His father was a barber in the tiny town of Oroville.
And when they asked Joe Parker to run for mayor, he replied, “I can do more good here.”
When Dale Parker came out of the Navy in World War II, the Wenatchee Chiefs of the Western International League offered him a contract to play professional baseball.
He turned it down.
“The GI Bill looked pretty good to me,” Parker recalled. “I sat down with my dad in Oroville and said, ‘I know I’ve always wanted to be a Yankee, but nobody in the Parker family has ever had a college education so maybe I should get one.’”
And so he did. And became a teacher. And, like his father, did more good than he ever could have done in the glitzier job.
Dale Parker’s passion was baseball. He had played all three major sports in high school – football and basketball being the others – but there was just something about baseball that made it special.
Maybe because a little guy like himself could play. “It’s a game for all people,” he said. “I don’t care whether you’re 90 or a woman or a child.”
Or maybe it was because baseball was such a challenge. “I don’t know anybody who has ever mastered it,” he said. “A lot of people think they’re experts. But, boy, do they have a lot to learn.”
For the past six decades, Parker has taught thousands of people what he knows about the game. And, boy, he knows plenty.
He’s taught kids. He’s taught adults. He’s taught boys. He’s taught girls.
He’s coached at the high school and the college level. He’s put on baseball camps in the U.S., as well as in Canada, Bulgaria and Germany.
For 29 years, he was director of the popular Okanagan Major League Baseball Camp in Oliver, British Columbia. More than 400 kids a summer would attend, sleeping in barracks with tent tops and no lights. Future major leaguers such as Larry Walker (“He was just a toddler on the beach,” Parker remembers) and Wally Backman sharpened their skills there.
Parker brought in ex-pros to instruct, guys like Johnny and Eddie O’Brien – baseball’s only twins – and Jeff Heath, who twice led the American League in triples. And it wasn’t enough that they understood the game. They had to be able to teach it and they had to like kids.
High school and college coaches also lent their knowledge, guys like Fred Shull of Edmonds Community College and Jim Piccolo of Stanwood.
Just as some major league players take their families to spring training, so would Parker take his wife and three daughters to Oliver each summer. “The kids and I spent (the equivalent of) three years there,” Kathy Parker said.
A good time must have been had by all because Dale and Kathy will celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary this year.
It’s been quite a ride, with baseball always a staple of the Parker household.
You recognize this the moment you step inside their home just down the street from Meadowdale High School. A ceramic pot holds several baseball bats as well as umbrellas.
And, it holds memories.
“See this?” Parker says, pulling out a handsome Louisville Slugger with the name Lychak engraved on it. “Perry Lychak, the only Canadian pitcher to beat the Cubans until four years ago.”
Lychak, who had attended the Okanagan camp, was bound for Edmonds Community College when he showed up at the Parkers in the late 1970s, intending to bunk there for a few days until he got situated. He stayed for two years before transferring to Indiana State.
A left-handed pitcher in the Toronto Blue Jays organization – he roomed one season with David Wells – Lychak started his pro career in Kinston, N.C., and never got out of there, a rotator cuff injury keeping him in the Class A Carolina League his entire four-year career. He married a girl from Kinston and has been a teacher/coach there for 17 years.
Lychak, who still talks with Parker several times a year, remembers the old coach as a man who had “tremendous respect for the game, a great understanding of it, and theories about teaching it.”
Oh yes, and he also “lived, loved and slept baseball.” And he was willing to go anywhere to teach it. Anywhere became Bulgaria in 1991.
Jack Brenner, an English professor at the University of Washington, was teaching in Sofia in 1988 when he saw a group of men playing baseball near his apartment one day. He assumed they were from the American Embassy. Turns out they were Bulgarians.
Brenner, then 57, started playing with them and within a week they asked him to be their coach. “They didn’t really know that much about baseball,” said Brenner, now retired.
Their equipment was as raw as their knowledge, and so Brenner contacted the International Baseball Association, asking for enough gear to outfit a 32-man team. “The IBA jumped on it right away,” Brenner said. “These were the Reagan years and Washington, D.C., was very happy that I was spreading baseball to these Godless communists.
