CityView Magazine

70 | October 2015 a country mile. Today, he might be a designated hitter." Tart- aglia remembered watching Marciano knock a ball out of the park, and hit a house across the street. Tartaglia is proprietor of George's Cafe, a Brockton fixture since 1937, a restaurant with walls lined with hundreds of photos of the city's favorite son. He climbed into many rings himself over years as a Massachusetts boxing commissioner, and enjoys telling stories about the many fighters he's known including Marciano, Sugar Ray Leonard, Larry Holmes and Brockton's other world champion, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, the middleweight champion of the 1980s. Cubs historian Ed Hartig notes that Fayetteville was home to minor league clubs for 11 seasons. e Cubs started here with a D league team in 1946, which became a B league team in 1947, the year Marciano tried out. e 1946 team is notable for the presence of Ed Musial, brother of future Hall of Fame member, Stan. e 1947 team was notable for future major leaguer Smoky Burgess. It was managed by longtime minor leaguer Clyde McDowell, who would later coach at Texas Christian University. Both teams had losing record and the club won the league in 1948. According to Marciano biographer Everett Skehan and Cubs historian Hartig, Cubs scout Ralph Wheeler, also scho- lastic sports editor for the Boston Herald, invited a handful of Brockton ballplayers to try out for the Fayetteville farm team. Marciano and three friends, Vinnie Colombo, Eugene Sylvester and Red Gormley hopped into Colombo's old gray two-door sedan for a two-day drive to North Carolina. Al- ready late, they made an overnight stop in New Jersey, then drove straight through to the Tar Heel state. Marciano had quit school aer his sophomore year in high school to help support his family. He worked on a coal truck, for a candy factory and in a shoe shop, playing base- ball at night. Draed in 1943, he was stationed for a time in Wales and helped ferry supplies across the English Channel to Normandy. When he returned to the U.S, at Fort Lewis, Washington, he played baseball again and found that boxing helped get out of the worst duty. Historian David T. Morgan is too young to have known Marciano in his Fayetteville youth. But he certainly knew baseball in Fayetteville. Morgan, now retired as a professor at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, was a ballboy and batboy for the Fayetteville Athletics, the team that followed the Cubs here Morgan, who researched his home town for his book, Murder Along the Cape Fear, said that more than 3,000 fans showed up for Opening Day at Cumberland Memorial Sta- dium on Bragg Boulevard at Bonnie Doone. e Cubs lost, 6-2 to the Wilson Tobs. Beyond his research, Morgan has personal memories. "I caught many fly balls on that field," he recalled. He has fond "The prize for Marciano was identification, and he would bleed without protest and ache without complaint if he could be called a champion. Obscurity was all he was afraid of." Cape Fear Crematory, Inc. More cost effective than traditional burial We offer private family viewings Affordable direct cremation Services available 24 hours Family owned and operated for 33 years 6765 Sandy Creek Road | Stedman, NC 28391 | 910.323.8898 | www.capefearcrematory.com "Where compassion and care run the business"

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