My Favorite Pennock

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009

It probably has not occurred to you that I have one or two things in common with Joseph Pennock.

The reasons why it has not occurred to you that I have one or two, perhaps three, things in common with Joseph Pennock are, as a former college roommate of mine once said, varied. It could be that you are unfamiliar with me and my personally biographical history and idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, or it could be that you are unfamiliar with Joseph Pennock and his “back-story,” as they like to say in the theater.

I am guessing the latter since before Monday of last week, I had never heard of Joseph Pennock, either.

But Joseph Pennock came to the United States and, ultimately, West Marlborough, from County Tipperary in Ireland. It just so happens that not only have I been to Tipperary, but I was at one point in my life a fervent, if somewhat ill informed, supporter of the Tipperary Hurling Team, and could not only sing their fight song (“It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go”) but also could at the drop of a hat sport a lapel badge that said, “Come on Tip!” So that is one commonality we share.

Another stems from this snippet of a sentence written by Joseph Pennock as he was contemplating the construction of a building that now stands as Primitive Hall in West Marlborough. "The 14th of the 9th 1738/ then my impostum brok and the Seme year I Bilt my nu Hous." What links Joseph Pennock to me in that statement is not that I have ever built a house, or had my impostum broken, or even bent I dare say, but that there are times when one or more of my editors has commented that my copy read like I was an unschooled inhabitant of the 18th century.

But I don’t want to talk about Joseph Pennock. I would rather talk about his distant cousin, Herb Pennock.

Herb Pennock was born in Kennett Square in 1894 and died there in 1948, just weeks before he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame for a variety of reasons, but for my mind mostly because he played in the major leagues for 21 seasons, starting from when he was just out of high school in 1914 to when he was just about washed up as a left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in 1934.

In between times he was a pitcher that, as Casey Stengel used o say, had been up and been down. He had a stellar opening season with the (almost) home town Philadelphia Athletics, then went south for a while until hooking up with the New York Yankees. He won five games in the World Series competed in, including four with the Yankees and along the way helped tone down the profane ebullience of one George Herman Ruth, known more familiarly as Babe.

Once when Babe and Herb were dining with their wives as a fancy restaurant, Ruth rose to excuse himself to go to the bathroom, explaining in no uncertain terms what it was he had to accomplish once there. Herb followed Babe to the washroom and counseled him that it was unnecessary, and perhaps a bit impolite, to explain exactly why he was excusing himself. Babe, embarrassed for once in his life, apologized to Herb and made his way back to the table. There, he sheepishly tried to make amends for his gaffe but saying he was sorry he said what he said, repeating it word for word, of course.

I also enjoy the story about the time that Herb and the Babe and some Yankee teammates made their way to a Kennett Square street fair and started knocking down milk bottles at a street both for prizes. It was no sweat for the pitchers to break the bank, and they did so by throwing curves with the light balls. The next morning, one of those pitchers woke to find his arm swollen from the curves and the light balls, and had to explain how he had hurt himself to the Yankee skipper, Miller Huggins.

That pitcher, as I remember, was Waite Hoyt, who in the early 1960s provided a young boy just returned from Ireland with a new team to root for as he broadcast games played by the Cincinnati Reds. For me, you see, it was hard to find the Tipperary box scores in the paper.