“We practiced through the winter in gyms and when it came time for me to go home, I asked myself, ‘Do I want to do this anymore?’ and I did. I went back in the summer of ‘91 and took a bunch of coaches with me, and Dale was helping me at that point.”
Brenner wasn’t sure how Parker would take to the Bulgarians. “By that I mean he’s so America,” Brenner said. “Bulgaria was a very secret society, everybody spying on everyone else.”
He needn’t have worried. “Dale was just wonderful,” he said. “He adapted immediately. Everybody liked him.”
He’s an easy man to like, a giving soul. Anything to spread the gospel of baseball. Initially, Parker said he would accompany Brenner to Bulgaria on one condition: “If you think I’m not taking food out of their mouths, I’ll go.”
Piccolo, then the Stanwood High baseball coach and now the school’s athletic director, also made that first trip to Bulgaria and recalls how primitive the ballfield was. “It was absolutely a pasture,” he said. “When we said ‘mow the lawn,’ they brought in sickles. Then trying to teach them the game … well, that was interesting.”
Brenner and Parker would make two more trips together to Bulgaria. One year they took old UW and WSU uniforms and left them with the teams to distribute as they saw fit. When the Americans came back in the room, there were players wearing Purple and Gold shirts and Crimson and Gray pants.
“Isn’t this what democracy is all about?” asked one of their hosts.
During the course of his visits there, Parker started and organized the country’s first Little League baseball program and a girls’ fast-pitch softball league. After making great gains in the early 90s, baseball has lost some of its steam, though “everyone’s interested in who wins the leagues,” Brenner said.
Parker has also conducted clinics in Germany and has high expectations for the Deutschlanders. “Before they get done, the German program may be more like the Japanese program,” he said. “They haven’t gotten to the Olympics yet, but once they get there, they’ll stay.”
And if the Germans are lucky enough to learn from Parker, they’ll play the game the right way.
“He knows the game and he knows a lot of people in the game,” said Shull, whose friendship with Parker goes back more than 40 years. “He’s a baseball purist. Most of our playing days and a lot of our coaching days were played in the poorer times of baseball. Wood bats. Grass fields. Not a lot of baseball trinkets.”
While Parker keeps the game simple, he also likes to challenge his students. “You don’t do a drill just to do a drill, it has to be tied to the game somehow,” Piccolo said. “He taxes your thinking to make sure whatever drill it is has a purpose. He is definitely a purist about baseball.”
The game has lost some of its purity with the steroid issue. “I’m more saddened than anything else by what has happened to the game because of the actions of a few,” Parker said.
Not angry, but saddened. Anger is a waste of energy, and Parker needs all of his vigor for a major project he’s undertaken. He’s writing a book about how to teach baseball the professional way. It’ll consist of four booklets, actually, and he plans to have them completed by September.
That is, if there aren’t any interruptions. “The phone’s always ringing,” Kathy said. “Some parent asking: ‘Can you help my son with his baseball?’ It never stops and he’s always willing to help young kids.”
The kids might not realize it but they’re being coached by a heavily decorated man. Parker’s in the Washington State Baseball Coaches’ Hall of Fame and the University of Washington Athletic Hall of Fame. He was the Husky baseball coach from 1956-60, and his ‘59 squad was the first in school history to qualify for the NCAA tournament. The entire team went into the UW Hall of Fame with the coach.
There have been a number of “firsts” in his life, including initiating the Washington State High School Baseball Playoffs and establishing the Washington State Baseball Coaches’ Association.
Eleven months ago, he wondered if he wasn’t about to experience another first: death. An irregular heartbeat almost cost him his life just hours before he was to go into the operating room. In a period of 36 hours, he not only had a pacemaker installed, but underwent emergency surgery for colon cancer.
To visit him in the hospital, you had to know the password: home run.
“Prophetic,” his wife said. “He’s going to make it around the bases.”
He did. Three months ago, Parker celebrated his 80th birthday.
The man from Oroville slugged a home run the old fashioned way.
Without steroids.
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