The lively ditty “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob Bobbin’ Along” might have been Jerry Whitworth’s favorite.
I’ve noticed several robins lately, which brought the song to mind in a bittersweet way. A sure harbinger of spring, I saw my first robin about the same time I learned Jerry had lost his months-long battle with cancer Sunday.
Now, let me navigate this – robins, spring, Jerry and, by progression, baseball.
One of Jerry’s favorite things was baseball, especially kids’ baseball. He was a coach of the first order. More importantly, in the late 1970s he started t-ball for little guys before they were old enough to play in PeeWee League, when we had 10 or 12 teams each summer in Iola.
He’d take off mornings from his downtown store, McGinty-Whitworth, round up kids meandering in Riverside Park — they knew he was coming — and play games, interrupted often by an extended session of fundamentals.
A good many of those kids were part of Iola’s first-ever American Legion state-championship team in 1988. Not a fluke. Jerry knew if they had enough preparation and learned to love the game as much as he did, they’d come together in the years ahead.
He and I coached against each other in PeeWee when we used a pitching machine, which was an important aside to get kids involved and learn how to play the game.
Jerry would accuse me of sneaking off with the pitching machine to practice in some out-of-the-way place — we had just one available — and I was just as sure he also was using it far more than his share. We both were guilty.
A little later, when he and I teamed up to coach a Pony team, we were on our way to Riverside one May evening, talking baseball and trying to come up with an edge for our team. We saw what we needed in a kid jivin’ along the street. We circled the block, Jerry leaned out of the window and in his quizzically humorous way, from his Arkansas roots, he called out: “You play baseball?” “I sure do,” Mike Howard replied. We had a good one for the Pony team. A year later, when we moved to Class A Legion, we had our catcher and spiritual leader.
When we got into AA Legion, Jerry didn’t have time to coach full time, but he was around often and always had helpful ideas I invariably incorporated.
At the state tournament, no one was happier than Jerry when we beat El Dorado for the championship. To his credit, practically every kid on the field had been a t-ball protégé of Jerry’s.
Nary a new year will dawn, when hope springs eternal for baseball fans, I won’t think about Jerry Whitworth. Same can be said of a legion of kids he helped in multitudes of ways, many more than just to be better baseball players.
He could have no better legacy.
