By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

SHENANDOAH, Iowa, June 28, 2025 – The Shenandoah High School Class of 1965 – the largest graduating class ever in my southwest Iowa hometown and thus “the biggest and best,” as we say to the hooting of alumni from other years – has scheduled its 60-year class reunion during the community’s “Shenfest” in late September.

I was thinking about that recently, and then suddenly gasped at the reality: I’ve been out of high school for sixty years!

But posi-thinker that I am, I almost as suddenly moved to a more pleasant thought: That means it was also 60 years ago, this summer, when I was the catcher for the SHS Mustangs baseball team, and I was also the sports editor for the local 5-day daily newspaper, The Evening Sentinel. It was a summer in which some magic happened for my teammates and me, and we’re still relishing it.

Then another thought hit me: I know almost nothing about my successors – the SHS catchers and the local sports editor of today. (I say catchers, plural, because in 1976, the school finally added girls’ softball to its athletic program.)

What kind of lousy alumnus am I, living just 2 ½ hours away from home base, so to speak, and not knowing these young people who now hold the positions that were once so meaningful to me?

Back home in Shenandoah, dining on “The Offenburger” at the Depot Restaurant. The meal is detailed among the entrees as “8 oz ground Chuck patty topped with Swiss cheese, mushrooms & brown gravy,” and I added mashed potatoes and a house salad. Total: $13.75. (Photo by John Offenburger)

So I spent Tuesday and Wednesday on the ol’ home sod, so to speak, getting to know 17-year-old baseball catcher Tyler Babe, 18-year-old softball catcher Lexi Schebaum, and 39-year-old Bryan Clark, the sports editor of the weekly local newspaper, the Southwest Iowa Herald. The head coaches Brett Roberts for baseball and Cayley McCoy for softball graciously handled the introductions of the old guy, who asked a lot of odd questions.

Like this one: “Tyler Babe, I happened to write a book in 2005 on the history of high school boys sports in Iowa, and in the last paragraph of the preface, I wrote this, ‘I close with one final word of thanks – to the teammates, coaches, athletic administrators and fans I came to know as a below-average athlete at Shenandoah High School a long time ago. Thanks to all those old Mustangs for helping introduce me to the love of the game that I have tried to convey in every page of this book.’ So, Tyler, do you feel that kind of thing now? Do your teammates feel that?”

He looked blankly at me a moment, then waved his left hand in his catcher’s glove toward players taking indoor batting practice, and just erupted: “Oh, yeah! There’s a lot of that in all of us here. I love baseball. I’d play 8 hours a day if I could. I want to play baseball as long as I can, at least through college. Every single man in the Babe family has played past the high school years. And, really, I want to play until I feel myself plateauing or going downhill. You know what I really like about baseball? Some nights you go out and fail, and it feels terrible. But then you get to come back tomorrow and see if you can do it better and win this time. The baseball field is my happy place. I like hanging around the guys, being around the game, and I think most of us feel that way.”

I wanted to hug him.

Tyler Babe.

Well-equipped.

He has a baseball heritage, as he was saying. His great-grandfather, Loren Babe, a native of Pisgah, Iowa, was an infielder who played in the 1950s for the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Athletics. He spent the rest of his career coaching in the major leagues and managing in the minor leagues.

Tyler is 6 ft. 1 in. and 180 pounds. In 1965, the catcher was an even 6 ft. and a lean 129 pounds. Tyler paid $300 for his excellent catcher’s glove; the most I ever paid for one was $105. Tyler’s suit of catcher’s “gear” – leg guards, chest protector, helmet with mask – cost $600. Mine was $150 or less. Tyler’s aluminum bat cost $350. My wood bats were going for about $9.95 in ’65.

Many changes, huh? But some similarities, too.

Coach Roberts, the SHS baseball skipper for 16 years, is an old catcher himself, I learned. He told me that “being the catcher on a team is still like being the point-guard in basketball – you kind of run the game for the rest of the team. And you’ve got to be the psychiatrist for the pitchers.”

Lexi Schebaum (pronounced she-BOMB) is a classic example of that. She was the 5 ft. 4 in. point-guard for the “Fillies” (our school’s cool nickname for the girls’ teams) in basketball. And she’s intending to play that sport, beginning this fall at Grand View University in Des Mones.

She’s played softball since little girlhood, but always as an infielder. She’d been a varsity starter since her eighth grade summer and had been playing second base as a sophomore and junior. Early in the ’24 season, the summer after her junior year, she got a surprise.

Lexi Schebaum, as a junior for the SHS Fillies. (Photo by Bryan Clark, the Southwest Iowa Herald)

A closer look at her.

“Our catcher left the team,” Schebaum said. “Our coach called me over at our next practice, and we had a pretty interesting conversation. ‘I know you have a good arm,’ he said, ‘so how would you like to be our catcher?’ I thought, ‘Well, like I’ve never caught one game in my life!’

“But I thought about it and decided I had nothing to lose. We had several other good infielders on the team for those positions. Our pitcher Peyton Athen throws fast, but I know her really well – we’ve always played together. So I went to work and had to learn fast. I worked on how to use the glove to scoop the ball, learned how to block throws when they’re in the dirt, at knowing when to move defensive players on the field, and how to call the pitches. I memorized what pitches Peyton throws. Then being up close behind the batters, I know what they’re swinging at and what they’re not – that really helps me.”

