Oral History Interview

with

Dick Soergel

Interview Conducted by Jerry Gill March 24, 2009

O-STATE Stories Oral History Project

Special Collections & University Archives Edmon Low Library ● Oklahoma State University © 2009

O-State Stories An Oral History Project of the OSU Library

Interview History

Interviewer: Jerry Gill Transcriber: Samantha Siebert Editors: Jacob Sherman, Latasha Wilson, Tanya Finchum

The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Project Detail

The purpose of O-STATE Stories Oral History Project is to gather and preserve memories revolving around Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (OAMC) and Oklahoma State University (OSU).

This project was approved by the Oklahoma State University Institutional Review Board on October 5, 2006.

Legal Status

Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Dick Soergel is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on March 24, 2009.

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O-State Stories An Oral History Project of the OSU Library

About Dick Soergel…

For more than a half century, the Oklahoma State University baseball program has been nationally competitive, having made several trips to the College World Series, but only the 1959 Cowboy team has won an NCAA Championship. In April 2009, members of that team, including Richard W. “Dick” Soergel, returned to the OSU campus for a reunion and to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of their championship.

Soergel grew up in Oklahoma City and was an outstanding athlete at Capitol Hill High School, where he played on state championship teams. He also participated in the historic football game between Oklahoma City Douglass and Capitol Hill, the first game in Oklahoma between segregated black and white schools. He enrolled at OSU in 1956.

Dick , a member of the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame, has a special place in the history of Oklahoma State University sports. He was the last three-sport athlete at OSU. He quarterbacked the 1958 Blue Grass Bowl championship team, played and lettered under legendary basketball coach Henry Iba and was member of the 1959 NCAA National Champion baseball team. Dick was one of three starting pitchers on that team, and he was the winning pitcher in the championship game against Arizona. The 1960 OSU baseball team won the Big 8 Championship, finished third in the NCAA Tournament and Dick was named First Team All-American. He is a member of the OSU Baseball Hall of Fame and the OSU Sports Hall of Fame.

In 1960 Soergel signed a contract with the Boston Patriots American Football League team and played through the entire pre-season before he was released. He returned to Oklahoma State in 1962 and was Associate Athletic Director and Business Manager until 1981. For the next 17 years he had a highly successful career in banking with Liberty National Bank, later purchased by Bank One, culminating in his position as Senior Vice President and Director of Trust Investments.

Dick and his wife, Gwen, live in Oklahoma City. They have two children, Rick (deceased) and Sandi.

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O-State Stories An Oral History Project of the OSU Library

Dick Soergel

Oral History Interview

Interviewed by Jerry Gill March 24, 2009 Stillwater, Oklahoma

Gill My name is Jerry Gill. Today is March 24, 2009. I’m visiting with Dick Soergel here in the [Angie] Debo Room of the OSU library on the campus of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. This interview is part of the O-STATE Stories Project which is part of the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program. Dick, we’re delighted to have you with us today. Glad you could take time from Oklahoma City to come down and visit.

Soergel Thank you. It’s always a pleasure to be here on the campus.

Gill Dick, could you start off with where you grew up and tell us about your family and early life?

Soergel Be glad to, Jerry. I grew up in Oklahoma City. My father was on the Oklahoma City Fire Department and we lived in several different places in Oklahoma City. We moved around quite a bit. I had two brothers, both of them are older. My oldest brother was six years older than I am. He was seriously afflicted with cerebral palsy and he lived quite a life, and passed away. He must’ve been about 63 or 64 years old, which was very old for his affliction. He also was able to earn both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from, I hate to say it, from the University of Oklahoma, and I was quite proud of my brother, Johnny.

My other brother I am also quite proud of, he’s four years older than I am. His name is Don and Don ended up coming to Oklahoma State and participated in athletics here, but he had a little different route than I had. When Don finished high school he was an outstanding athlete and had a baseball and basketball scholarship to Oklahoma University. He started attending college there and went out for the basketball team. He decided he didn’t like school very much so he left and joined the Navy. He was in the Navy for four years, played sports in the Navy and when he got ready to get out I was in school here at Oklahoma State. He was

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determined to join me here and he came here on a football and baseball scholarship. He was always a semester behind me in school so he became my little brother.

But that was kind of our family. Then, as I was growing up, sports were always very important to us. My dad had been an outstanding athlete. He’d been a three sport athlete at Oklahoma City Central High School. He’d been All-State in all three sports, and upon graduating from high school, he attended Oklahoma A&M College for a brief time. He was on a football scholarship here at Oklahoma A&M and I’d say he probably was here maybe six weeks and as he said, he didn’t like the smell of ink, and he was also in love with my mother so he returned to Oklahoma City. Upon returning to Oklahoma City, OCU had an outstanding athletic program at that time. Part of OCU’s methodology was that they’d find athletes that would play in the sports program, but they’d also get a job on the Oklahoma City Fire Department. So that’s how my dad became a fireman. He loved the fire department and stayed with it for 35 years, before retiring.

He attended OCU briefly and was on the OCU football and basketball teams, but again, the ink didn’t agree with him so he left and became a full-time Oklahoma City fireman. But his influence in athletics was very significant in our family and Don was an outstanding athlete, my brother Johnny helped coach some of the athletic teams in high school and in college. We attended Capitol Hill High School in Oklahoma City, which at that time was one of the strongest sports programs in the state and had an outstanding record and reputation in sports, so that’s where we attended high school. My brother Don played football, basketball, and baseball and was an All-State baseball player. Then I came along and I played football, basketball, and baseball there. I was an All-State and All-American high school basketball player and I determined that I definitely wanted to go to college and continue my education. At that time I felt like the thing I wanted to do was to go to Oklahoma A&M and play basketball for Mr. Iba and then following basketball, go to work for Phillips 66 and try to play basketball for the [amateur basketball team] 66ers. That was my goal when I started to think about going to college. I was recruited by several other universities, but I had my eye on Oklahoma A&M, primarily because of Mr. Iba.

Gill Do you recall some of the other schools that were recruiting you at the time?

Soergel Well, OCU had tried to recruit me. I had letters from Kansas and Pennsylvania. There were a number of schools that had contacted me. Probably the most serious was OU. At OU Bud Wilkinson had me down to Norman and they romanced me a little bit about the football program,

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but Doyle Parrack had just taken over the basketball coaching job and he was a lot more interested in me coming there and playing basketball. Of course, OCU also tried to recruit me. Abe Lemons was coaching there and tried to recruit me to OCU to play basketball. But Iba’s background, he had known my dad, and in fact he coached Classen High School in Oklahoma City when my dad was at Central High School. Then, later Mr. Iba played sandlot baseball and my dad played on some of the same teams, and so they had known each other and that relationship was there.

Plus, the first college basketball game I ever saw, I was at the All- College tournament in Oklahoma City at the old municipal auditorium and watched the Oklahoma Aggies play and I also used to listen to them on the radio. Curt Gowdy was the voice of the Aggies at one time, and then Bob Murphy came along afterwards. I just kind of fell in love with Oklahoma A&M. I still hadn’t really committed to anything, and Cliff Speegle got the head football coaching job here the year before I was planning to attend. He talked to me about playing football. He wanted me to play football. I really didn’t intend to play football, I intended to play basketball. But he really did encourage me to play and then he got together with Mr. Iba and Mr. Iba encouraged me to play, too. They told me that I could come to Oklahoma A& M and I’d have a four-year scholarship in either sport. If I wanted to quit one of them, I’d still have a four-year scholarship in the other sport. That kind of sold me, so unintentionally I went out for football.

Gill Just a clarification, Cliff Speegle is your high school coach?

Soergel No, Cliff was the brother of my high school coach. C.B. Speegle was my high school coach. Cliff was the younger brother. And Cliff was a great guy. C.B. was also. They were really, really super people.

Gill Dick, can I ask you, while we’re still on high school just before we get into college. There’s a game, a historic game that you played in. At that time we were just beginning to segregate schools, hadn’t really quite done that yet. So there’s Douglas High School and Capitol Hill that had never played against each other, because Douglas being an African American school, and the white school. Was that your senior year that you played each other?

Soergel My senior year.

Gill Can you share a little bit of background on that?

Soergel Well, that’s a game that really has made history; something you wouldn’t have thought of back at the time. But that was during the integration time, and that’s when the blacks went to the black school and

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the whites went to the white school. There wasn’t any competition athletically between the blacks and whites. However, our high school coach, C.B. Speegle, had become acquainted with Moses Miller who was the coach at Douglas at the time. We always used to scrimmage Douglas before we played an actual game. So when I was a sophomore and when I was a junior, Capitol Hill would suit up over at Capitol Hill Stadium and we’d go over to Douglas and Douglas would just beat the dickens out of us. They were very, very physical. But we’d go over and scrimmage them anyway every year. Then my senior year, integration was starting to form and C.B. Speegle and Moses Miller got together and they agreed to schedule a football game. And so they did.

Douglas at that time was a powerhouse. They’d won 46 straight football games. They had a tailback named Prentice Gautt, who went on to play at the University of Oklahoma, was the first black football player at OU, and then played for the professional Cardinals for a number of years. He was an outstanding player. He was Douglas’ tailback. So the contract was made to play, and it was somewhere in the latter part of November when Douglas came to Capitol Hill Stadium. The ballgame was televised, which again was amazing. It was a sellout completely, there were people standing all around the fence at the ballgame, both blacks and whites. And it was a bitter, bitter football game. It was hard-nosed, hard-played football. We were fortunate to end up winning the game. I think we won it 13-6. Both teams were beat up after it was over, but that was a major occurrence. And the crowd—there were no problems whatsoever with the crowd, it all turned out good. That was the beginning of integrating sports in Oklahoma.

