JOE JUAREZ, FUHS 1942

Photo by
LENIN AVILES, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

(This story was printed on May 21 and May 25.)
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Fullerton High's baseball band of brothers

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/juarez-team-fullerton-2423366-munoz-joe
Monday, May 25, 2009
Fullerton High's baseball band of brothers
MORNING READ: WWII interrupts the team's championship hopes. CIF sets the record straight years later.
By JONATHAN KAY

The Orange County Register
FULLERTON There's no one left from Joe Juarez's band of brothers who can corroborate his memories. Thus, this story is incomplete.
Even through the big, on-field celebration, held earlier this month, the year being remembered was in question. The California Interscholastic Federation's Southern Section, its record books and its veterans committee all said 1942. Juarez said 1943.
Either way, the CIF-SS was at least 65 years late, and Rob Belleque, president of Fullerton High School's baseball booster club, sided with Juarez. So earlier this month, before Fullerton's baseball team wrapped up its regular season at home, Juarez took the field wearing a red cap with the letters "FUHS" across the front and the year "1943" across the back.
At age 86, looking not a day over 70, the 5-foot-7 Juarez took about 10 strides toward the pitcher's mound. His plan was to stand there for 15 seconds of silence, to absorb the scene and pay tribute to those who played alongside him on Fullerton's 1942 ('43?) team.
But when Juarez took center stage, he felt overwhelmed by both the moment and the butterflies swarming through his guts. He took the shiny, new baseball right out of his dark brown mitt and fired the ceremonial first pitch – a belt-high strike.
"I keep remembering all the other players," he said afterward. "I'm sad. I'm sad that they couldn't be here. … It's just a shame to miss this."
What follows is the story as Joe Juarez remembers it. As he's the one who had to wait 67 (66?) years to be honored, who are we to remember it any other way?
By age 9, Juarez had perfected a summer escape route off his father Frank's 100-acre ranch, which was on land near what is now the Fullerton Courthouse. The family grew vegetables (corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, chilies) and fruit (watermelons, oranges, lemons, kumquats) and owned hundreds of chickens.
Joe was accustomed to waking early, working the land, bathing, then heading to school. During the summer, he would wander to a remote end of the ranch, pretending he had a task out there, then steal out the back to meet his friends at Amerige Park.
When Frank caught on, Joe had to spend his nights irrigating the orange groves. But by day, Joe and his buddies played baseball.
Their coach during this period was the tough, beautiful Clara Cotton. She was the mother of Kiko Munoz, who later would be the leadoff batter and left fielder for Fullerton's championship team, which lost its first two games in 1942 ('43?) before winning the next 26.
But first, Clara had to teach. The boys would take the field, and she'd hit balls at them. They practiced until they got it right.
"If you missed the ball, she'd cuss you out like a drunken sailor," Juarez says. "She was a heck of a coach."
Cotton put together a youth team that called itself the League of Nations, featuring Mexican, African American and Japanese players, in a time when squads tended to segregate by race.
Munoz, her son, is Joe's only surviving high school teammate.
His survived a bullet to the head in World War II. And, with a metal plate in his skull, he returned home to play sports at Fullerton College. The college's baseball team, with Munoz, Juarez and three of their high school teammates, won a Southeastern Conference Championship in the late '40s. Munoz also earned player of the year honors for Fullerton's football team, as a halfback, before moving on to UCLA, where he served as a kick returner.
But he's less mobile these days. And, beset by various health problems, including dementia, Munoz could not join Juarez on the field for the celebration of their high school team.
Juarez recalls that championship lineup with ease. After Munoz came second baseman Ernie Johnson, who Juarez says was fast and a solid hitter. Shortstop Trent Mitchell was a "terrific ballplayer," but slow of foot. He was followed by Eddie Hill, third base, another "tremendous hitter," and Lee Hodge, the "quick center fielder."
"The first five batters were right around five hundred," Juarez says, referring to their batting average. "That's the best team I've ever seen."
