For those of you who think Mungo is nothing more than an odd street name, here’s a brief biography of the man. Born in 1911, Mungo was a pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1931 to 1941. He averaged 16 wins per season from 1932 to 1936 and lead the National League in strikeouts in 1936. He was named to the All-Star team three times and later played for the New York Giants.He completed his career with a 120 wins and 155 losses, pitched for more than 2,000 innings and retired with a 3.47 earned run average.
It’s been a while since I followed baseball, and I tuned out around the time of the 1994 strike. I don’t know much about the early days of the sport and Mungo was before even my father’s time (he grew up in the heyday of Mickey Mantle.) I’m not sure if Mungo’s retirement statistics are worthy of recognition by the Baseball Hall of Fame, but in his prime he seemed like as good a pitcher as any team could want.
I found a petition last week to nominate Mungo for the Hall of Fame and thought it might be fun to promote a grassroots effort to add more signatures to the list. As of this writing 123 people have singed the petition (I was number 123.) You can find the petition by clicking here.
I found the Mungo petition while building a local history page for our website. Online since last Thursday, the page is titled The Scout, named for Pageland’s first newspaper. I’m currently researching The Progressive Journal’s troubled lineage and believe The Scout is among our journalistic ancestors.
For a little authenticity, the header of the page is scanned from a 1910 edition of The Scout. I plan for the page to primarily serve as a “photo blog” and we’ve already got a lot of interesting images posted, ranging from a 1943 photo of The Pageland Theater to the obituary for Van Lingle Mungo. If you’ve got any vintage photos to share, we’d be interested in using them.
The blog is at: pagelandturns100.blogspot.com, or link to it directly from our primary webpage.
By Wallace McBride
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