Gill And what year was that?

Soergel That was 1955. And people are still writing about it! They’re still talking about it. We celebrated 55 years, something like that.

Gill Did you have a reunion of both teams?

Soergel Well no, not both teams, but some. You know they’re not that many still around! That’s what happens when you get older, Jerry! There are a lot of them that are gone. But we did get together and we met at Capitol Hill Stadium when Capitol Hill and Douglas played this past year. And it was—it brings back a lot of memories.

Gill Well, I didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation. You were talking about Oklahoma State and giving the background. And I’m sort of interested in baseball. You were talking about football and basketball here, but you also played baseball. Had you had any thought about playing baseball at that time, before you enrolled at OSU?

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Soergel Not really. I played baseball all my life. In fact, you’re talking about historic games. Capitol Hill had one of the greatest baseball programs in the country. In fact, my brother played on the team that started it, and I played on the game that ended it, a 63 game winning streak. Capitol Hill won 63 straight baseball games. Before we lost, I was on the team and we went down to a little town of Friendship, Oklahoma. We played Friendship and they had a pitcher named Eddie Fisher and Eddie went on to the big leagues and probably pitched for 12 or 15 years in the big leagues, but Friendship beat Capitol Hill down there and that stopped the winning streak.

But then as I progressed in baseball, I was an infielder and right prior to my senior year I was playing American league in baseball. We didn’t have any pitchers, so I told them well I’ll try to pitch. So I started pitching and I had some success. We went on and our American Legion team won the state championship. Then we won the regional championship and then we went to the sectionals in Bismarck, North Dakota and got beat there by the team that ended up winning the Little World Series, a Cincinnati team beat us up there. Then I went on to pitch my senior year in high school and I didn’t lose a game. We won the state championship. I think I was 14 or 15 and 0. So that was kind of my baseball go, but I really didn’t think about it much in college and really had never met Toby Greene, the baseball coach at Oklahoma A&M. I had never met him, never talked to him. I did get to know him because he helped coach football. He was an assistant football coach too so I knew who he was, but I really had never had a conversation with him.

One day I was walking down the hall of Gallagher Hall, just walking along and Coach Greene walked up to me and he said, “Why don’t you go in the equipment room and check out some baseball shoes?” That’s how I was recruited to play baseball. And I did, I went in the equipment room and checked out my baseball shoes when baseball season came, and started playing baseball. And fortunately we got to play on the team that won the national championship. We finished third my senior year. I didn’t get to go to the tournament, I had a knee injury. I made first-team All-American in baseball. So that was kind of ironic that things happened like that, but you never know.

Gill Going back a minute talking about just your student experience, not as a student athlete, but your student experience. First of all, what was your major?

Soergel I was a business major. I majored in General Business.

Gill What were some of the buildings that classes were held in at that time?

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Soergel Well, the Classroom Building was new. We had classes in the Classroom Building. Morrill Hall is still there, that was the Business Building and that was where we had most of the business classes. Then Old Central, I’ll never forget, we had English classes and psychology classes in Old Central. I had an English class down in the basement, and every time it rained that basement would flood. I can remember that, and then we didn’t have to go to class on those rainy days because the class was flooded. But those were some of the main buildings and, of course, the library was here. I used to spend a lot of time in the library, because I studied a lot in the library. I don’t think I’ve been back in here until now from the time I left college.

Gill Dick, do you remember some of the professors that you had?

Soergel Oh very well, yeah. Very well.

Gill Can you share your thoughts on some of them?

Soergel Well, Eugene Swearingen was one of them. He was a wonderful, wonderful teacher. Dr. Swearingen became a dean of the business school. Then he became vice president of the University and almost became president of the University. Then, he left here and became president of the Bank of Oklahoma in Tulsa. What a neat guy he was. Dr. Jewett was an accounting professor. Joe Klos was an accounting professor. One I’ll never forget, if anyone ever took Oklahoma History here, they would never forget B.B. Chapman. If you ever had B.B. Chapman, he was quite a teacher. And I can, me and some of my friends, still recite the thing that he taught us that we’ll never forget. He would teach us, he’d say, “Students, your information is no better than your source.” And he’d drill that into us and how important that is and how true that is. Your information is no better than your source. So you remember that when you hear things from me here today, that your information is no better than your source.

Gill What about hangouts on campus? You mentioned the library. The Student Union, and then maybe some off-campus hangouts?

Soergel Oh, I used to spend probably more time in the library than anywhere because I was pretty busy when I was in school. I was married. I lived in an apartment and I was playing sports. My freshman year, I’d practice football in the early afternoon. I think we’d start practice at 2 o’clock and then when the basketball team would practice that night, I’d go practice basketball. So I was pretty busy, and fortunately I was able to study in the library in the mornings. I’d come in early in the mornings, come to the library and I’d bring my books in here and I would study. The Student Union, I’d spend some time there, but I really didn’t have a

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lot of time to spend with college hangouts. I just didn’t have the time.

Gill Dick, what about any student activities, organizations, leadership opportunities? I know you said you were busy in athletics. Did you have a chance to participate in student activities at all?

Soergel I did in some. I’m a member of the Sig-Alph [Sigma Alpha Epsilon or SAE] Fraternity. I’m a member there. The only sport I got to play there was volleyball. I really enjoyed that. It was a neat group of guys. I got to participate some in some of the social activities, not a whole lot. Again, our budget was tight and we just didn’t have extra money to spend on a lot of social things. Other clubs, of course I was a member of the O Club. And back when I was in school, the O Club was pretty active. In fact, it was very active. First of all, we had some fundraising projects that some people may remember. One of them was we sold freshman beanies. When you came onto campus as a freshman, the O Club would really strong-arm you into paying a dollar for a freshman beanie. We raised money that way. Then also, the O Club was in charge of Homecoming. We sponsored the Homecoming dance, so we sold tickets to the Homecoming dance. We had the Homecoming queen and all that. So the O Club was much more active during that time than it is today.

Gill You were talking about being married at the time. Did you get married before you came up to OSU?

Soergel No, I got married my freshman year.

Gill And you said you lived off-campus. Did you live in married student housing?

Soergel I lived in several places. The first apartment, Jerry, and I can remember very vividly, it was over on Scott Street; 115 West Scott. That’s just a little bit east of Bennett Hall. We rented a three-room, furnished apartment, and we paid $35 a month and no bills. That was our first home, and then we lived in some other apartments, right there near that area. Frank Martin, “Papi” Martin, used to have some rental property in there. A lot of people remember Frank. He was very active in the band organization. He was the head of that. We rented an apartment from Papi Martin there for awhile. Then later they started building the new—well we called them the new university married student housing out on the north side of the campus and we moved in there. Prior to that the university had some married student housing, but it wasn’t too good. They had Vet Village, it was one area. Then they had the College Courts over on Sixth Street and those were old Quonset huts that had come out of World War II and they rented those to married students.

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Gill Do you remember how much you got paid per month being married, part of your scholarship stipend?

Soergel Yes, when I came to school on an athletic scholarship, you were entitled to room, board, books, tuition, and $15 a month. The $15 a month was supposed to be for laundry money and incidentals. A little later on, the NCAA did away with that $15 a month and I still think it’s a travesty. But what a married student would get, they would get the equivalent of what the athletic department would have to pay for their room and board, and then the $15 a month. In my recollection, that would total about $85 a month, $85 or $86 a month. And that was my paycheck. Of course, the athletic department went ahead and bought my books and paid for my tuition. But that was my scholarship. We’d have to save enough money in the summer to subsidize that. And that’s what we did.

Gill We were talking earlier about being a three-sport letterman, and the background there. Did you have a favorite sport out of those three? I know you played football, basketball, and baseball at Oklahoma State, was there a favorite one for you?

Soergel Not really. Again, I didn’t intend to play three sports. My intention was I’d probably find something that I liked better than something else and I would quit. But I started playing football and I really enjoyed it. We had a good team, we had good teams. We had winning seasons all three years I was there. In 1958, we beat Florida State in the one and only Bluegrass Bowl. Had some success and I really enjoyed it. And basketball, I came along right in between the time when Oklahoma A&M or Oklahoma State was in the Missouri Valley conference and changed to the Big Eight Conference. So I got to play in the Missouri Valley in basketball and some of the football schools too, and then got to play in the Big Eight when I was a junior and a senior. My first year here, the basketball team was successful and we made it to the Final Eight in the NCAA basketball tournament. Kansas State beat us out, but that was a successful team. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Then in baseball, baseball was a lot of fun and the guys I played with were really a neat group of guys and we had a lot of fun and we had a lot of success. We won the conference championship two years. We were in the Big Eight in baseball three years, but we still are angry over that first year. We were tied with Missouri for the Big Eight championship and we went to Columbia to play a three-game series with Missouri. We had a real strong pitching staff. Missouri had one real good pitcher. Missouri beat us the first game. And then it started to rain that night. It rained some; we don’t think it rained that much. But about 8 o’clock that next morning, John Simmons, [who] was the Missouri coach, called Coach Greene and said, “Coach, it’s too wet. The games are rained out.” So we

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didn’t get to play Missouri those last two games. We think we could’ve beaten them and won the Big Eight Championship that year [1958], but it didn’t happen. But then the following year we won the Big Eight Championship and we won the National Championship [1959]. Then the following year [1960] we won the Big Eight Championship and we were in the National Tournament in Omaha. I had a problem with my knee. I don’t know really what caused it, but my knee was swollen and they put me in a hospital. So I didn’t get to go to the nationals. But the team still played well and, I think, finished second or third in the national tournament.

