Hartford High Baseball
By
Roy M. Davis
Submitted on October 30, 2010

    Just recently I wrote a column on baseball as our national pastime.  And that got me thinking about the game....only on a local level.  In our past years we have had some marvelous baseball players.  And some great coaches too.  Our own school days, the coaches were Arthur Yost......then after him came Max Johnson...both with a history.  Art Yost was offered a contract to play with the Chicago White Sox, but turned it down in favor of a teaching career.  Max Johnson was catcher for the Western Michigan team when he was in college.

     Personally, I always admired most the pitchers......did a little pitching myself.  Coach Johnson asked me one time to pitch for batting practice.  I was a southpaw, and many of the HHS players had never faced a lefty on the mound!  I did manage to lob a few over, but did not have the arm for a whole game. I admired greatly the guys who could really do it!  And there were three I’d like to mention: Dave Moore, Leo Shindeldecker, and the legendary Cleo ‘Squirt’ Van Woert.

      Dave Moore was a big man with arms like an oak tree.  He was a fire ball pitcher for sure!  Leo Shindeldecker was smart and tricky.  He could throw balls the batters had never seen before.  Only trouble, sometimes he had a problem with control....thus was apt to walk a batter too.

      Cleo Van Woert was the best in my estimation.  If his health had been better, I would bet on Hartford’s having a local boy pitching in the big leagues!  The Van Woerts lived just around the corner from my boyhood home.  Squirt was throwing things from the time he could walk.  Stones at telephone poles.....a bulls eye on the barn, and he threw tomatoes at it, I’ll bet.  I know he wore every kid in the neighborhood out catching for him.  And he developed an unerring eye for the target. 

      Only problem......Squirt was plagued by heart problems.  He mostly ignored that and, when he went out for the baseball team, he brought the physical form home.  And I was told in confidence that he signed it himself and turned it in with no questions asked.  No question about it.....he had a gift and was determined to use it! 

      Of course the coach built his team around Cleo.  He used Dave Moore’s talents, and Leo Shindeldecker’s too, but when the chips were down and trouble looming, he sent in Squirt Van Woert.  And it all came together in the 1940 season. 

      Hartford had a lot of good players, and their spirits were always up.  They didn’t start out to play a record season.....just one good game after another, often coming from behind to win.  They had taken 4 games straight and then came to Bangor.  Doc Gauthier’s boys almost always chewed up their opponents.  That day Cleo Van Woert was on the mound.  In recent years I talked about it with friend Larry Olds (God rest his soul).  Larry was Hartford’s premier catcher, and that game was etched in his mind forever.   

      Back in those days high school teams played seven innings.  When we faced Bangor, Squirt held them hitless.  He was throwing flawlessly......like a machine.  Their batters were baffled.....three up and three down.  Along about the sixth inning there was a lull; and as Larry remembered it, Gordon Kime called from the outfield, “Come on, Cleo, we got a no-hitter going!” 

      There was a silence; and Larry, behind the plate, felt his heart sink.  Van Woert just stood there on the mound in utter silence.  Then he looked all around the field, took his signal from the catcher, wound up, and began his flawless, machine like pitching again.  Final score: Hartford 5, Bangor 0. 

     There is often a time when a person in the public eye hits a peak.....an epiphany never to be forgotten.  For Cleo ‘Squirt’ Van Woert it must have been that day.  Not often in high school baseball do you see such a no-hitter.   Cleo went on to be graduated; but he could never make it into the service in WWII, because army doctors immediately caught his heart problem. 

      And there is a post script to the story.  Five and one half years later WWII had just ended.  I was out of the hospital just in time to come home for Christmas, 1945.  The joy at seeing Marion and my folks was tempered by the news that Cleo Van Woert was dead the day after Christmas.  His heart just gave out; and there, without a doubt, went the best potential big league baseballer ever produced in our area. 

      A classmate of mine, George ‘Sonny’ Morris, had just arrived home also.  I might mention that George was a talented baseball player himself, and a member of the team that memorable day.  So we went together to Cleo’s funeral.  Cold, snowy, and sad.  Our famed pitcher would have been 24 years old in just three more days!  As we stood in the cold for graveside services, I couldn’t help but think......here we had both survived a war.  And our friend did not, even though he never left home.   

      When I ran my idea for this story past friend Ray Sreboth, he sent me a picture of the immortal Squirt Van Woert.  I had never seen it before, and Ray (an excellent athlete himself) told me that Cleo always warmed up wearing a leather jacket.  He has it on in the picture.....and there he is, just as we remember him.  He has probably just delivered a smoking fast ball that would baffle any batter, and cause Catcher Larry Olds to sit between innings with his swollen glove hand in a pail of ice water!  Glory days in our story book town along the Paw Paw River.