Pee Paw Played for Gulf States

It’s been a while since I posted a baseball photo of my Landry grandfather.  I posted one back in 2021, and before that one it had been five years since I posted one.  I was once concerned about overdoing it with his baseball photos, but I had no reason to be concerned.  Maybe I should have posted more!  After all, he was a semiprofessional baseball player back in the heyday of baseball’s infancy.

My grandfather was born in 1893 in Westlake, Louisiana.  He grew up with a family of four older brothers.  I’m sure there were lots of games played in that family during that time.  What else were they to do?  There was no television and certainly no internet, so they were left to their own devices.  If their children and grandchildren are any indication of their behaviors, games were being played.

And with games comes competition.  Having older brothers pushes you to be better earlier if you want to compete.  I’m thinking that must have been the case with young Robert Joseph Landry – better known as Rob at the time.  I really don’t know anything about his education.  I’ve never heard anyone talk about that.  He did marry a schoolteacher, and previous generations of the family were known to value education.  But I did hear about him being a semiprofessional baseball player.  There are photos to document that.  

Rob was involved with a baseball group out of Beaumont, Texas.  The year was 1915, and the group was the Texas League Beaumont Oilers.  The photo of that group is the earliest photo that I have of his baseball career.  It was taken during tryouts.  I don’t know much about Rob’s involvement with the group.  His career took a break in 1917 when he joined the military during World War I.  There’s a photo of him with a group of other guys playing baseball during that period.  He didn’t give up the sport completely during that year-long stint.

The war ended before he was ever deployed and after that he went to work for Gulf States Utilities.  His father had died in the beginning of 1917.  The rest of the family moved to Lake Charles shortly after that.  The caps of these baseball uniforms have an LC on them, which I’m pretty sure is for Lake Charles.  I think he was living with his mom, his widower brother Seb, and Seb’s young daughter Manette.  I think it was during this time that Rob was playing for the Sawdust Circuit in that same area.  I suppose he played for Gulf States because that’s where he worked.

I estimated that this photo was taken around 1920 or 1921.  A newspaper article said that he played until that time, even though his pitching arm was not quite what it used to be.  Rob Landry is standing in the back row of this photo.  He is the second from the right.  Or you can easily see him in the crop that I enhanced in the second image.  He was starting to be known as Pappy back during this time.  It wasn’t until much later when he became a grandfather that he would be called Pee Paw.