Gill You mentioned earlier playing in the three sports and taking your class work. Did it take some particular time management and discipline to make that all work?

Soergel Oh, absolutely.

Gill I mean, I can just imagine all the hours you were putting in.

Soergel Absolutely. Jerry, in between classes, if I had an hour in between classes, I had to find a place to go hit those books. I was fortunate I had a pretty good educational background. Some people may not realize but at Capitol Hill High School we got a good education if you were willing to want the education. Now, if you didn’t want it, you could probably get by without. But I really appreciated my teachers. I had good teachers. Then, when I came to college, I thought it was really going to be hard. I thought it was going to be just awfully hard and I wasn’t going to be equipped for it. Well, mid-semester my freshman year, I think I had about a 3.6 grade point average [GPA] and then I decided, well it’s not that hard. Then I kind of got lazy. (Laughs) I ended up making adequate grades but I got lazy. And then my last two years I was on the Dean’s Honor Roll. I found out if you applied yourself and you went to class—that was another thing, I didn’t miss class. I went to class, that’s what I came for, an education. And that was important to me because I really ended up being the first one in my family to graduate from college. The others had gone, but none of them had graduated before I did. So I had to make use of my time.

Gill Dick, do you know for sure? My understanding is you were the last three-sport letterman we had at Oklahoma State University.

Soergel That’s correct.

Gill And I think people really don’t understand the magnitude and the hours in a year’s time that that takes and that requires. It just is incredible. And this is in a fairly modern era of sports. It’s not back in the ’30s or

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’20s when we had some of them that did that. Does that give you a sense of pride for having been able to do that?

Soergel Well, it does. It does. I’m proud of the fact that I was able to do it. But I’m also proud of the fact that I have made so many friends through the various teams that other people aren’t able to. When I played three sports, there weren’t many other people doing that in my era either. So it was very rare. Very rare. And it would’ve been impossible had it not been for my coaches. Cliff Speegle had played football and basketball at the University of Oklahoma. Mr. Iba played football, basketball, and baseball at the college [Maryville Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State)], he went to in Missouri. They appreciated all sports, both of them did. And they encouraged me. They let me have that opportunity. They didn’t give me anything. They made me make the teams. But they allowed me that opportunity. Mr. Iba, to allow you to miss practice for a certain period of time—that was just almost unheard of. You see he believed in practice. But he let me go through the football season and then come out right after football and start playing basketball.

In fact, Jerry, and this is something that was another thing I’ll never forget, we won the Bluegrass Bowl in 1958 and we played in Louisville, Kentucky. It was on national television. It was five degrees at kickoff. They’d had a blizzard hit the week of the game. They had to scrape the field off with bulldozers. It was ice. We played Florida State. Both teams wore tennis shoes because cleats wouldn’t go down into the turf. The national television had a rookie television color man named Howard Cosell who did the color for the game. We were fortunate enough to beat Florida State. And I want to say that was early December [December 13, 1958] when we played that bowl game. Well, less than two weeks later, I was back in Kentucky. I was back in Lexington and I was playing basketball.

I made the basketball team and I made the trip. We were playing in the Kentucky Invitational Tournament in Lexington in less than two weeks. In that particular tournament, West Virginia was there and they had a guy that turned out pretty good named Jerry West. We played Ohio State University. They were in that tournament also. At that time John Havlicek and Larry Siegfried and [Jerry] Lucas were all part of that team. Then, Kentucky had their usual great basketball team, so we got to play some really top teams. But I’ll never forget running up and down that floor. Basketball conditioning is different than football. I was ill- prepared but they took me anyway, and I’m most grateful that they did because that was a wonderful experience.

Gill You were part of the 1959 [baseball] championship team. I guess that

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was a pretty special year for you! I want to ask you some specific questions later about that. But could you share some of your highlights in all three sports, some things you remember, maybe some significant players, events that you recall?

Soergel Oh, I’ve got so many memories, things that happened. You know in football, golly we played a lot of different schools. Many times you remember the games you lost more than the ones you won. They stick with you. We got beat in 1958 by the Air Force Academy out here in Stillwater. Air Force went on to play in the Cotton Bowl that year, but they beat us 33-29. We were ahead of them and they had a quarterback named Richie Mayo and he threw a touchdown pass with nine seconds to go in the ballgame. Oh, it was just frustrating. And then that same year, we played OU out in Lewis Field and it was a defensive knockdown drag out. They beat us 7 to nothing. And we let Bobby Boyd run a keeper about 30 yards for the only touchdown of the game. And I think I had a shot at tackling him, but I missed him. I’ll never forget those things like that.

I also remember going up to Kansas—I remember a lot of things about defense, you know you played defense, well I had to play defense, too. We had to play both ways while I was there. I can remember playing defensive safety and we were playing the University of Kansas up at Lawrence and it was one of those cold, cold grey days in Kansas. Kansas had a real good football team. They had John Hadl who was playing with them, and they had a big halfback named Curtis McClinton and McClinton weighed about 220lbs and was a Big Eight hurdles champion. He went on to play in the National Football League for a long time. I can remember I was playing defensive safety and Kansas had the ball down on about our five yard line, and they ran a sweep. I can remember going up and laying my helmet across McClinton’s numbers like you’re supposed to and that’s the last thing I can remember. (Laughs) He liked to knock me through the end zone! I knocked him out of bounds, but that was the only game I ever came out of. He really put a lick on me and I’ll never forget it.

I can remember going to Milwaukee. We played Marquette in Milwaukee one year, and I can remember we were behind with about three minutes to go and had the ball on our own three yard line. We took it down the field, run the little sideline passes and stuff and scored a touchdown right at the end of the ballgame and beat Marquette. It was a memorable game. I have a lot of memories. Those are football memories.

In basketball, the one I’ll never forget, we beat Kansas in Lawrence when I was a senior. And we weren’t that good of a basketball team. But

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we got ahead of Kansas and we could take care of the basketball. And I was one of our centers, believe it or not, I had to play inside. So the guy that I was guarding, the guy that guarded me was a guy named Hightower, Wayne Hightower, and he was about 6’8”. He ended up going into the pro’s and playing pro ball, was a good basketball player. But he was trying to guard me and we went into Mr. Iba’s famous delay game, and I’m telling you, trying to defend that, it would wear you out. Gosh that poor old guy that was guarding me, before the game was over he wanted out of the game so bad. And since Hightower was so tall, Mr. Iba would have me bring the ball down the court. So I’d take the ball in as a guard at the opposite end. Hightower ended up fouling out because he wanted out. He was just grabbing and holding on. And we went on to beat the Jayhawks in Lawrence. You don’t do that very often.

Gill Did you play in the famous game against Wilt Chamberlain?

Soergel No, I was a freshman.

Gill Did you see the game?

Soergel Oh, absolutely. What a thrill that was.

Gill Beating Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain in a last-second jump shot…

Soergel Yeah, Mel Wright hit that shot right about the top of the circle. And I’ll never forget it, it was tremendous.

Gill Did you play basketball with Eddie Sutton?

Soergel Yes.

Gill Was he a senior when you were a sophomore?

Soergel He was a senior when I was a sophomore.

Gill What do you remember about Eddie as a player?

Soergel Oh, Eddie was a good player. Whether people know it or not, Eddie was a real fine offensive player. He wasn’t necessarily that much of a defensive player, although you had to play defense if you were going to play for Mr. Iba. But Eddie could really shoot the ball. In the Kansas game, Mel hit the winning shot, but Eddie knocked in a bunch of baskets from outside. If they’d had the three-point shot—they didn’t have the three-point shot at that time—Eddie would’ve scored a bunch of points because he could really shoot. And he was a sound player, Eddie was always sound. He didn’t have the greatest speed, but he didn’t make

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mistakes, could shoot the ball well, and played good defense. And was a good team member. Eddie was a good guy to play with.

Gill Was he a graduate assistant coach after he graduated for a year or two?

Soergel Yes, he was.

Gill So he maybe helped coach you later?

Soergel Yeah, he did. He helped coach the next year. We had a fair team then. Arlen Clark was our main player and I was our number two scorer, and that was bad when I was the number two scorer. But Arlen was a good player. He was an All-American here. And Eddie was a graduate assistant.

Gill Dick, were there some other players that stand out in your mind in any of those sports that you played with? Not that they weren’t all good certainly, but some that you recall especially?

