Fan Profile: Harvey Utech’s baseball memories started with Stan Musial

A Stan Musial autographed baseball sits on Harvey Utech’s bookcase in Germany. The ball has yellowed and the signature has faded with time. But the memories it invokes are fresh and vivid.

The ball takes Utech, a 72 year-old semi-retired professor, back to his childhood. Growing up in the 1940s in Riverside, Conn., just two hours from Brooklyn, his best friend was a Dodgers fan. Utech was attracted to the Dodgers’ archrival St. Louis Cardinals and to the team’s superstar Stan Musial.

“(Musial) somehow seemed much more colorful to me than Furillo, Hodges, Snider,” Utech said.

In the first ever game he saw in person, Utech witnessed his hero take on the Dodgers at Ebbets Field on July 24, 1949. Utech said his father couldn’t have picked a better game to go see. The Cardinals won 14-1 and Musial hit for the cycle.

It was a perfect day.

So perfect that Utech wrote an essay about the game and Musial in his high school entrance exam later that summer. He was accepted and received a scholarship to attend the high school.

Utech said his father excitedly sent a copy of the essay to Musial. Soon after, he received that baseball signed by Musial. He’s still unsure where the ball came from all these years later, but keeps hope that Musial sent it himself.

“Maybe my dad never sent my composition in and maybe Dad bought the baseball,” Utech said. “I have continued to believe Dad’s story was true.”

Whether it came from Stan the Man or his father, is not important. The ball will always be special.

“That ball has remained in prominent view throughout my life,” he said. “I still treasure that ball.”

Utech grew up in Riverside Conn., moved to Washington, D.C., then again to Verona, N.J., and again to Vancouver, Wash., and finally to his current home in Schriesheim, Germany. Though his surroundings have changed, his memories and that ball are never too far away.

The game has never been too far away either.

Utech was first introduced to baseball playing with his friends in a vacant lot in Riverside. He would imitate Musial’s unique stance, but said it didn’t work for him.

“Bases were rocks, discarded cardboard, whatever,” he said.

He also spent Sunday afternoons watching industrial league softball games in Stamford with his father. As a young kid, he was in awe of the older, talented players.

By the time he reached grammar school, Utech was out on the field. He remembers the excitement of having his own uniform and the camaraderie. The team won more than 30 games in a row over several seasons.

Though Utech said he wasn’t a very good ballplayer, he still found the joy in baseball.

That love for the game was clear when his family moved to the nation’s capital in 1953. Utech became a Washington Senators fan to support the hometown team. The Senators were a perennial loser and hard to watch.

But Utech found a silver lining: Tickets were easy to get. And he can remember watching Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew and great players like Eddie Yost, Mickey Vernon, and Frank Howard.

He also saw President Kennedy throw out the first pitch at old Griffith Stadium.

But perhaps his most memorable moment at the ballpark was made by an opposing player and baseball legend, Mickey Mantle. Mantle stepped to the plate batting left-handed and crushed one deep into the night sky. Sitting near third base, Utech was mesmerized as the ball cleared Griffith Stadium’s right field wall – a 30-foot wall Utech remembers as “higher and deeper than Fenway’s Green Monster, which stands 37 feet tall.

“The ball seemed to be still rising as it disappeared,” he said. “I hated Mickey Mantle and the damn Yankees, but I never forgot that demonstration of power.”

Utech had an appreciation for greatness from a young age.

It started with his first sports hero Musial. It continued from the stands in D.C. He saw greatness again when “the greatest softball pitcher who ever lived,” Eddie Feigner and his four-man team known as “The King and his Court” played a Boston-area All-Star team in the ‘60s. And it touched him when he lived in Mariners country during Ichiro’s rise to superstardom.

Utech lists Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Bobby Orr, Muhammad Ali, and Rafael Nadal as others who have inspired him over the years. He said their performances on and off the field go beyond physical.

“I feel they exposed me to the things that are important in life and so, seeing them perform was often a deeply emotional experience,” Utech said. “They have all evoked in me tears of joy and admiration.”

For Utech, it all comes back to the baseball diamond. Living in Germany, he said they have “German Sky” satellite service and received a steady diet of baseball through ESPN. He still enjoys watching the game live too. His small town of Schriesheim has its own baseball team, Die Raubritter – the Robber Barons. America’s pastime is played from Little League to a professional German league.

“It’s great to be able to stay in touch with baseball,” Utech said.

Staying in touch with the game has allowed Utech to hold on to the past and its glorious memories.

It’s why Utech purchased the game story from that 1949 Dodgers-Cardinals matchup from the New York Times archive a few years ago. It’s why he still remembers watching a pre-game show for kids called “Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang” and the show’s sponsor Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy when television first arrived in America. And it’s why he can still hear Red Barber calling the Dodgers games on the radio, saying “They are FOB – Full of Brooklyn,” when the Dodgers loaded the bases.

It’s why after all these years, that baseball is still sitting proudly on his bookcase.

“There was something enchanting about baseball in those days, our heroes then were surely bigger than life,” Utech said. “I suppose it’s still the same for young people today but somehow, I feel that with TV and the saturation of the airwaves with baseball games, a lot of the enchantment has been lost.

“And maybe that’s not a bad thing. After all, there’s a lot more to life than baseball – although for me, it was a good place to start.”