Music from the Scat Cats!

You asked for it, you got it. After last week's Column I Never Got Around to Publishing post about the Scat Cats, I found these performances by Kingsport's legendary funk band of the fifties and sixties (and also seventies, eighties, nineties and aughts!) on YouTube.

  

"Nobody Else But You" by Kenny Springs andt he Scat Cats on the Spot Label

"Please" by Kenny Springs and the Cats on DeWitt Recrods (1963)

(Courtesy Lonnie Salyer)

"Let Nobody Love You" by Kenny Springs and the Scat Cats 

"Just Walkin' in the Rain" by Kenneth Springs on Columbia (1961)

(Courtesy Lonnie Salyer)

Two Big League Dads in one D-B Class, 1965

 After I published a column about big league exhibition games in Kingsport, I heard from my high school classmate Mark Haggitt. Mark tells me that the father of our classmate Barbara Diehl Williams, George Diehl, played major league baseball.

I think that makes our class – D-B ’65 – unique. Another classmate, Sharon Hillman Lake, is the daughter of former big leaguer Dave Hillman.

I wonder if any other D-B class had two big league dads.

I looked up George Diehl’s record. He was frequently called “Big George” because of his stature; he was 6’2”.

Diehl pitched parts of the 1942 and 1943 seasons for the Boston Braves (later the Milwaukee Braves, now the Atlanta Braves), where his manager was the legendary Casey Stengel!

And how about that. Dave Hillman also played for Stengel, in 1962, Dave’s one season with the Mets.

How did Diehl, a native of Pennsylvania, end up in Kingsport? Kingsport bookended his baseball career. He spent 1938, his first year in professional baseball, with the Kingsport Cherokees of the Appalachian League. His final season, 1950, was also with the Cherokees.

But a bigger factor in his staying in Kingsport after his baseball career ended might have been this:

The Kingsport Times reported that on New Years’ Eve 1939 he married Margaret Evelyn Coffey of 222 East Wanola.

Diehl was a highly regarded prospect who spent spring training of 1939 with the Boston team. In the end he played in only two games in the majors.

He explained what happened to cut short his big league career in a 1982 article in the New York Times. It seems in the spring of 1943 wartime restrictions on gasoline prevented teams from traveling to Florida as usual for training. So the Boston Braves trained at the Choate prep school in Wallingford, Mass. Diehl described the experience of training in 12-degree weather to the Times. “’When we weren't using their indoor cage, we worked out in the snow,’ said George Diehl, 64, a middle-inning relief pitcher with the Braves in 1943. ‘One day I was outside throwing sidearm and I felt something happen to my arm. It wasn't right the rest of the season.’”

After baseball Diehl worked in mortgage banking in Kingsport, first for Bennett & Edwards which would become Schumacher Mortgage.