Soergel Oh yes, we had some really good athletes. I think maybe the best athlete I ever played with anywhere was Jerry Adair. Jerry Adair was a fantastic player. He had played football, basketball, and baseball at Sand Springs, but he came to Oklahoma State and didn’t play football. He played basketball and baseball. In basketball, he was a terrific basketball player. He was about 6’2” or 6’3”, a guard, and quick, and could really, really play. Then in baseball he was our shortstop. He was an All-American baseball player, he was a leading hitter. We’d have had a lot better basketball team the following year if Jerry hadn’t signed a professional baseball contract. He signed a pro baseball contract and went on and played. I bet he played 12 or 13 years in the major leagues. At one time I know he held the record for the most consecutive chances at 2nd base without an error. He was a gifted, gifted athlete. In addition to Adair, Tony Banfield was a football player I played with. He played halfback and was a defensive safety. Tony went on to play in the pros for the Houston Oilers. He made all-pro down there. Outstanding athlete and a super guy. Other basketball players… Arlen Clark was an outstanding basketball player. He made All-American here and then went on to play for the Phillips’s 66ers. But a lot of good athletes, we had a lot of good athletes.

Gill What do you remember about your coaches? I guess let’s start with Cliff Speegle in football, and of course Mr. Iba in basketball, and Toby Greene in baseball. Could you share your stories about those coaches?

Soergel Well, our coaches were all good. Cliff was a sound, really a sound football coach and a true gentleman. I don’t believe I ever heard Cliff

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Speegle say a swear word at all. He was just a very clean cut, super nice gentleman. Some people would say he was too nice to be a coach. Perhaps that’s true, but he was a good coach, he was very sound. He had good assistants, [Neil Armstrong was also one of ourfootball coaches and Neil went on to be an assistant football coach for the Houston Oilers, Minnesota Vikings, Dallas Cowboys and was the head coach of the Chicago Bears]. Harry Buffington was an outstanding line coach. I think we had five assistants and they were all good. Jim Spavital was good—most of them, most all of them were Aggies. They played here. Dorsey Gibson, [Henry Buffington, Jim Spavital, Otis Delahart and Davey Gibson were all outstanding coaches. Toby Greene did the scouting and Jack Baker coached the freshmen.]

It was an Oklahoma A&M group that coached us in football. We had some good schemes. I would say that we were far too conservative on offense. We tried to play defensive football and we had some athletes that could’ve done better, I think, offensively if we’d been a little more aggressive. Another outstanding athlete we had was a guy named Dwayne Wood and Dwayne was a super halfback from Wilburton and went on and played for the Kansas City Chiefs. In fact, Dwayne may be one of the only guys I ever heard of that played a full year in the Canadian Football League and they finished their season earlier, then he went right on with the Chiefs and played their full season. So Dwayne was truly a gifted athlete. But you know, they could catch the ball and I could throw the ball. But we didn’t loosen them up quiet enough. Jerry, in my senior year I was the tenth leading passer in the nation and I completed over 60% of my passes, but we just didn’t throw it enough. We could’ve spread them out a little bit and throw the look-ins and sidelines and the corners and the posts. We had the people that could’ve done it, but the coaches determined that we were going to run the ball in there. I’m sorry we didn’t try to throw it more. All of my coaches were sound coaches, their schemes were good. Mr. Iba, nobody ever had sounder schemes than he did. Of course he was defensive oriented, too. You didn’t shoot the ball a lot for him. If you did, you better hit it or you weren’t going to be playing. He didn’t mind you shooting if you hit it.

Gill Well, he was legendary for his discipline. Was he as tough as everybody said he was?

Soergel He was. That he was.

Gill And did you participate in any of those three-a-days they had during Christmas?

Soergel Absolutely, and it was awful.

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Gill Can you share a little bit about that?

Soergel Oh, you used to hate the holidays because we’d practice three times a day. And if you taped your ankles, you didn’t have time to take the tape off, you’d just leave it on until the next practice. You’d go out there and start practicing. And Mr. Iba, I grew to be very, very close to him in later years. We worked together and he was a really tremendous friend. We talked a lot about his philosophy and he didn’t think hard work hurt you. He didn’t believe you got stale. But he did believe that you needed to change your drills. He said as long as you keep changing your drills, you can just work ’em and work ’em and work ’em. I can remember he did. I also can remember, and I do believe this, that sometimes when we’d go on the road and play out of town and we’d have a shoot-a-round the morning before the game, some of those shoot-a-rounds would end up being full-time scrimmages. That night when we’d get ready for the game, we were a little bit tired-legged and I think that wasn’t always good.

But I’ll always remember Mr. Iba. He made sure he had your attention. I love the way today you watch basketball teams come over to timeouts and maybe they bring a bunch of chairs out on the floor and you just watch the players and they’re looking around, gawking around. Well, when you came out for a time out with Mr. Iba, he had you lay down on your stomach, facing him. He had five players gathered around him, he was sitting on the bench, and you couldn’t look around. He had your absolute attention. You weren’t going to be looking at the girls. You were going to pay attention to what he said. And he had great ideas, he was just so sound.

Then, Toby Greene, baseball coach, he was another sound coach, but Toby never said much. But when he did, you better jump, because he meant it. And I was fortunate enough to really play for good coaches.

Gill Your favorite Henry P. Iba story. Have you got a favorite one, Dick?

Soergel Oh, I’ve got so many of them. He loved to go mushroom hunting. He’d grown up hunting mushrooms up in Missouri. After I was working for him, he used to just love getting me, Buel McElroy and Sam Aubrey and we’d go mushroom hunting. If you’ve never hunted mushrooms, you go down on a riverbank. You go where all those briars are there, and you wade through those briars and you look for mushrooms. You’d have to find them there kind of in a shady place. We’d find the mushrooms and we’d pick the briars out and you were kind of afraid to eat them anyway, but if Mr. Iba said they were good, they had to be good. But he used to get the biggest kick out of that. He’d come up and he’d say, “You ready to go mushroom hunting?” I says, “No, Mr. Iba, I don’t want to go

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again.” And, “Oh yeah, let’s go mushroom hunting.”

Then, I remember he liked to fish too. He had an old fly rod. He liked to catch frogs on that fly rod. He’d see a frog sitting out there on the lake or the pond and he’d take that old fly and he’d flip it out there and that frog would grab it and you had something on there when he got that frog. But I remember we went out to [Lake] Carl Blackwell one time and I drove—he had a pickup truck and, of course, Mr. Iba was retired and I was driving his truck. We went out there and we fished for awhile, and then we decided we were going to go look for another place. We got on one of those roads and I got that truck stuck on high center. (Laughs) There we were and, of course, there are no cell phones or anything, you’re just out there. And we laughed about that. He said, “Here I am an old man, and you don’t know what you’re doing.” So we ended up, we put enough stuff under the wheels to get it out and we got it off high center. But we used to laugh about that. Lot of good things. Lots of good things about Mr. Iba.

Gill What do you remember about the facilities that you played in? Could you share a little bit about [them]? Not anything like they are today, but what do you remember about them?

Soergel Well, we really didn’t have the best facilities. It was kind of sad. Football, particularly. In football, our dressing room was down in the basement of Gallagher Hall, and Gallagher Hall leaked when it rained and it was kind of like Old Central. When it rained, our dressing room would be flooded and you’d have to stand on the benches to put your equipment on. So that wasn’t real good. The atmosphere wasn’t real good either, it was dark and dreary. It just wasn’t real conducive to building up your enthusiasm. But the football field itself, the practice fields were good. They had good turf on them and they worked out fine. Didn’t have any lights, and we were glad of that. We had one old flood light and that was down at the southwest corner of the practice field. We’d be practicing down there and it’d get late, we could kind of move under that one old flood light. It was dark, it wasn’t very good. But then also, about every day, when some of those football players would be going to school, they’d go knock that flood light out so we wouldn’t have to practice (laughs) late. I can remember some of those things. Then the football field itself was fine. The stadium wasn’t the greatest, but it was adequate. The baseball park was adequate. Gallagher Arena was a super place to play basketball. That floor, and I’m glad they still have it, it was the best floor I ever played on. It was really, really good. And the atmosphere and everything was good. The basketball situation was the best.

Gill What do you remember about down under Gallagher?

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Soergel Oh, that’s another thing, down under Gallagher was the basement. It was dirt, an all dirt floor. It had the concrete pillars that were in there in between, and that’s where we’d practice football sometimes down there when the weather would get bad. Of course, there wasn’t a lot of room in between those pillars and you could do one-on-one blocking down there pretty good because there wasn’t any place to escape. Then the baseball team practiced down there. We had a batting cage and it was a rope batting cage and room for a pitcher and a catcher. You could put a batter in there and the pitcher could throw batting practice to him. Toby Greene was a detailed-oriented person. He’d sit behind the screen and he would chart every pitch, and he would chart the hitters, whether you hit the ball solid or fouled it off, missed it or what. He’d have a book on you. He used that as part of his basis for how you made the team.

I’ll never forget, oh gosh, one day I was down there—I never got to go down there very often because I didn’t get out early enough for baseball, but I did go down there and I was pitching batting practice and we had a protector screen that would go up about waist high in front of the pitcher so you could duck behind it and dodge those line drives coming back. They use them all the time and they still use them today as protection for the batting practice pitcher. One day I was down there pitching and the catcher caught the ball and he was throwing it back to me. Well he hit it and ricocheted right off the top of that protector screen and hit me right square in the head. (Laughs) Oh, I thought Toby was going to kill that catcher. And he was scared to death, he was a freshman catcher, he was scared to death. Well, it hit me in the head and fortunately it was the best place, didn’t hurt me much. But he was scared to death and I walked down to him and I grabbed him around the shoulders and said, “Can’t you throw any harder than that?” And everybody just laughed and went on and that was the end of it. But he didn’t get in any trouble after that.

Gill Did it ever get a little dusty down there?

