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The Census Bureau believes nearly 82,000 Americans are 100 years of age or older. But only one of them played major-league baseball. And he's not about to act his age.
"Are you with me?" Bill Werber calls out, as he races his electric wheelchair through the carpeted hallways of the Carriage Club, an assisted-living complex in southeastern Charlotte. You still have to move fast to keep up with the former third baseman, who led the American League with forty stolen bases for the Boston Red Sox in 1934.
Werber '30 has a firm handshake and a steady gaze. He remembers, in rich detail, playing bridge with Babe Ruth and going bird hunting with Frank "Home Run" Baker, a slugger of the early 1910s. ("Frank Baker was the best shot I ever saw with a shotgun," Werber says.) He was the first player to bat in the first televised major-league game—Cincinnati at Brooklyn, August 26, 1939—and he helped the Reds win the World Series in 1940.
More than eighty friends and family members attended Werber's 100th birthday party, at a Charlotte country club. "They turned away as many as they seated," he says with a smile. "Standing room only!" As befits a man who was born on June 20, 1908—the same year a songwriter named Jack Norworth wrote "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," the anthem of baseball's seventh-inning stretch. It's been a busy spring and summer for Werber, as a steady stream of journalists have dropped by his table at the Carriage Club restaurant or called for telephone interviews with the Oldest Living Ballplayer.
Werber doesn't disappoint. The author of three books about baseball and his place in it, he's happy to explain why he doesn't watch the game anymore. It's a well-argued stance that's earned him prominent play in USA Today and Sports Illustrated: "I got so disgusted four years ago, when Boston won it, and I saw Manny Ramirez with the long hair down his back, and Johnny Damon with the big whiskers on his face. They looked so sorry, and they weren't setting a good example for kids, and that causes problems for families."
At the same time, he still follows the news, disturbing though it may be. "I was very disappointed to read where this Alex Rodriguez has been carrying on with Madonna. Now that may be some high-class sex, but the ballplayers in my day, after a ballgame, most of 'em would go home, have a bottle of beer or two, play with the children, go to bed early, and come back ready for the next game under a hot sun."
Werber wasn't a drinker or a smoker, and he gives his wife, Kathryn, to whom he was married for seventy years until her death, in 2000, credit for helping him live so long. "I was devoid of friction in my marriage," he says. All three of their children attended Duke—Bill Jr. '53, Patricia '56, and Susie '69—as have two of his eight grandchildren.
Although he's deaf in his right ear and lost his left leg below the knee two years ago to complications from diabetes, Werber is generally in good health. Spend a little time with him over lunch—iced tea, a hot dog with chopped onions and ketchup, a cup of soup, and fruit salad—and you'll be rewarded with a rollicking tour of the history of Duke and of baseball.
He arrived at the recently renamed Duke University in September 1926, a two-sport recruit from Washington. He'd agreed to come to Durham sight unseen. "I envisioned a campus with ivy-covered walls and magnolia trees, but Duke was dust," Werber says. "Everywhere you went, there were planks on risers, and when it rained there was maybe three or four inches of mud. If you slipped off the boards, that's where you'd go, into the mud.
"Train tracks ran right up the middle of the campus, because the chapel was still being built. The workers unloading the rail cars—the bricks to build the chapel—would do it by lantern light, and they would do it to chants, moving those bricks out of the cars until 10:30 at night."
continues on page two.
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