She and the team had a great start this summer in Lexi’s senior season, but in the sixth game, she stretched ligaments in her arm and “and may have a rotator cuff problem,” Coach McCoy said. Schebaum has been unable to play since then. “That’s been hard,” Schebaum said, “but it shouldn’t affect me at Grand View. The basketball coaches know about it and told me, ‘Just get yourself healthy, enjoy the summer and we’ll talk about basketball when you get here.’ ”

Meanwhile, the Fillies catcher position has been taken over by eighth grader Bella Trowbridge, a strong hitter who is showing a lot of promise. I hope to get to catch up with this new catcher in coming years.

I would say that among my successors – as Shenandoah High catchers and local sports editor – the scribe Bryan Clark faces the biggest challenge.

Bryan Clark, of the Southwest Iowa Herald, stands in front of a mural portraying the front of the building where The Evening Sentinel was once headquartered in Shenandoah.

Clark, in front of another mural at the site of the old Sentinel headquarters, and it shows me. “All the times I’ve driven by here,” said Clark, “I’ve never noticed there’s a mural here.” I told him that’s what happens after 60 years — landscaping can cover you up.

In baseball and softball, the kids are bigger, stronger, faster, probably smarter and overall better ball players than we were in 1965. They play “travel ball” in spring and fall, in addition to “summer ball” for the high school teams. Their equipment is definitely better. Their uniforms are nicer. But being a high school kid playing catcher is generally a lot like it was for me. Great fun.

In contrast, being a local newspaper’s sports editor today is kind of dangerous, especially if you’re married and have two kids, sons 15 and 12, like Clark does. Oh, the really important things are fine – he’s still employed, his wife Mary has a good job and benefits (she’s a lab technician at the local hospital), the boys Alex and Levi are involved in lots of activities and happy, “and we all like it here – we don’t have any interest in moving.”

But his industry – our industry if we’re talking actual printed newspapers – is collapsing, as nearly everybody knows.

My 5-day daily newspaper the Evening Sentinel from the 1960s, through two sales and a merger, eventually became the Valley News Today. It was a 5-day paper for a time, then a twice-a-week publication. After another sale, or maybe it was more of a hand-off of management, Lee Enterprises is in charge. There was a big reorganization in January of 2023. Shenandoah’s Valley News and nearby Clarinda’s Herald Journal merged and became the Southwest Iowa Herald, which is now weekly.

It’s been difficult for everybody. There have been steady layoffs.

“I’m now the only person left on the staff in Shenandoah,” said Clark, who works from home, sending his stories to Council Bluffs, where other Lee Enterprise employees put the Herald together. “I’ve seen a lot of people get laid off – a lot of people who were good at their jobs. That’s tough to see. There are probably more layoffs coming at some point. I guess I know who that will be.”

But he’s not gloomy about the work he continues to do now.

He covers 11 sports at four schools – Shenandoah, Clarinda, Essex and Sidney – in two counties, Page and Fremont. (Sidney’s weekly newspaper, the Argus Herald, ceased operations in 2021.)

“High school athletes still love sports, and readers still have an appetite for it – they want to know about it,” Clark said. “The schools and the coaches couldn’t be more cooperative, so I like what I do, and I think my stories have a good following. The most rewarding thing may be when I go to high school graduation parties, and I see the scrapbooks full of stories I’ve written, and I think, ‘Wow, people still save all this stuff!’ It’s neat seeing that.”

His readership, he says, “is a generational thing. A lot of older people still want a printed newspaper, but the internet generation prefers everything digital. So, he produces for the printed Herald, the newspaper’s website (which still uses the name “ValleyNewsToday.com”), a Facebook page (“Page County Newspapers Sports”), and his personal account on X (formerly Twitter).

At this writing on Saturday morning, June 28, the Mustangs baseball team is 7-13. The Fillies softball team is 7-15. There’s a week left of the regular seasons and then the tournaments begin.

1965.

Without predicting anything, the story I wanted to leave with the Shenandoah catchers, coaches and sports editor is that magic can happen.

In 1965, there were five of us seniors who had played baseball together from the time we were 5 or 6 years old – Denny Howard, Gary Connell, Bruce Ketcham, Larry Cole and me. When we came into that season, I thought we should win the Hawkeye Seven Conference. “We did have about everybody back from the previous year’s team,” Howard said. “We thought we’d be good, but the regular season was a disappointment.”

We finished it with a record of 4-8, tied for fourth place.

But when tournament play started, we ran up seven straight victories, winning about every odd way you can imagine. “During the regular season, we were having games where on defense, we were making five and six errors per game, we weren’t hitting very well and our pitching was wild,” Howard said. “But then everything just seemed to come together.”

We won four games and the title in the sectional tournament beating two teams that had beaten us earlier. We won two games – upsets of mighty Council Bluffs Thomas Jefferson and Creston – and the district tournament championship. Then in the substate tournament game, we upset Carroll Kuemper and gave their ace pitcher, who came at us with a 14-0 record, his only loss. We were then one of only four teams left in the state, and that’s when Boone beat us on a no-hitter by their legendary pitcher Jack Mustapha. He pitched his Toreadors to the state championship, with three no-hitters in their final five games.

It was a great final stretch for our Mustangs. Of course, the young local sports editor had a heyday covering all the success, even feeding stories to the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, the Omaha World-Herald and the Des Moines Register.

And those of us who were there are still talking about it 60 years later.

It can happen.

In November 2017, I was speaking for the Shenandoah Iowa Education Foundation at a salute to teachers and staff at my alma mater during American Education Week. I called then new-SHS Athletic Director Aaron Burdorf up front. I confessed that after our grand baseball finish in 1965, I had stolen home plate from the ball diamond. I told him I was sure the statute of limitations had passed, but that I still felt guilty about the theft. I asked if I wrote a $500 check to the education foundation, if my crime could be forgiven — and if I could keep home plate. He said yes. I still treasure it on my office floor. (See below)

 

 

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You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com