Juarez started in right field and batted eighth. He was an expert bunter and fielder, and teammates called him "Rifle Arm." He had honed his strength and accuracy on the ranch, tossing rocks at quails, and knocking quarters off railroad tracks from 50 feet away.
But the star of the team was Vaughn Jones. A right-handed pitcher with superb control, Jones had a great fastball. But his changeup and curve (which his father would not allow him to throw until high school, for fear of injury) set him apart.
"He would have made it to the big leagues," Juarez says.
"He was killed in Iwo Jima. On invasion day."
Juarez knows about war.
He fought in the South Pacific, too, and once found himself piled with the dead. After mosquitoes roused him from unconsciousness, he wound up in a Hawaii hospital. There, the attending doctor, a Fullerton native, remembered Frank Juarez as the man who sold him oranges. He offered to send Joe home, after two and a half years overseas.
He had grown accustomed to teammates taking care of one another. Struggling to pass geometry, and needing to maintain a C average to play baseball, Juarez received a call one night from Trent Mitchell, the shortstop and team brain. Mitchell shared his math tricks and tips with Juarez until everything began to make sense.
"Because of him, I became a surveyor in engineering," says Juarez, who worked for the city of Fullerton and now lives in Orange. "We were all brothers. We took good care of each other."
Juarez knows about brothers, too.
He was the only Mexican in his class at Chapman Elementary, where students mocked his dark skin and long hair. One day, in first grade, he returned home in tears. His older brother Morris found him and said, "You have to stand up to them. If you come home crying, I'm gonna whip you," Juarez recalls, choking up. "You show them you can do better."
Morris shipped off to Europe in 1941. In 1945, after the war had ended, Germans staged a brief attack on a line of Allied tanks. Morris died in an explosion.
As good as they were, Juarez and his Fullerton High teammates never got a shot at the title.
Soon after Fullerton defeated Bonita High in the 1942 ('43?) "minor division" finals, every senior – including the entire starting lineup – and coach Richard Spaulding, reported for active duty. They had been drafted, precluding any chance they may have had to play a title game against "major division" champion Hoover High, of San Diego.
For more than six decades, the CIF-SS recognized only Hoover as that season's champion. Then, in April of 2008, the organization's Hall of Fame Veterans Committee added Fullerton's title to its books. That's what sparked the ceremony this month. On the day he and the other Fullerton baseball players were honored, Juarez was joined by two daughters plus a crew of nephews, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
"Wherever we go in the world, we just have that relationship of love and closeness. And that's very rare in families these days," says Juarez's daughter, Janet. "I'm very honored and privileged, I always tell my dad, to be your daughter. And he says, 'No. I'm honored that you're my daughter.'"
Two days before the ceremony Belleque, the booster club president who arranged the event, introduced Juarez to Fullerton's 2009 team.
The old man spoke briefly to the players, telling them about his squad's cohesiveness, built on love for one another and fun.
At the ceremony, Juarez spoke of swiping freshly-baked pies from Kiko Munoz's house and convincing teammates to escape with him.
"We had each other. That's what makes a team. That's what makes a home. That's what makes your life successful."
The day after the ceremony, Joe Juarez called the Register to clarify a detail. He had been wrong, he said. The championship had, indeed, come in 1942. Not 1943.
How, after believing another thing yesterday, could he be so sure today?
"I visited a friend of mine who was on the team," he said. "Kiko Munoz."
He told Munoz about the ceremony, about the honor their team had received. But, his old teammate showed no sign of recognition.
Then Juarez showed him the championship pamphlet that Belleque had printed. He pointed to the black and white team picture and began running through the names. Across the top row are star catcher Kenny Sullivan, who was in the second wave of the Normandy invasion and died in 2008, and the pitcher, Vaughn Jones.
"I started talking and he started remembering," Juarez said. "He did say it was '42."
And right there, Kiko Munoz changed history – at least as Joe Juarez remembered it. And if Kiko Munoz's word is good enough for Joe Juarez, let it be good enough for us.