Farewell to minor-league baseball great Dick Getter, one of the last Dallas Eagles

Dallas Morning News, August 29, 2019

A professional baseball player died here this weekend. You didn’t hear about it, because Dick Getter spent his entire career — from 1947 till 1960 — in the minors. He played for teams associated with the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers and Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs, but spent those 14 years on a seemingly never-ending tour of places called Iola, Seaford, Zanesville, Batavia.

The first time Getter’s name appeared in The Dallas Morning News was May 6, 1955. Said the headline above the brief tucked deep inside the sports section, “Eagles Get Outfielder on Option,” referring to the power-hitter dispatched to Dick Burnett’s Dallas Eagles by the Minneapolis Millers of minor-league baseball’s American Association. By then Getter was an old man in the minors — 26 years of age.

Dallas was the ninth stop in Getter’s career — and the last he would call home. He and his wife, Joan, moved first to Oak Cliff, to live near the ballpark that shared a name with the Eagles’ owner; then, to Farmers Branch, to a modest house along a quiet stretch off Marsh Lane adjacent to the Brookhaven Golf Course.

That’s where I first met Getter 21 years ago, while working on a long Dallas Observer story about the Eagles, once a New York Giants farm team. My father used to go to games at Burnett Field with next-door neighbor Richard Pool, son of congressman and lake namesake Joe Pool. Dad still has a program signed by the Indians and Giants passing through town on their way home after spring training.

My father’s memories became, for a time, my obsession; then, my son’s. (He has the replica Willie McCovey road jersey to prove it.) For two decades, Getter has always been kind enough to indulge my intrusive queries and visits.

There aren’t many Eagles left now — three, far as I can tell, now that the 90-year-old Getter is gone. With his death Saturday, we’ve lost yet another connection to the storied franchise that brought Texas League titles, major-league greats and minor-league shoulda-beens to a long-ago-dismantled ballpark once perched on the shores of the Trinity River.

Soon, there will be no one left who was there when future Hall of Famer McCovey drove in his first run as an Eagle or when Willie Mays squared off against Bob Feller in Oak Cliff. Or who will remember what it sounded like when Miss Inez fired up the organ in the shadows beneath the canopy.

Even in 1998, Getter was one of the few old-timers still blessed with a crystalline memory. What made it easy, too, was the fact his stats were easy to find. Getter played long enough, did well enough, to make sure his history didn’t fade with time’s passing.

He was born in Bethlehem, Pa., hit .600 in American Legion ball, and was signed by the New York Giants in 1948. Then he became a Dodger; then, an Indian. When he played in Iola, Kan., he met Joan. They were married almost 70 years ago at home plate — “which they don’t do anymore,” Getter said two decades ago.

Getter told me that in 1952, the Indians offloaded him to an independent team in Duluth, Minn., where he drove in 121 runs during 140 games — a staggering stat. He could have gone back to the Indians but declined the offer, so he was sold, again, to the Giants and shipped to a farm team in Sioux City, Iowa. Then it was off to Nashville. Then Sioux City again. Then Minnesota. Then, finally, here.

“And when I got to Dallas,” Getter told me, “I made the All-Star team here in a short amount of time.”

He was part of the Eagles team that took the 1957 Texas League title, with more than 100 wins. The next year he was named the Eagles’ player of the year, for which his prize was a shotgun gifted him by famed pawnshop owner Dave Goldstein. He played with a lot of major-leaguers on their way up and down — McCovey, most famously, but there were so many more.

And his sons Kerry and Rusty, who were also drafted to play ball in the bigs, remind that their father was the only man to strike out Mickey Mantle and hit a double off Satchel Paige.

Getter played for the Dallas Rangers, too, in the late 1950s. But the last uniform he put on was that of the San Antonio Missions of the Texas League. Getter, then 31, hit close to .300 that farewell season; drove in 63 runs; hit 15 balls out of the park. Not bad. Impressive, even. Then, he hung it up. Went into the scrap-paper recycling business. Eventually his boys followed.

I asked Getter in ’98 why he left the game at such a young age. He said he was just tired of moving — and of not having control over his own destiny.

“It’s not like today,” Getter said. “Today, these guys have options in their contracts. Like, they can say, ‘Well, I don’t want to go over there and play, because I don’t like that town.’ Well, in our day, if you didn’t play, you didn’t get paid. They’d tell you to go here or there, and what could you say? But it was a good team then. We were a close enough team. We didn’t go to bed with one another, but we were close. We drank beer together, raised hell together.”

Last I saw him was on Nov. 3 of last year. Getter invited me to bring my son, a left-fielder at Hillcrest High School, to talk hitting and fielding. The University of Texas was playing football on TV; Getter wore a wool Longhorns cap and sat in a recliner. He asked my son to stand so he could see his swing; while he gave Harry some tips I thumbed through and took pictures of an scrapbook filled with yellowed clippings and old Eagles and Rangers programs. I snapped photos, too, of my son with a man I considered a great — a legend.

Harry and I were talking last week about going back to see Mr. Getter. But on Saturday, during our drive to the baseball card shop, Rusty Getter called to say that father had but a few hours to live. Rusty wanted to drop off a book of interviews and photos they made for his father before he died; it’s a wonderful keepsake filled with stories about baseball, Campisi’s and stripper Candy Barr.

My Baseball Life, the book is called.

When Rusty hung up I asked Harry what he remembered most about his time with Mr. Getter.

“He told me, ‘Never, ever dive for a ball if you’re not sure you’ll catch it,'” Harry said. “I’ll always remember that.”

Good advice from one outfielder to another. And just good advice, period.

A version of this column originally appeared in Robert Wilonsky’s Most Dallas Newsletter Ever.

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