up symbolic sanctuary in the Unitarian Universalist church where Beyer had been christened two decades earlier. Ten days later, 32 lawmen stormed in, and Beyer was dragged out of the pulpit. By his own account, Beyer punched one federal marshal in the nose — showing better aim than his birth father — and bit the thumb of another.
Beyer would be convicted of assaulting federal officers and got two three-year terms, to be served concurrently. In 1970, awaiting appeal, Beyer jumped bail and fled to Canada and then Sweden.
Beyer moved back to Canada a couple of years later and worked as a courier in a small town 150 miles north of Toronto. Then, in 1977, Beyer read Winners and
Losers, Gloria Emerson’s book imploring Americans not to forget the Vietnam War. Beyer felt like he’d been hiding in the north woods, trying to forget it himself. That’s when he decided to come home to Buffalo.
But first he needed a lawyer — so he called Clark, the former attorney general who by this time had joined the antiwar movement. “I’m the one who got you into this,” Beyer recalls Clark telling him, “so I guess I’m the one to get you out of it.”
Clark walked with Beyer across the Peace Bridge, as did his adoptive father. Beyer expected to be shipped off to prison before nightfall, but that afternoon federal judge John T. Curtin released him on his own recognizance.
Curtin eventually would vacate the three-year assault sentences and resentence Beyer to 30 days, of which he would serve 11 because he’d already done 19 when originally charged.
A GIFT FROM HIS MOTHER
Beyer’s 2-year-old grandchild, Emslie, is rolling around on the living room rug, showing off for company. Beyer smiles in the contented way that grandparents do.
Bruce and Mary Beyer, his second wife, have four grown children — three from Mary’s first marriage and a daughter, Elizabeth, together — and seven grandchildren. They live in Lackawanna, a few blocks south of the Buffalo line; they moved there a year ago when Beyer retired from his career as a carpenter.
“As a kid I remember looking at photos of my parents’ ancestors and feeling absolutely no physical connection,” Beyer says. “Yet my love for my parents never wavered and they were by all measure the two most influential people in my life. They never faltered in love or support — and God knows I gave them reason to.”
This Father’s Day, Beyer will remember both of his fathers — the big-league catcher and the college halfback. He will have thoughts of each of his mothers, too — the one who gave him life and the one who gave him a life.
Images of his birth father are easy to find, always a click away on the Internet. He has only a few photos of his birth mother, who somehow remains ethereal, elusive. Last month, though, he received a precious object by mail that makes her memory tangible.
Deborah Coble, niece of his birth mother and a United Methodist Church pastor, sent Beyer an oval Christmas ornament, 2 1⁄2 inches across. He wept when he opened the package; Tipton men are like that.
Pamela Lazarus Thomas printed her name in block letters on the back of the ornament. On the front she cross-stitched “passion,” a two-syllable summation of the life of her only child. And next to that is an image in bloom that makes Beyer’s stuttering heart sing. There, embroidered by the mother he never knew, is a beautiful pink flower.
“Mine is an American story about love, history and politics.” Bruce Beyer