"Pepper" Martin was the star third baseman for the Gashouse Gang, the St. Louis Cardinals team that won the 1934 World Series.
Another "Pepper" Martin was the star catcher for the Beacon Blanketeers, champions of this region's Industrial League in 1940.
Beacon Manufacturing, a blanket-maker up until its closing in 2002, raised spirits not just with jobs, but also with ball play in the wake of the Depression. Professional quality athletes went ball-to-bat and cleat-to-shin in such arenas as Beacon's Nolan Field amid large, loyal crowds.
The league continued through the 1950s; and, during World War II, included two soldier teams, the 28th General Hospital and Moore General Hospital, which in one year featured the New York Yankees' 1943 Most Valuable Player, Spud Chandler.
Drowsey on the mound
In addition to Martin, the Beacon Blanketeers featured star pitcher J.D. "Drowsey" Hardin, who pitched a no-hitter versus Brevard College in 1941. (The team played a couple of non-league games each week, including barnstorming contests against national major and minor league rosters.)
"Drowsey" had gotten his nickname when a factory co-worker had found him napping atop a jacquard loom head crate at lunchtime and said, "Feeling a little drowsy today?" It stuck.
Nicknames were a sign of camaraderie. "Pepper" Martin's brother, the late Wade "Gobbler" Martin, an all-star shortstop, once gave me a list of 164 Swannanoa guys and their nicknames.
Other members of the 1940 Beacon team were Henry "Bucket" Burrell, Bill "Nanner Nose" Barnwell, and another Martin brother, Wayne, dubbed "Bozo."
Hardin's no-hitter would have been a perfect game, if it hadn't been for two errors; and he struck out nine. His trick was pinpoint control. "I could throw into a quart cup," he told me in 2000.
Tricks of the trade
The Berkeley Mills team had a less legitimate trick. Its manager sometimes inserted a gramophone needle into a ball to make it wobble. Other times, he froze the ball to deaden its bounce.
"We told him we'd protest the game if he used that ball again," Wade Martin related in 2000. The threat was effective because protests stopped play, which nobody wanted.
"One time, when we went to play Sayles (the Bleachery's team)," Wade Martin recollected, "The manager dropped gravel on the shortstop part of the infield" to throw Martin off. When the manager, who was also the catcher, hit the ball to the left side of infield, Martin charged toward the plate, picked up the ball on the undisturbed grass, and threw the manager out.
"It made him furious," Martin recalled.
In a 1943 game against Moore General, Beacon scored 11 runs in the last three innings to win 13 to 3. A Moore rally was squashed when the Beacon infield executed a triple play, with Martin as the pivot.
Vincent "Shine" Gregg, Beacon's first baseman, left the game with a spiked foot. The Moore catcher had to exit in the ninth with a broken finger.
Touching base
Martin grew up with his Swannanoa teammates.
'"When I was a boy," he avowed, "I could go into any home and say, 'Momma, you don't have another jelly biscuit, do you?' and she'd take care of me."
When he made an error behind Hardin, Hardin would chirp, "Don't worry, Gob. You did good the day before."
Martin could have gone on to play professionally, but chose to stay in Swannanoa. His parents had moved there in 1929, when he'd been nine, after first leaving their Cherokee County farm for work in Gastonia.
When Beacon opened, Wade's dad, Marcus, who had separated from Wade's mom, got a job there. The job came with a home in Beacon's mill village. The four oldest of six children accompanied dad.
Marcus' dad, Nathaniel, had been a famous fiddler. Marcus continued the practice and also made fiddles, carving the scrolls and bridges.
Wade discovered he had the carving talent when he was serving in the Philippines during World War II.
"There was this little feller from New York in my unit. He was a woodcarver," Maggie Lauterer quotes Martin for her article in "May We All Remember Well, Vol. 1."
"One day I asked him if I could borrow his knife just to pass the time. With a piece of Japanese mahogany I'd cut off a landing barge with a machete, I carved a little hula dancer."
The right stuff
Wade's career as a woodcarver gave him a second claim to fame. His work is in museums; and there's s significant display at the Folk Art Center.
His figures are of local folk, and are an expression of his locally-derived energy.
Wade "was all over the place" when he was a teen, Dean Wilkerson recalls in Lauterer's piece. "He was playing ball, and he was up on the mountain gathering ramps to cook with eggs and potatoes for all us kids who hung out together."
Wade was given his nickname, "Gobbler" (shortened to "Gob") by his brother, Fred "the D.A." Martin to describe his late-in-starting and fast-in-catching-up dinner-eating habits.
The competitiveness of team sports were a release for his energy as well as a means by which to bond with his buddies.
"Other teams weren't as close as ours," he told me, "because we lived in the village together. Let's put it this way. We loved one another."
Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Dec. 15, 2014.