Minor league baseball great Dick Getter dies; married Iolan

Editor’s note: Joan Haney Getter, sister-in-law to Iola’s Mary Anna Haney, was married to Dick Getter, a professional baseball player, in 1950.

Mary Anna called The Register on Friday to relay the news of Dick’s recent passing. 

Copied below is an Aug. 29 column by Dallas Morning News sports columist Robert Wilsonsky relating Getter’s heyday.

A professional baseball player died here this weekend. You didn’t hear about it, because Dick Getter spent his entire career — from 1947 till 1960 — in the minors. He played for teams associated with the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers and Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs, but spent those 14 years on a seemingly never-ending tour of places called Iola, Seaford, Zanesville, Batavia.

The first time Getter’s name appeared in The Dallas Morning News was May 6, 1955. Said the headline above the brief tucked deep inside the sports section, “Eagles Get Outfielder on Option,” referring to the power-hitter dispatched to Dick Burnett’s Dallas Eagles by the Minneapolis Millers of minor-league baseball’s American Association. By then Getter was an old man in the minors — 26 years of age.

Dallas was the ninth stop in Getter’s career — and the last he would call home. He and his wife, Joan, moved first to Oak Cliff, to live near the ballpark that shared a name with the Eagles’ owner; then, to Farmers Branch, to a modest house along a quiet stretch off Marsh Lane adjacent to the Brookhaven Golf Course.

That’s where I first met Getter 21 years ago, while working on a long Dallas Observer story about the Eagles, once a New York Giants farm team. My father used to go to games at Burnett Field with next-door neighbor Richard Pool, son of congressman and lake namesake Joe Pool. Dad still has a program signed by the Indians and Giants passing through town on their way home after spring training.

My father’s memories became, for a time, my obsession; then, my son’s. (He has the replica Willie McCovey road jersey to prove it.) For two decades, Getter has always been kind enough to indulge my intrusive queries and visits.

There aren’t many Eagles left now — three, far as I can tell, now that the 90-year-old Getter is gone. With his death Saturday, we’ve lost yet another connection to the storied franchise that brought Texas League titles, major-league greats and minor-league shoulda-beens to a long-ago-dismantled ballpark once perched on the shores of the Trinity River.

Soon, there will be no one left who was there when future Hall of Famer McCovey drove in his first run as an Eagle or when Willie Mays squared off against Bob Feller in Oak Cliff. Or who will remember what it sounded like when Miss Inez fired up the organ in the shadows beneath the canopy.

Even in 1998, Getter was one of the few old-timers still blessed with a crystalline memory. What made it easy, too, was the fact his stats were easy to find. Getter played long enough, did well enough, to make sure his history didn’t fade with time’s passing.

He was born in Bethlehem, Pa., hit .600 in American Legion ball, and was signed by the New York Giants in 1948. Then he became a Dodger; then, an Indian. When he played in Iola, Kan., he met Joan. They were married almost 70 years ago at home plate — “which they don’t do anymore,” Getter said two decades ago.

Getter told me that in 1952, the Indians offloaded him to an independent team in Duluth, Minn., where he drove in 121 runs during 140 games — a staggering stat. He could have gone back to the Indians but declined the offer, so he was sold, again, to the Giants and shipped to a farm team in Sioux City, Iowa. Then it was off to Nashville. Then Sioux City again. Then Minnesota. Then, finally, here.

“And when I got to Dallas,” Getter told me, “I made the All-Star team here in a short amount of time.”

He was part of the Eagles team that took the 1957 Texas League title, with more than 100 wins. The next year he was named the Eagles’ player of the year, for which his prize was a shotgun gifted him by famed pawnshop owner Dave Goldstein. He played with a lot of major-leaguers on their way up and down — McCovey, most famously, but there were so many more.