Soergel Oh, it got dusty and dirty and the balls would get dirty. That old red dirt down there. I can remember Toby sitting up in the equipment room and he’d use a can of Pet milk and he’d wash those old baseballs with Pet milk so it would whiten them up. I remember him sitting there doing that so we could take batting practice down there.

Gill We were talking earlier about the Douglas ballgame with Capitol Hill, the period of integration, this is also the time of integration in intercollegiate athletics. I wanted to ask you if you remember some of the early African American student athletes enrolled at Oklahoma State University, and if you do, could you share some of your memories about that?

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Soergel Absolutely. We had the first black athletes that came and played here at Oklahoma State. Of course, the first one was Orlando Hazley and he was a track man. I wasn’t on the track team, but knew Orlando and what a fine gentleman he was and truly a great sprinter. He was a 9.4 sprinter for real and he ran with the greatest sprinters of that time. He was also a guy that could get along with people. I am in awe of those early athletes because of some of the things they had to go through because it wasn’t easy. Many restaurants wouldn’t serve them. They couldn’t stay in some of the hotels. It was just difficult. Orlando, I believe he came the same year I did. I think he was in my class. I think he came here in ’56.

Then, in ’57 we had the first black football player that played here. A guy named Chester Pittman, and Chester was a little halfback from Wewoka. What a nice guy Chester was. He was a good teammate and just a good guy to be with. I’ll never forget some of the difficulties he went through. We used to always play Arkansas in Little Rock and when we took Chester over to Little Rock with us we stayed in the hotel in downtown Little Rock. When we drove the buses up to the hotel Chester didn’t get off and we didn’t know what was happening. We soon found out that Chester couldn’t stay in the hotel with us. Had to take him to a hotel for blacks. And we really felt bad about it and we were trying to console Chester and I can remember he laughed at us and he said, “Guys, don’t you worry about me, you know I’ll have a lot more fun than you will.” He just could handle things like that. I’ll never forget how bad it was when he went out on the football field. I think he was the first black football player that ever played there in War Memorial Stadium. The crowd booed him. It was just awful. Old Chester just endured it.

Then we used to play the University of Houston, too and we stayed in a yacht club down near Galveston Bay and Chester wasn’t allowed to go into the dining room with us. His roommate was Tony Banfield and Tony would just eat in the room with Chester. But it was just tough for those guys. The first black basketball player we had was a guy named L.C. Gordon. L.C. was from Memphis. Another really, really nice guy. He could get along, I mean those early pioneers. They had to take a lot of abuse. I remember going into a cafeteria in Kansas City. Our basketball team went in and we lined up with our trays on the counter and they came over and said, “Well, we can’t serve L.C. in here.” We all just got up and left. But that kind of thing went on and they had to be able just to turn the other cheek and keep going to make it work.

Gill Was there a black baseball player that you played with?

Soergel There were a couple of black guys that came out for the baseball team, but I don’t—none of them really made the team, so I don’t really

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remember them. I never got close to any of those guys.

Gill Were there some special honors and recognitions you got? First as a student, you said you made the Dean’s Honor Roll a few times. Any other honors, recognitions as a student you recall?

Soergel Oh, I was one of the, what do you call them, Redskin Congratulates? Something like that. That recognized some of the students at OSU. I received an award from my fraternity that was a significant sort of an award, more academically and athletically, it was kind of a combination thing. That was about it. I wasn’t a great student, don’t get me wrong. I could go to class and if I worked hard I could pass. I wasn’t a great student, but I could make my grades.

Gill You mentioned some of your athletic honors. Can you tick off some of those? I know you started in all three sports for three years, isn’t that correct?

Soergel Yes.

Gill Some recognition, conference, national recognition in any or all of those sports that you recall?

Soergel Well, of course, I made All-American in baseball. In football I didn’t make All-American or All-Conference. I never got to play in a conference in football. We were in between conferences. We didn’t have a full-schedule of Big Eight teams and we’d just gotten out of the Missouri Valley. They put me on the All-Academic Big Eight team. But I was either the leading passer or the second leading passer in the conference even though we didn’t play a full slate of Big Eight games. So I didn’t do that well there. And then my junior year I made the Honorable Mention on the All-Conference basketball team as a junior. Didn’t play that good as a senior. But those were some of the things that happened when I was in college.

Gill Well you graduated in 1960, is that right?

Soergel 1960.

Gill With a bachelor’s degree in general business?

Soergel General business.

Gill Can you share some about your professional career in your life? Just kind of hit some highlights after you left OSU?

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Soergel Well, when I graduated from OSU I first tried to play professional football and I signed a contract with the Boston Patriots in the American Football League. It was the first year of the American Football League. The Green Bay Packers had tried to sign me and at that time, they didn’t pay professional athletes like they do today, particularly football players. And the top quarterbacks in the NFL at that time were probably making $25,000 a year, and that was about the tops. So they didn’t pay that much and I ended up getting, I think I got $500 more to sign with Boston than with Green Bay. But I always remember Green Bay trying to sign me. The coach there that was trying to convince me I should go ahead and come with Green Bay, he said, “Now you know, we really need a quarterback here. We’ve got an older quarterback named Lamar McCann who’s kind of about over-the-hill and then we’ve got some young rookie named Bart Starr that you know he’s not there either.”

Bart Starr ended up having a pretty good career so I probably made the good choice anyway and went to the Patriots. I stayed there for two months, got through the exhibition season. The first year of the American [Football] League was kind of an interesting time because you didn’t have any nucleus, you had to build a team from scratch. I wasn’t ready to be a pro-quarterback my first year. I really hadn’t ever thrown drop back passes to speak of. They kept me around for quite awhile. But I really wasn’t ready to start as an NFL quarterback. So right before I left they brought in a guy named Babe Pirelli and Pirelli had had a lot of experience and had been an All-American at Kentucky. They also had another older guy from Boston College that had played in the Canadian League named Butch Songin. So those were the two quarterbacks they kept. They kept me around so long that it would’ve been difficult for me to go somewhere else.

Another significant thing at that time, very few of your football players had what are called no-cut contracts. In other words if you signed a professional football contract you might get a bonus, whatever kind of bonus you signed for, but your contract really didn’t take effect until you were on the team when the season started. So they could wait right ’till the end to cut you and they didn’t have to pay you. I found out that professional football, as all professional sports, it’s a business. They kept me around until the end and they said, “Well Denver and a couple other teams would like to have you.” Well I knew if I went somewhere else it’d be just such a quick look it wasn’t worth my time. And I had a family to support so I needed to go to work.

Then, after that didn’t work out, I went into the life insurance business and was trying to make a living there. I was kind of struggling along there, working in Stillwater, loved Stillwater. Was working for Bob Fenimore and I found out that Cliff Speegle wanted to hire me as OSU’s

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freshman football coach. Well, that would’ve really helped me. It would’ve given me a chance to make a few extra dollars and also continue in the insurance business. But just prior to things happening there, the Athletic Cabinet here at OSU determined that the business of athletics was growing and they needed somebody to be a business and ticket manager for the athletic program. One of the people that was instrumental on that athletic cabinet was Dean Swearingen, who had been one of my professors. He was touting me for that job. At that time, Mr. Iba had another gentleman that was working for him, had been hired as his secretary really and his name was Harry Dolman. Harry served to some degree in that function as a business and ticket manager, but not really. But Mr. Iba was really, really loyal to all his people. He wasn’t interested in replacing Harry, but Swearingen and the Athletic Cabinet kept working on him. They recognized they needed to have somebody and Mr. Iba agreed on me. So they ended up hiring me as OSU’s first athletic business and ticket manager.

Gill What year was that?

Soergel It was 1962. I worked for OSU for 16 years. It got into a period of time during the Floyd Gass era that there was a lot of controversy regarding the athletic program. I determined that I needed to get out. It might’ve been a mistake, but I determined that I needed to change professions. Well, I was about 40 years old, a little old to start changing professions. But I had the opportunity to join a bank. I was hired as a vice president of a small bank here in Stillwater and learned an awful lot in that small bank because you had to do everything. Then, I determined again that I needed to move on to where there were more opportunities, and I had some friends at the Liberty National Bank in Oklahoma City. Gordon Greer, a lot of you OSU people will know Gordon, well he was the President of Liberty and I knew Gordon. So I asked him if I could interview there for a job. I was thinking about the lending field, because that was kind of the direction I was going, to be a loan officer in the bank.

I happened to go to Liberty and had lunch with Gordon and while I was there another fellow named Ken Brown saw me. Well, I didn’t realize that he had seen me there, but I had known Ken—I played baseball with Ken at Cherokee, Oklahoma in a semi-pro league and Ken remembered me. He went to Gordon and he said, “What’s he doing here?” He told him I was looking for a job, and Ken had a job open as a division manager in the investment department. Well, I didn’t know anything about investments. I knew a little bit about loans and a little bit about banking, but not anything about investments. But Ken asked Gordon, “Would you mind if I talked to him?” So he called me and had me come down and interview, and visited with me a little bit, then he had some

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other people talk to me. I told him, “Ken, I don’t know anything about investments.” And he said, “Well, you know, you can learn.” I said, “Well yeah, I probably can.” But anyway, they ended up hiring me as the manager of the government investment division of the Liberty National Bank. Well, I didn’t know a treasury bill from a treasury note. I just remember I got a bunch of books and I went into my office and shut the door and I started reading. And I started learning. And I learned a lot. I managed a group of people there and they were good to manage, and went on and took over the investment department completely, helped manage the bank’s portfolio, did a lot of trades, travelled to a lot of banks here in Oklahoma. I probably have been in more than 100 banks here in Oklahoma calling on different bankers, selling investment services. So I stayed in the investment area.

