Oh Brother: How They Played the Game by Carlton Stowers

(Abilene: State House Press, 2007. 80 pp. $14 cloth)

The boys of summer are packing up their cleats as late fall winds blow the discarded remnants of playoff hopes and peanut shells across stadiums nationwide. The encroaching winter is a sad time for baseball fans. Playgrounds and diamonds are better suited for chasing swirling leaves than roped liners through the gap. The comforting smells of hotdogs and screams of children and fans whisper ghost-like through the imagination and we look forward to the renewed spirits and hopes of Spring Training. However, Carlton Stowers gives us a small glimmer of hope this off-season in Oh, Brother, How they Played the Gamethe Story of Texas' Greatest All-Brothers Baseball Team.

Carlton Stowers takes us on a journey of future Presidents, through the 1935 Depression ravaged dustbowl, meetings with future great, Satchel Paige, and ultimately ending with the All-Brothers Baseball Championship in Wichita, Kansas. Stowers' story follows the Deike Brothers (pronounced Dike) of Hye, Texas through the historic season of 1935. While the Deike Brothers were realizing every young boys dream to play in front of adoring fans, the Babe was ending his historic career with his 714 homeruns, Jolting Joe D. was hammering his way through the Pacific Leagues, and the Reds played the first baseball game under lights. Stowers' returns us to a simpler time when Sundays gave Depression wary communities the opportunity to sit back, enjoy a relaxed day in the sun, take their minds off foreclosures and family survival, and take in America's favorite pastime-Baseball.

Small Texas towns are notorious for their quick grapevine gossip. Hye, Texas' small population was no different. The local General Store in 1935 was the gathering place for old men and out-of-town visitors. Fritz Deike, patriarch of the Deike fame, was the proprietor of Hye's local mercantile. As all proud fathers are prone to brag, Fritz could not keep the conquests of his ball-playing sons quiet. He would spend his down hours tending his customers bending the ears of visitors and townsfolk alike. He had reason.

The Deike brothers' baseball prowess was renowned in the Texas Hill Country. The brothers' pride and the town's reputation directly tied to the success of their baseball team. Although the nine brothers could fill a full lineup from their breakfast table, they recruited from neighboring towns to find ringers that helped the Hye team win games. Stowers masterfully uncovers through interviews and newspaper reports a young man from neighboring Johnson City they recruited to field first base. The tall, lanky, boisterous, win at all cost first bagger was none other than future President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Brothers Deike recruited him for his bat and reach at first base. Stowers paints a portrait of Johnson as a typical Americana teenager by humanizing and calling admiration to the young future president's person and deportment. The brush with Johnson's fame is one of many the brothers would experience through their 1935 season.

However great it was to play with a future president, as fate would have it, an out-of-town salesman delivered a package to the Deike General Store on one of Fritz's more braggadocios days. As Fritz related the talents of his nine ball playing sons, the salesman for Nueces Coffee Company hatched a promotional plan to match the Brothers Deike with another all-brothers team. Upon his return to Corpus Christi, the enterprising salesman began a nationwide search for another all brothers team. He quickly found a team from Oregon that unfortunately had recently disbanded. Undeterred he soon found the Stanczak brothers of Waukegan, Illinois. With birth certificates in hand to prove they were indeed brothers, the Brothers Deike and Stanczak convened on Wichita. The first All-Brothers Championship Game was set for Sunday evening, August 18th at the National Congress World Series in Wichita, Kansas' famed Lawrence Stadium.

Oh Brother is a heart-warming story of a small Texas town's heroes' odyssey through a lifetime of firsts. The Brothers Deike travel out of Texas for the first time, receive a whopping amount of money for the depression era, and they get to tug on a real wool uniform for the first time. Stowers recalls an important part of Baseball, American, and Texas histories. The Deike's story is a necessary read for any student of Texas history or lover of the great game of baseball. With excellent and conscientious writing, Stowers places the reader back on sunny country field in 1935 under a huge Elm tree shade and takes us back to Sundays filled with fried chicken, lip-puckering lemonade, and the national pastime--Baseball.