Dec. 8, 2011 - Right in the middle of the worst hard time this country ever had, nine brothers from Hye, Texas rose above the doom and the dust to give their community something to cheer about -- even if only for a short time.
Hye is in the middle of the Texas Hill Country, not far from Johnson City, and if it's known at all it is known as the place where LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson used to get their mail. More than 150 years after its founding, the post office is still the main building in town.
The Deike brothers were the sons of Fritz Deike, who had come to Texas from Germany, settling first around Bastrop and later exploring the Hill Country on horseback. In Hye, he learned that the cotton gin was for sale and needed someone to take it over before the local harvest came in. Despite having just 50 cents in his pocket, he secured a loan, bought the gin and moved his family there. The family came to include the nine boys, who formed their own baseball team, and two daughters.
The Deike brothers played baseball at a time when most of the baseball played in Texas was played by "town teams" for bragging rights and a brief respite from the travails of daily living, and travails were many in 1935. Every town had at least one baseball team and some would have as many as three, which were usually divided along racial or ethnic lines.
Veteran Texas journalist Carlton Stowers, in writing his short, sweet book about the Deike brothers' team, "Oh Brother How They Played the Game," relates how the Deike brothers came to leave their Hill Country home for Wichita, Kan. to play for the All Brothers Baseball Championship in against another band of brothers from Illinois.
A traveling salesman for the Nueces Coffee Company in Corpus Christi was in the store while Fritz Deike was telling, yet again, how he had enough sons to field a baseball team and how he did just that and how they were pretty good, too. The salesman listened and told Fritz that he thought the brothers could be part of a big promotion for the company. He launched a nationwide search for another team of baseball-playing brothers and found two such teams. The first, in Cheyenne, Wyo., had recently disbanded. The other was the Poland-born Stanczak brothers of Waukegan, Ill.
The Deikes got uniforms and $600 to cover expenses. They traveled in two Model A Fords and the trip to Kansas took them almost a week. They squared off against the Stanczak brothers on Aug. 18, 1935 as part of the National Baseball Congress World Series in Wichita, Kan. for the All Brothers Baseball Championship. The Stanczaks won handily, 11-5.
The Deike brothers might have had a case of the jitters early when they allowed seven runs in the second inning, which turned out to be the difference. The Deike boys offered no excuses. "We were beaten fair and square," center fielder Ernest Deike told Stowers. "They had a couple of big ol' boys who were just better ball players than we were."
Levi Deike, shortstop for the team, inherited the job of postmaster from his mother Lena and held that position for a record-setting 64 years. "I don't remember anybody getting too down in the dumps over the fact we lost," he said. "It wasn't the first time we'd been beaten, you know. Back in those days we had our hands full just trying to whip town teams like Dripping Springs, Blanco and Johnson City."
Several of the brothers continued to play baseball for other teams. Victor Deike impressed the manager of a Perryton-based oil company team enough for the manager to offer him a job and a spot on the company team. He spent the next decade in the oil fields of the Panhandle and as a player for Sun Oil. He would work 37 years for the company.
Stowers discovered a facet of LBJ's life that not even Robert Caro's exhaustive biographies uncovered: the future President played from time to time with the Deike brothers and was considered a good first baseman and a pretty fair hitter. He might have stayed with the team, but he had other plans.
In 1965, LBJ called up Levi Deike to tell his old teammate that he planned to swear in the new General Postmaster of the United States on the steps of the Hye General Store and Post Office. During the ceremony, Johnson mentioned that he had once played first base on "the best all-brothers team in Texas history." Nobody ever challenged him on that fact.