The Liberty [Bank] in Oklahoma City ended up buying the First National Bank of Tulsa and they merged the two banks. When they merged the two banks, my area went to the Tulsa office. So that offered me an opportunity to move into the Trust Department. The Head of the Trust Department at Liberty asked me if I would be interested in coming to work there. So I started to work in Trust and again a new learning experience. I didn’t know anything about trusts. But I ended up in the Trust Department and I worked with employee benefit plans, pension plans, profit sharing plans. Did a lot of work with government regulations. But then eventually had an opportunity to come back to investments, which I truly loved. And I ended up being the manager for trust investments for the Liberty Banks of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. We managed a lot of assets. We had over $2 billion in trust assets, I was responsible for that. We had I don’t know how many accounts. We also had the safekeeping of probably somewhere over $6 or $7 billion of assets that we were responsible for. That’s what I ended up doing and we were doing real well up until the Bank One of Columbus, Ohio came in and bought Liberty. Well, Bank One was a large national bank and my job was going to go to Columbus. I didn’t want to go to Columbus. So I retired. And that’s what I am right now, retired and I’ve enjoyed it. I had a very enjoyable working career but I’m enjoying retirement now. The Bank One of Columbus ended up being purchased by J.P. Morgan Chase. That’s who they are now. So that bank consolidation was quite a time.

Gill Dick, can we go back a little bit, I guess nearly 16, 18 years you spent at Oklahoma State University?

Soergel Yes.

Gill And I know you moved into the assistant athletic director and business manager position. Can you talk a little bit about some of the people,

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staff, coaches, you remember during that period? This was from 1962 to ’80? Somewhere along in there, is that correct?

Soergel Yeah. It was amazing the number of staff and coaches that came through this university. There were so many football coaches and so many that went on to be very successful. The first one I remember that became very successful wasn’t here when I was working here, but was one of my freshman coaches, a graduate assistant, Buddy Ryan. Of course, Buddy went on to fame with the Chicago Bears and so forth. And then after I went to work with OSU, the famous one that I remember working with that was such a character was Sammy Baugh. Slingin’ Sammy Baugh became the freshman football coach here one year. And Sammy was a real character. Of course, he was a legend in the National Football League, maybe the greatest passer of all time. Ended up doing a lot of different things, ended up coaching the Houston Oilers. I think that was his last coaching job, but we had him here as our freshman coach one year.

I can remember Bowden Wyatt. Bowden Wyatt, oh man, what a character he was. And Bowden, he had a great football reputation. He’d been the head football coach at Wyoming and he left the Wyoming job and went to Arkansas and was very successful at Arkansas. They won the Southwest Conference. Then he went back to his alma mater, Tennessee, the University of Tennessee. They hired him and he coached there and had a great deal of success. I think they were the number one team in the nation at one time. They had Johnny Majors as their tailback and Bowden was very successful but then he kind of dropped by the wayside and he ended up coming to Oklahoma State. And Jerry, as you say, you remember him, he was a tough old boy but a real character. And of course Frank Gansz went on to coach Kansas City. Golly, just so many. Jim Stanley, he was on Phil Cutchin’s coaching staff, Willy Zapalak, Elwood Kettler. Just many, many, many coaches who’ve been through this school and have done well and been successful. Many of them have gone on to other places. And, of course, I left, I retired or resigned here at Oklahoma State just when Jimmy Johnson came along. So I was here more through the Jim Stanley, Floyd Gass, Phil Cutchin, Cliff Speegle era.

Gill What about athletic directors that you worked with? Of course, Mr. Iba, obviously. And you worked with Floyd Gass?

Soergel Floyd Gass. Mr. Iba, you know, I just can’t say enough good things about him. There never was a man that was more loyal. If you were his staff and you were with him and you were—I mean he might get on to you about something, but he was loyal to his people. Maybe even to a fault. But what a great guy. And his management philosophy was

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different. I don’t believe we ever had any staff meetings. He didn’t manage that way, he did it one-on-one. He’d get you in his office and he’d talk about things with you. You knew he was in charge. There wasn’t any doubt about that. But he could handle people. He was a great people person. And the people that he had were all very loyal to him. They were very, very loyal. Sam Aubrey was his assistant basketball coach. Nobody was any more loyal than Sam. Ralph Higgins was the track coach. Labron Harris was the golf coach. Cliff Speegle was the football coach. Toby Greene was the baseball coach. They all were loyal and worked together. It was really a family. Otis Wile was the Sports Information Director. All the people got along. We got along with each other. It wasn’t a selfish organization, and that’s what made it good. We helped each other. I can remember Higgins and Labron, they took care of the scoreboard for the basketball team forever. They didn’t get paid for that, they just did it. They’d run the clock and take care of the scoreboard. I can remember when Higgins would have a track meet some of us would go out and help him mark the track off and put the hurdles up. We just worked together. It was a good situation.

Then things started changing a little bit. Mr. Iba left and a lot of politics got involved. It got very, very political here for awhile. Floyd Gass came in, and Floyd was a nice guy, but Floyd came in with a lot of the politics attached to him. He was very close to the Board of Regents, and the Board of Regents really supported Floyd in becoming the athletic director here. I worked with Floyd and got along with him very well. He just kind of left me alone and let me run my shop and we got along good. But Floyd had a lot of controversy, and again there were a lot of people taking shots at people. It got to be where it was kind of frustrating with all the politics that were going on. People were going to the Board of Regents and trying to get this person fired or that person fired. It wasn’t the family situation that Mr. Iba had initially.

Gill Dick, what were some of the main issues at that time when you were working?

Soergel Well, of course, when Cliff Speegle got fired and they brought in Phil Cutchin. Phil’s attitude, Phil was a nice guy too and a good coach, but Phil’s attitude was completely dominated by football. He thought football ought to be it and that hadn’t been the way it was at Oklahoma State and it created some difficulties. Phil went ahead and did some good things. He brought the football program up. He got the facilities improved. They built the football dressing room down there on the corner. He got the offices improved. He did a lot of good things. But I think he didn’t lend toward the camaraderie that we’d had previously. Then when Floyd came in there was a sentiment around that, the reason that Oklahoma State’s football program wasn’t good was because of Mr.

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Iba. And that’s not true, Mr. Iba loved football. He wanted football to be successful. But a lot of the controversy stemmed around our football program wasn’t as good as we’d like to have it. And Mr. Iba took a lot of that blame and consequently all the people connected with Mr. Iba took on some of that blame. I took on a bunch of it. It wasn’t all that much fun. Floyd didn’t indicate to me that I was on shaky ground, but the Board of Regents was out there and they were trying to micro- manage this university at that time. Dr. Kamm could attest to that if he were still around. It was difficult.

Gill He had a different idea in mind I think, didn’t he? Selection process.

Soergel Yes, yes he did.

Gill We won’t go there. Dick, one of the things that was beginning to emerge in your time was fundraising. And of course, it’s huge now. Can you remember some of the early beginnings of fundraising?

Soergel I remember very well, Jerry. Mr. Iba’s mentor was Dr. Henry G. Bennett. I never knew Dr. Bennett, but I felt like I knew him because Mr. Iba had talked about him so much. I used to spend hours talking to Mr. Iba about all kinds of philosophy and how to operate and different things. He used to talk a great deal about Dr. Bennett. He would tell stories that Dr. Bennett wasn’t real interested in going out and raising money from the alumni because once you start getting money from them, you also get their input. And first thing, they’re trying to run your program and they’re trying to run the university. Dr. Bennett didn’t want that. But Dr. Bennett was so strong politically that he felt like he could get things done through politics rather than going out and raising money through alumni. That’s what he was able to do, but unfortunately he was killed in a plane crash in the early 1950s. He was at that time head of the Point Four Program and was on a trip in Ethiopia and was killed in a plane crash. Well, that didn’t help Oklahoma A&M’s political power, so the financing got to be more and more of a problem.

Frankly, the university used to provide much of the financing for the athletic program here at Oklahoma State. We began to get pressures from the legislature and I think OU was one of the main reasons—they couldn’t understand that we could compete with them and we didn’t have near the money they had. Part of the reason we could compete was because the university helped fund athletics and there was a lot of juggling done in the early days here at Oklahoma State where the university could pick up a lot of that funding. But when the legislature started taking looks and they began questioning the funding, it became evident that the athletic program was going to have to fund itself. And the only way you could do that was to start raising outside funds.

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I remember the first athletic fundraising group that I was associated with. A separate corporation was formed here called the Oklahoma Educational Foundation. A man named Lee Gilstrap was a retired colonel from the military and was a speech professor here on campus and really a neat guy. They assigned Colonel Gilstrap the responsibility to go out and raise money for athletics. I remember my first year I think we raised a little over $2,000 and thought that was just absolutely wonderful to raise that kind of money through outside donations. But that’s what Colonel Gilstrap did. Then more evolution came along. Howard “Moose” Johnson was assistant to the athletic director here and he took over some of the fundraising aspects of athletics and another corporation was formed. It was called the Oklahoma State Athletic Fund Incorporated and it was designed to raise money for athletics. People would make checks out to Oklahoma State Athletic Fund and they’d send them to Moose. Then he’d get them to me and we’d deposit them into a banking account.

