Youth baseball relies on good people like James Beckum
James is the Mr. Baseball of Milwaukee
Have you ever asked yourself - what is baseball? It’s a sport, certainly. At one time it was called the National Pastime. For many young boys, and even many young women, it’s a rite of passage. For many, it’s a way of life. It’s all these things, and often more.
I recently read about the life of a man named James Beckum. Baseball was a way of life for James Beckum. Many small towns and cities have someone like James Beckum. My hometown of Lincoln, Kansas did. We had a man named Lovey Holl. The Holls lived across the street from us, and I was fortunate to get to know him during that time. Lovey, whose given name was LaVerne, served his country in World War II and in the Korean conflict. He played baseball in the minors for several seasons and later for the Lincoln town team.
Over the next 40 years, Lovey was Lincoln baseball. At various times, he coached the Lincoln Cookie League team and the American Legion team. He was instrumental in building what was called the East ball diamond. He used his influence to bring the state American Legion All-Star game to our small town, a three-day extravaganza that showcased the best ballplayers in the state. If Lovey wasn’t at his hardware store, you could find him at the East diamond, painting foul lines, mowing the grass or smoothing the infield dirt. Young ballplayers in Lincoln started out in the Pee Wee league. The next stop was the unfortunate named Midget League. The Pee Wees and Midgets played on the West Diamonds, which was set on the west end of Lincoln Avenue. At our season-ending Midget tournament, we’d get to play on the East diamond, which was a big deal. Lovey kept the East field in tip-top shape. You finally got to play on the East diamond when you moved up to Cookie and Legion ball. The park that held the East ball diamond and the adjacent swimming pool was the nerve center of summer life in Lincoln. Besides the Cookie and Legion games, it hosted girls' softball games and tournaments as well as touring promotional events like the Red Heads softball team and NWA Championship Wrestling.
In Milwaukee, James Beckum was that guy. I’d never heard of James Beckum until about a week ago. That’s how our news is today. If you want to find out who Kristen Cavallari is sleeping with this week, no problem, there are probably a thousand stories about that. But someone who makes a difference, like James Beckum? You must dig to find out about them.
James Beckum was born February 7, 1929, in Villa Ridge, Illinois. 1929 was not a particularly great time to be born with the Great Depression coming and World War II right on its heels. Beckum’s parents were farmers, and he spent his youth doing two things: working on the farm and playing baseball. James Beckum loved playing baseball. After graduating from High School, he followed an older brother into the Negro Leagues, where he played shortstop for teams based out of Chicago and for the East St. Louis, Illinois Giants. He was drafted into the Marines in 1952 and proudly served his country. He moved to Milwaukee in 1956 and went to work for a company called Ladish, who made aerospace parts. He spent the next 34 years working for Ladish. That was his money job. His real passion though was baseball.
1956 was a big year for James. That was the year he also married Jimmie Ruth Golden, and their union lasted until her death in 2016.
In 1963, E. B. Phillips, the pastor of Beckum’s church, the Galilee Baptist Church, asked him to organize baseball games for local youths. “There were no youth sports programs at all”, says Beckum. Beckum recruited other churches and enlisted the help of a friend, Charles Stapleton. The duo started the Beckum-Stapleton League and started playing with four teams in 1964. They incorporated into the Little League system in 1965.
By the early 1980s, the league had grown to 31 teams. The league brought a sense of community to the Triangle North neighborhood with James Beckum serving as the de facto mayor. Beckum did a lot of everything: recruiting sponsors, running fundraisers, umpiring, managing volunteers, coaching teams and the one job he took the most pride in, groundskeeper. There are five fields located within James Beckum Park, and their namesake could often be found working on one of the fields, picking up litter, smoothing the infields or mowing the grass with his orange lawn tractor.
More than 25,000 boys and girls have passed through the league since its inception, with some families having multiple generations of players. No Beckum team has ever made the Little League World Series, and the league hasn’t produced any major league players, but make no mistake, it has influenced generations of young people. Graduates of the league would come back to the community and tell James Beckum, “This league helped shape my life.” According to Beckum’s granddaughter Asia, Beckum once said, “I’ve got doctors! I’ve got lawyers! I’ve got Aldermen! I’ve got business owners!” About 400 young men and women played in the league last summer.
A charismatic personality, Beckum was able to navigate between the community and the corporate world. The Milwaukee Brewers bought in. Beckum twice threw out the first pitch on opening day. Christian Yelich contributed to field upgrades in 2021. James Beckum was a Milwaukee icon.
As Beckum said in an interview, “Whatever you do, you need to try to do it the correct way. A kid comes to me and says I want to play but I don’t have a glove. I’m going to get that kid a glove. I see a kid out here playing day after day with no parent in the bleachers, I’m going over to that kid’s house and ask what’s keeping them away.”
Baseball used to be our national pastime. Somewhere along the years, it lost that title. As a country, do we really do enough to develop our baseball talent? Ask yourself, when was the last time your city or town or your high school put any money into developing its baseball facilities?
It seems most of the money and development have been flowing into soccer over the past thirty years. Every city, town, village and school has dumped millions of dollars into building soccer complexes. And to what end? The United States still can’t field a decent men’s team on the national stage. The women do fine, but the men? It seems like a low return on investment to dump that much money into soccer with so little to show for it. Soccer apologists will say that soccer is the most popular sport in the world and that all our best athletes gravitate to other sports. To the first statement, so what? Maybe it is the most popular sport in the world, but it’s not the most popular in the United States. And for the athletes? I don’t buy that for a minute. I’ve seen some of our national team players and those guys are terrific athletes. To infer otherwise is an insult. The US men have never won the World Cup and haven’t even advanced past the quarterfinals in over 90 years. We turn out some of the best athletes in the world in nearly every other sport, but team excellence in soccer continues to evade us. What sport has been getting the most money and development recently? Pickleball. What’s next? Shuffleboard?
Despite my misgivings, I do applaud the soccer cartel for doing the work. They secured large land donations, organized the infrastructure and convinced parents and school boards to spend their own and tax payer money on the sport. Baseball could use some of that passion.
James Beckum died on November 11, 2024, at the age of 95. The pastor who presided over Beckum’s funeral, Johnny White Jr., played in the Beckum-Stapleton league in the mid-1960s. There were about 500 people in attendance at Mr. Beckum’s funeral, which was held at Galilee Baptist, of which Beckum was a lifetime member. Pastor White asked the congregation how many had at one time played in the Beckum-Stapleton league. About 400 stood up. That is a legacy.