Baseball lore will come alive

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April 19, 2014 - 12:00 AM

Wilbur Rogan, whose fastball was so good he was called “Bullet,” is one of several Kansas City Monarch baseball players whose exploits will be told here Tuesday evening.
Phil Dixon, who has written nine books about black players in baseball, will talk about Rogan and others at the spring meeting of the Allen County Historical Society at 7 p.m. at the Funston Meeting Hall, 203 N. Jefferson Ave. The event is free and open to the public.
“Rogan was one of three Monarchs elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame,” Dixon, 57, told the Register. Others were Jose Mendez, a Cuban, and J.L. Wilkinson, the team’s owner.
The Monarchs were a prominent member of the Negro League before Major League Baseball was integrated on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Dixon’s stories will be about the Monarchs, including when they played exhibitions in Iola, as well as local players and teams his research has uncovered.
Rogan’s story is one of more than just baseball, Dixon said, which he learned when he interviewed an aging Ernest Maun, a New York Giants pitcher the Iola club enlisted to hurl against the highly regarded Monarchs.
“Rogan got so upset with the umpire, that he hit him,” Dixon said, and then quickly departed the diamond in Riverside Park by scaling the center field fence and racing away in a car. The game was played in October 1922.
“You can imagine that a riot about happened,” Dixon said, with a black player slugging a white umpire. “Maun told me the umpire was cheating on Rogan.”
Dixon will also touch on The Go Devils, a black team of considerable fame in Iola, the Red Six, another team of black Iola players in 1922-23, and George Sweatt, Humboldt product who excelled in baseball and other sports including collegiately at what today is Pittsburg State University.
“I interviewed George in the early 1980s,” Dixon said.
 Sweatt died July 19,1983, at age 89. He played in the Negro League World Series two times each with the Monarchs and the American Giants. A baseball field in Humboldt is named for Sweatt, which puts him in good company. Another field there is named for Walter Johnson, the Hall of Fame pitcher born north of Humboldt.
Dixon often speaks in Kansas and Missouri towns, with his wealth of information from interviews and research revealing stories that sometimes have escaped local notice.

DIXON GREW up in Kansas City, Kan., born when his father was 49 and mother 44, which gave him access to stories about players younger parents wouldn’t have been familiar with.
One of his neighbors was Eddie Dwight, who broke into professional baseball with the Indianapolis ABCs in 1925 and played his last game with the Monarchs in 1937. Stories Dwight showered on young Dixon stroked his interest in baseball.
He collected baseball cards in the 1960s and has had a long love affair with the game, having worked in public relations for the Kansas City Royals “during the Bo Jackson era, 1987-90.”
Coaching baseball also has been a big part of his life the past 35 years.
When Dixon isn’t researching and writing about baseball and other sports — he currently is working on his first boxing book — he works in security.

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