Long before Walter “Big Train” Johnson became arguably the greatest pitcher in Major League Baseball history, he was just your average kid on a farm north of Humboldt.
Though the family’s white clapboard house is long-gone from where it once stood, one dreams the place abuzz with activity nonetheless, breaking through the silence of farm fields under cloudless cobalt skies.
There in the river one could swim all summer in dark water, and fish under willow trees that still bend in the soft wind.
When he was young, Johnson exhibited an almost supernatural kinship with animals, whether it was trying to break in his father’s colts, or trying to capture and tame various wild creatures.
His brother Earl shared the story that once he and Walter spotted an enormous gray wolf across a pasture, and chased it back to its den beneath a rock.
Fearless, Walter started scooping up the five young cubs he found nearby, and as Earl observed: “Had the dens been connected, the mother would have torn him to bits.”
Earl likewise recalled his brother’s abilities with a rifle, and how he revealed early physical gifts by being able to target squirrels 60 feet away with a sling.
One wonders if he threw sidearm even then, a style that became a signature part of his lightning-speed fastball.
As for the beginnings of other athletic abilities, Johnson credited his physical strength and endurance on the ball diamond to endless labor on the farm when young.
But although well-suited for such work, Johnson suggested that farm life was also isolating, and he and his siblings relished traveling into “the big towns” of Humboldt and Iola in order to procure necessary supplies.
Upon entry into Humboldt, one has been greeted for decades now by an impressive billboard honoring Johnson, along with his contemporary phenom George Sweatt.
Given his famously humble demeanor, one wonders if the spectacle would have embarrassed Johnson, such as when thousands would later gather to celebrate him in town for annual “Walter Johnson Day” celebrations.
AS PER formation of Johnson’s early character, it’s intriguing how, according to his biographer (and grandson), Henry Thomas, the Johnsons were exceptionally upright people, but their moral education was more secular than religious.
As brother Earl explained, “it was wilderness-country where we lived, and churchgoing was difficult. But our father and mother taught us the Golden Rule, and we lived by it to the best of our ability. Walter, I believe, best of all.”
Standing on the edge of the field where the Johnsons once lived, with its carved stone memorial, one immediately gets a sense of the expansiveness of the scene, and realizes how a walk to church might have been quite the long trek.
