Class Note 1959

About 57 years ago the Dartmouth baseball team was selected for post-season NCAA play and, with eight ’59s on the roster, met the University of Connecticut in a best-of-three series. Alas, Dartmouth was unable to score a single run in either of the first two games. UConn struggled to score against Art Quirk in the first game and then, facing a cadre of Dartmouth pitchers, scored 10 runs in the second game. The first game was scoreless after eight and one-half innings. Art Quirk had allowed only one hit and the UConn pitcher had allowed only three. In the bottom of the ninth the first UConn batter tripled. Art then struck out two and had two strikes on the next batter. His next pitch broke extremely sharply. The UConn batter swung and missed, but the ball got past the catcher and the runner on third scored to win the game for UConn, 1-0. The official scorer ruled it a wild pitch and not a passed ball, but that did not end the discussion for Art and the catcher, Woody Woodworth ’60. Whenever they got together, the discussion about the sharply breaking pitch continued. “Wild pitch,” Woody would say; “Passed ball,” Art would reply. In early November last year Woody visited Art. Each knew that it was almost certainly the last time the two of them would be together in this life. As Woody was leaving, he said, without stopping or even turning around, “Passed ball.” Art’s reaction, as reported by his son, Kent, was “I think he’s just feeling sorry for me.” Many of us who knew Art Quirk did not have or make the opportunity to say to him our version of passed ball. Whatever one’s version was or might have been, it would have included a full measure of sorrow for Art. But despite Art’s typically terse understatement, it also would have included, as surely as did Woody’s passed ball, an equal measure of sorrow for our own loss of a person so thoroughly respected, admired and loved.


—Dick Hoehn, 845 Union St., Marshfield, MA. 02050; (781) 834-4113; rhoehn@choate.com