Henry W. Broughton 1919-2008

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My father, Henry W. Broughton, died in his sleep on September 28, 2008. I took him to the emergency room on September 21. An hour earlier, we were watching the final baseball game in Yankee Stadium on TV.

Henry took me to a game at Yankee Stadium in 1964. We were in New York for the World’s Fair. The game was remarkable because Mickey Mantle hit a home run, and it was one of the longest balls ever hit in Yankee Stadium.

An earlier baseball memory is from 1961, the year that Mantle and Roger Maris were chasing Babe Ruth’s record. We were watching a Yankees game on TV. This was long before ESPN, and televised sports were far less common. The game was tied going into the ninth inning. Henry observed that an extra-inning game would be a bonus to Mantle and Maris, because it would give them additional turns at bat. As it turned out, Yogi Berra hit a walk-off RBI single in the bottom of the ninth, and the scenario Henry envisioned didn’t happen.

A year later, Henry loaded the family into the station wagon, and we went to RFK Stadium (called DC Stadium at the time) in Washington to see a double-header between the Senators and the Yankees. We encounted a huge traffic jam. When we finally got to the stadium, it was standing room only. Henry hadn’t bothered to purchase advance tickets, which was understandable, given the size of the crowds that the Senators usually played in front of. This was the first-ever major league game for me and my younger brother Bill, and the scene was a zoo. Every time the Yankees took the field, several people would jump from the stands and run into the outfield attempting to get autographs from Mickey or Roger. They would be escorted off by police. Then there would be announcements over the P.A. that if the fans continued to go on the field, the game would be cancelled and the Senators would forfeit it. Since most of the crowd were attending their first Senators game, the possibility of the Senators forfeiting the game had no impact whatsoever.

Henry and I made some more trips to RFK Stadium over the years to see the Senators of Frank Howard, Mike Epstein, and Jimmy Piersall. (There were also some trips to see the Redskins of Sonny Jurgensen, Bobby Mitchell, Charley Taylor, and Jerry Smith; Henry had a friend who had season tickets.) I remember the last game, in 1969, which was a couple of years before the Senators became the Texas Rangers, the abomination which was owned by George W. Bush and offered Alex Rodriguez an obscene amount of money to leave the Mariners. The Senators still had Howard and Epstein, but of more importance, their manager was Ted Williams. The Yankees didn’t have much of a team that year; their star player was Joe Pepitone.

Henry and my mother, Elizabeth, moved from Virginia to Bremerton, WA in 1987, in order to be closer to their granddaughter. He was making occasional trips to Safeco Field until a couple of years ago, and he had some definite opinions on how to solve the Mariners’ difficulties with pitching and hitting.

As a teenager, he played for what he said was a pretty good team in Norge, VA.

A memorial service will be held at Silverdale Lutheran Church in Bremerton, WA on October 4.

P.S. Henry’s older sister, Ruth Auping, was a Cleveland Indians fan for most of her adult life. After she died, in January 2007, her daughters put a memorial brick for her in Progressive Field.