surely you guys knew of jack lamabe. he coached maybe 5 or 6 years before stanley bertman took over. i dont think they ever won anything with him. a lot of games but no titles. attendance was close to 20-24 people including girlfriends and parents. jim smith im pretty sure was before him. he was pretty good actually and won a few sec titles. that funeral home dude harry rabenhorst coached them for like 100 years some time before that. he musta been ok cuz he coached like 3 decades. theres many others but thats the ones i can recall offhand. ray didier was pretty well known as well. late 50s or so? some of the other guys may know.
Ray Didier was the scout for the Dodgers in '89 that told Kirk Gibson that The Eck was going for the back door slider on the 0-2 count. That's why Gibby knew it was coming and took one of the most effortless, yet one of the most historic swings in the history of the game. Imagine game one of a series determining the outcome of a series so dramatically for an underdog, and Gibson didn't play the rest of the series... Ray's son Bob was a star QB and catcher at Glen Oaks, and I idolized him as a kid in the mid 60's. Ray used to run an annual baseball camp at GOHS every summer, and Bob was always there. My brother and me went every year, in mid-June for 2-3 weeks. Bob went on to catch for the Braves in the early '70's, and then as a base coach. I met him out here in the '80's when he was a third base coach for Jackie Moore, the A's manager before LaRussa. We reminisced about the old days, his "glory years". Since then he has been a base coach and now a scout for the Yankees.