Also at that time, a lot of people don’t realize it, but the athletic program didn’t operate as a department of the university. It was a separate corporation. It was called the Oklahoma A&M Colleges and Universities Athletic Association. We had our own bank account down at Stillwater National Bank. We wrote checks on that bank account. We deposited our money into that bank account. We didn’t function exactly as a university department. But again, things began to change and it became more evident that we needed to become a true department of the university, and we needed to raise funds. The university was also getting more into fundraising and the OSU Foundation began to function. I can’t remember exactly what the name of it was to begin with, Jerry, you might remember. But I remember Bob Irwin was the director initially of the foundation.

Gill I think it’s called the OSU Development Foundation.

Soergel I think that’s right. I think that’s what it was called. Bob Irwin, in fact he had been one of my instructors. He’d been a marketing professor before taking over the head of the OSU Development Foundation. They hired a couple of guys to raise money for athletics because people would give money to athletics. They might not give it to other things, but they would give it to athletics. They hired a guy named Merlin London. Really a nice guy. And Tom Turvey. Tom had been a football coach, and Merlin had been a football coach up at Tonkawa at Northern Junior College. They were very much in tune with athletics and they worked for the foundation but they primarily were out raising money for athletics. We developed procedures where the money would go directly into the Foundation. There were some other fundraising things that probably went on, but basically we determined that the need was to

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make sure everything went through that OSU Foundation. So that was the beginning of it as I remember. And now, my goodness, how it’s grown and what a wonderful thing.

Gill Can you share a little with us about your family, Dick?

Soergel Oh, I’m just so fortunate. My wife, we’ve been married for 52 years now. She’s just a wonderful lady. We were high school sweethearts.

Gill And her name is?

Soergel Her name is Gwen. Last name was Howard. She’s still working. She works for a dentist in Oklahoma City. She loves it. She loves people. And so that works out real fine. When our children were growing up she never worked outside the home. At that time, she raised our children. We had a son, Rick. Rick passed away in 1995 from lymphoma. At that time, he was a banker at the Bank of Oklahoma in Tulsa. Quite a sad thing in our lives. But we also have a daughter. Her name is Sandi Warner. Sandi has five children, she has triplets. We have triplet granddaughters. They’re just a joy. She lives in Edmond, Oklahoma and she’s a housewife there and a wonderful mother. That’s basically our family. My brother, Don, is still living and he lives a little north of Edmond, he and his wife. They’ve been married about 50 years now. My mother and father are deceased and my wife’s are deceased. But that’s our family.

Gill What about community activities, church activities?

Soergel Oh, I’m telling you what. I belong to the most wonderful church you could ever imagine. It’s Crossings Community Church in Oklahoma City. I’ve been a member there for about five years now. Prior to that, we were members of a Baptist church there in Oklahoma City for about 20 years and I was very active in it—probably got too involved in it and it became a good time for me to move on and we joined Crossings. It’s such a delightful place and such a joy. I belong to, we call it a community group. We meet together in people’s homes every Sunday night. I belong to a bible study group, we meet every Tuesday morning at 6:45 in the morning. I just thoroughly enjoy it. It’s been a real blessing to us.

Gill Involved in any civic clubs, organization?

Soergel Not anymore. I used to belong to a lot of them. Of course, I was a Rotarian for a number of years. I belonged to the Rotary Club here in Stillwater. Then I moved to Oklahoma City and I belonged to a group club called the Oklahoma City Executives Association. It was a

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wonderful organization, belonged to it for a long time, served in every capacity from all the officer’s chairs to directors to whatever. I’ve been a member of the Oklahoma City Downtown Optimist’s Club. I was on the board of directors of the Stillwater Country Club at one time. Was a member of the—oh, another organization I’ve been very involved in is the Jim Thorpe Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame. I’ve been on that executive council forever. I’m not very active anymore in it, although I was inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame. Just a lot of different organizations. The Olympic Festival, I was on the executive committee for the—I believe it was 1989 Olympic Festival that we had in Oklahoma City. I’ve been involved in a lot of different organizations, a lot of different groups like Pension & Benefit organizations, Banking organizations; again, there’ve been a lot of things. Anymore, my church is very, very important and that’s basically it. Plus my tennis, I belong to the Greens Country Club and I play tennis about three days a week and thoroughly enjoy that. Play a little golf. We don’t hardly call it golf anymore, we call it a social, because it really doesn’t look like golf the way we hit it anymore.

Gill (Laughs) As you viewed the university, gosh you’ve been affiliated since the mid-’50s with Oklahoma State University. How do you feel about the direction of the athletic program?

Soergel I think they’re doing a wonderful job. I think recognizing that you’ve got to have the funds in order to compete. There’s a direct correlation between the amount of money that you have and the success that you have. That’s been true. Mr. Iba’s program might’ve been the one that was a little different because he had so much success. Not in football though. And I think not having the funding hurt the football situation. I think the fact that we had to rely on outside guarantees from other schools to provide a lot of the financing for OSU’s athletic program, I think that hurt us. I remember one year Jerry, and you were probably playing when Cutchin was coaching and he had to play the Big Eight Conference schedule, which is rough enough, and in addition to that, he had to play Arkansas in Little Rock, he had to play Texas in Austin, and he had to play Houston in Houston. Well, that’s brutal. Your football team, if they can go through that kind of a schedule, and win, then they really are something. That wasn’t a good situation to force all that on the team, having to compete that tough.

Gill Which I think I hear you saying is one reason we play Arkansas every year, for example, a lot of people ask why wasn’t that a home and home series.

Soergel Was the revenue. We needed the revenue.

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Gill They would guarantee us a little more than we could make playing here in Stillwater. Is that correct?

Soergel That’s right. Very much more. Yeah, they’d more than double what we could make at a home football game.

Gill Well, speaking of arenas, what do you think about the facilities that have been developed lately? Gallagher-Iba Arena and now the football stadium and the proposed athletic village.

Soergel I think they’re terrific. They’re just wonderful. I’m so proud of the facilities. Gallagher-Iba, it’s as fine a place to play basketball and to watch basketball as there is in the country. Of course, it’s always been a great facility, but not like it is now. And that football stadium, I am so pleased to see it dressed up and look like it looks. You know, when Terry Don Phillips was here he was advocating the Gallagher-Iba project and I was trying to [advocate doing something to the football stadium]. We needed to do something with that football stadium, it looked awful. And right now it’s a showplace. I’m so proud of it and proud to see it. I hope we just continue. I’m pulling for this indoor practice facility coming on. I think that would really be beneficial to football and all the athletic programs to have a facility that you could practice when the weather’s bad.

Gill Dick, are there some special memories you have of your time at OSU as a student-athlete? I mean you’ve had a long history, a long relationship. Were there some special times that you recall?

Soergel Oh I’ve had so many special times.

Gill Any of them stand out in your mind?

Soergel Oh gosh, I remember winning the Bluegrass Bowl. I remember very significantly winning the National Baseball Championship, although we didn’t realize how significant that was at the time. You know our philosophy was we liked to play. We liked the game, we liked the competition.

Gill Bring ‘em on.

Soergel Bring ‘em on. We didn’t care who we played. And we had a saying, old Bob Andrew was the one that coined it, when you thought about this little old Stillwater, Oklahoma gonna go play Southern Cal or UCLA, and we played all of them, we’d always say, “You know, there ain’t never been a horse that ain’t been rode. There ain’t never been a rider that ain’t been throwed.” If you line up against them, they put their pants

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on the same way you do, then you got a chance to whip them. And we whipped a lot of them.

Gill (Laughs) You did. Well speaking of whipping a lot of them, I understand that this is your 50 year reunion?

Soergel Fifty, yes. Fifty years since the 1959 National Championship.

Gill Coming up here, is that exciting for you?

Soergel Oh, it’s very exciting, yeah.

Gill You were a pitcher, correct?

Soergel Yes.

Gill When you weren’t pitching did you play a position? Were you a position player at all?

Soergel No, I didn’t. None of us did. I did in high school.

Gill Now obviously you started, did you relieve some in those days? Did you do both?

Soergel We had a pitching staff so we didn’t need much relief. We really had a good pitching staff. Joel Horlen, he went on to pitch for the White Sox for a long, long time. Joel was a terrific starter. Roy Peterson was another right-hander that was a terrific pitcher. I come along and would hold up my end. And we generally played a three-game series on the weekend—that’s kind of how we played. We didn’t play nearly as many games then. Thirty games was probably the tops that we played.

Gill Where did you pitch in the rotation?

Soergel I was the third game. I pitched the third game.

Gill Do you remember that season what your win-loss record was?

Soergel I don’t know. I hadn’t lost a game until we got to the College World Series. I remember that very vividly. I was probably 7 or 8 and 0. I was undefeated. We’d been beaten a couple of times, but I had never lost a game. In fact, I didn’t lose a game my sophomore year nor my junior year. In fact, the first game I pitched they took me up to Manhattan against Kansas State. I didn’t know what was what up there and I think I shut them out and I hit a grand slam home run.

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Gill Do you remember what your ERA was in the ’59 championship season?

