Pappy Was a Pitcher
March 1915 – tryouts for the Texas League Beaumont Oilers. Rob Landry is standing on the right in a dark sweater.
I shared this photo ten years ago, but I think it’s time to look at it again. It’s such a great old baseball photo and it happens to also be a great photo of my grandfather Robert Joseph “Rob” Landry, Sr. Of course, he hadn’t acquired the Sr. addition to his name. He wasn’t even married yet! He turned 22 in January of 1915, and at the time he must have been quite interested in baseball.
I remember hearing that my Pee Paw had been a semi-professional baseball player when he was young. He died before I was born, so it was one of the things I knew about a man I had never met. I remember seeing photos of him during World War I. Those were taken in 1917 and 1918. But I don’t remember seeing any of the photos of him during his baseball playing days.
The back of the photo shows names and a date. Next to that are the rosters of the 1914 and 1915 teams of the Beaumont Oilers.
In 1915 it looks like he was trying to see if he could get into more serious baseball playing. He lived in Westlake, Louisiana, at the time. Maybe Beaumont, Texas, was the closest place with a serious baseball team. All I know is that I got this photo from my dad back in 2016 and it was a great photo of a young Rob with a baseball team. Best of all was that it had the date, the group name, and the names of the players written on the back of it!
Actually, it has just the initials for the first name and their last names. Wait! No, it doesn’t. LOL It just has their last names, and after that are abbreviations for their positions. Now, after 10 years I finally figured it out. I was thinking the P. after Landry was verification that he had been called Pappy back in 1915. No! It stands for pitcher! I was wondering why the initials didn’t match the first names given on the rosters.
As you can see, some of the names on the back of the photo are a match to the team rosters from 1914 and/or 1915. Those are the ones who successfully made it through the tryouts and played on the team. If you read the text on the roster, there is an asterisk * to indicate those people on the roster that played in the majors. Then there are some names that aren’t on either list. Those are the ones that didn’t make it onto the team. The semi-professional team.
The only photo I have of Pee Paw with a semi-professional baseball team is a photo from a 1915 tryout for the Beaumont Oilers. He wasn’t on the team in 1914, 1915, or any other year as far as I can tell. If he had been on some other semi-professional baseball team, wouldn’t we have a photo of that? I never met my grandfather, so I don’t know if he ever said that he was a semi-professional baseball player. Maybe it was other family members who slightly exaggerated a minor detail.
There are several photos of him playing baseball through those early years. There is even a newspaper article about him playing for the Sawdust Baseball Circuit. I don’t think that was considered semi-professional, but it was something. They said he was a great pitcher until his arm went dead. But even after that, he was able to pitch a winning game in 1920 for a Marksville vs Lake Charles game. It was the end of his baseball glory days. He then became a husband, father, and grandfather. From what I can tell, he was pretty good at that, too.