Soergel Well, that was what was so significant. The three pitchers, the ERAs were all under three runs a game. So we didn’t give up many runs and that’s the reason we didn’t need a lot of relief pitching. When you went out there you were usually out there. But we had good defense. We had good defense behind us, we had good pitching, and we didn’t need a lot of relief. And that was one of the things that really, really came home to roost in the College World Series. We’d won the first couple of games and I was pitching the third game against the University of Arizona and I hadn’t been beaten, and OSU hadn’t been beaten in the tournament either, and I got beat. Oh, I sure didn’t enjoy that.

Gill What was the format? Obviously it was double elimination tournament?

Soergel Double elimination.

Gill And how many teams made it to the college world series?

Soergel I don’t know whether it was eight or ten. And it was double elimination.

Gill Did you come out as two separate pools and then the winners would play?

Soergel Yeah, that’s kind of how it was set up. But Arizona beat us. You had to play several games in row coming up. And we played our way back through the loser’s bracket. I believe San Jose State was the West Coast champion or the team that represented the West Coast and then Arizona was also in there and they were both undefeated. And then I don’t know, somehow or another they met and knocked each other out and we worked our way back through the loser’s bracket. We were about out of pitching and we were going to play Arizona in the finals. We had a little left-hander named Toby Bensinger. I’ll bet Toby hadn’t pitched ten innings all year. He was a good pitcher. We had some other good pitchers, but they never got a chance to pitch because we didn’t play that many games and the pitchers that were the starters just didn’t lose, hardly. But we were out of pitching. It was about two nights after I’d gotten beat. So Toby [Greene] had to start Bensinger. And what a great job he did. Toby went in there and pitched I think the first three or four innings and we were just nip and tuck. I forget what the score was. But then it was either the fourth or fifth inning, they put me back in to relieve. And again, Arizona had beaten me, the only loss I had in college, and I really hadn’t lost a game in high school either come to think of it. So I got a chance at Arizona again.

Gill You had a little motivation? (Laughs)

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Soergel I shut them out. I shut them out the rest of the way.

Gill Did you get the win?

Soergel I got the win.

Gill You were the winning pitcher in the national championship game?

Soergel I got the win, but Toby deserved it. You know, bless his heart, he did a wonderful job.

Gill As I recall, you lost 5 to 3 against Arizona the first time and then won 5 to 3 in the finals, does that sound about right?

Soergel I believe that’s about right. When I came in I think we were tied. I think it was 3 and 3 when I came in and we shut them down the rest of the way.

Gill Who got the winning RBI, do you recall?

Soergel No I don’t. I should recall, but I don’t.

Gill I’m sure somebody at the reunion will know, right? (Laughs)

Soergel Oh, they’ll know! Yeah. Well, [Roy] Peterson will know. He’ll know everything, Roy was our captain and he was…

Gill At that time you didn’t have post-season terms. You just had to win the conference. How did you play your way into the World Series?

Soergel Oh no, now, we had a playoff. That’s another story. There’s too many stories, Jerry. You know, we won the Big Eight. And we had to play the champion of the Missouri Valley, and that was Bradley. So we had to go to Peoria. The way we travelled was in cars. We had some of the players, if they had a car that didn’t have bald tires on them, who would drive. And, of course, Coach Greene would drive his car. And I don’t know, we’d take four or five cars, and that’s the way we travelled. Coach Greene would give us meal money. I think we got $3.50 a day and that was our meal money. You’d go eat wherever you could go buy a hamburger or whatever. But we had to drive to Peoria and we had to drive by way of St. Louis. We drove to St. Louis and stayed all night in St. Louis and then drove to Peoria. Well, we got there and played Bradley and we beat them in a double-header.

Gill Was it best out of three?

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Soergel It’s two out of three, yeah. We beat them double-header. So we got ready to come home and we drove back to St. Louis. And, of course, we were all pretty happy. We were all kind of celebrating. Some of us went down to some of the local establishments in the downtown St. Louis area and we were celebrating a little bit. Well, my celebration didn’t last very long, because I didn’t have enough money to celebrate very long. I decided I’d go back to the hotel room. Well, I went back to the hotel room and went to sleep. I was awaiting a wake-up call the next morning because we’d always get up early and we’d always be on the road by about 7 o’clock. My brother was my roommate. Well, he was one of the celebrators, and he and a carload of them decided they’d go over to East St. Louis. Well that’d been one of the places that Coach Greene said, “Now whatever you do, don’t go to East St. Louis!” Well, they went to East St. Louis. While they were there they got their tires slit.

So I’m in the hotel asleep and my brother, and I don’t know, there were three or four of them in that car. They were trying to get their tires repaired so they can get back to the hotel so Coach doesn’t catch them being out late. Then they’ve got to drive home the next day. Well, to make a long story short, they never got back to the hotel. They just basically took that group and left and went home. Well, everybody thought I was with him and there I was asleep in the hotel room. I woke up about 8 o’clock and got up, thought man it’s late, what’s going on, I don’t know where everybody is. I called the hotel desk and said, “Where’s the Oklahoma State baseball team?” They said, “They left about 7 o’clock.” I said, “No, they wouldn’t leave me.” (Laughter) I got dressed and I went down to the hotel lobby and started talking, “Oh yeah, they left about 7 o’clock.” Jerry, I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket and there I was in St. Louis. I didn’t know anybody in St. Louis and I was kind of shocked. So I talked to the hotel manager and I said I need to make a telephone call. So I called back to Stillwater and tried to call Mr. Iba, probably glad I didn’t get a hold of him, he wasn’t home, but I did get a hold of Cliff Speegle. He kind of laughed about it and he said, “Well, I’ll wire you the money and get on a plane. Fly in to Oklahoma City.”

So he wired me the money there and I got a plane ticket and I got on a plane and flew into Oklahoma City. Well, all the baseball team arrived at Gallagher Hall after their drive back from St. Louis and they started counting noses. And they said, “Well, where’s Dick?” and they said, “Well he’s with you.” And they said, “No, he’s with you!” And to make a long story short, they didn’t know where I was. And my wife didn’t know where I was. She was with her folks in Oklahoma City. Byron Bird was our trainer, you remember Byron. Byron called Gwen and said, “Have you seen or talked to Dick?” No, she hadn’t talked to me. I hadn’t called anybody. I was in the process of catching that flight and coming

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on to Oklahoma City. No one knew where I was. I can remember my wife ended up calling Byron back and saying, “Well you know, you guys better find him! You took him up there!” And Byron, in his congeniality, said, “Well, who do you think I am, the FBI?” It ended up being kind of a funny story and it all turned out good because when I got into Oklahoma City I called my wife and she said, “Where are you? Everybody’s been looking for you.” And I said, “Well, I had to catch a plane home to Oklahoma City.” But anyway, that’s another one of those trivia stories that took place.

Gill We’re talking about what we call the Road to Omaha, nowadays.

Soergel Uh-huh.

Gill So you beat Bradley in a double-header. Did that get you to the College World Series?

Soergel That got us to the College World Series.

Gill So there’s eight different regions of the country? You cut them on your district or your regional?

Soergel That’s right.

Gill Now what was the atmosphere like at Omaha? Was it like now? Was it a big deal in those days?

Soergel It was a big deal in those days. People in Omaha really did support it. They would assign some group to take care of each team. And they were more or less your sponsors. They would take you out usually to some kind of a feed one night and really treated you good. The crowds, they absolutely supported that tournament. That stadium was Rosenblatt—I believe was what it’s called—Stadium was packed with people and they loved that baseball. The baseball was good. You know, college baseball’s good to watch. It was really well-supported.

Gill Well, do you have some special memories of the College World Series? Of course, you were talking about the games you pitched in, obviously we talked earlier about the two Arizona games and the championship game winning was big. Are there other things you remember about the College World Series?

Soergel Not really specifically. I just remember how we always hung in there. We would maybe be behind in a ballgame and our team just never ever gave up. There would always be somebody come through. It wouldn’t be the same guy. As we used to tell, somebody’s got to pick it up.

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Somebody’s got to pick us up. And I can remember Grayson Mersch was our first-baseman, maybe as good a glove man as you’d ever find, but not a good hitter. A couple of ballgames I can remember where he hit one out of the park. Bruce Andrew was always a dangerous hitter. My brother was an outstanding hitter. He had a whale of a College World Series. He did really a good job of hitting. We just had different people that came along. It was a true team. James Dobson, he had a phenomenal series. He was voted the outstanding player in the College World Series. I don’t know what he hit up there in that series and he played third base and made every play. It just fit together. But again, it was a team that played together. Ray Bond was our catcher, a fine, terrific catcher. Bennie Bancroft played center field and, boy, he was a terrific center fielder. And Connie McIlvoy was a walk-on. And Connie, he played left field and just did a superb job. Tim Green was another outstanding player. Tim and my brother would alternate quite a bit or he and Connie would alternate. They were all outfielders. Somebody would always come along and pick up the team when they needed them. It wouldn’t be the same person.

Gill So now you pitched two games and in those days the pitcher hit for himself, right?

Soergel Yes, oh yeah.

Gill How did you do, did you get some hits in the College World Series?

Soergel I don’t remember whether I got any hits in the College World Series, but I was a good hitter.

Gill What was your batting average, do you recall?

Soergel I don’t recall what it was, but you know I could hit. My first year in high school I hit .400. The summer after I graduated from high school, I went to Liberal, Kansas to play in the Ban Johnson League in the summer. I started out being a pitcher and we didn’t have enough hitting so they moved me to third base and I had to clean up for the Liberal Ban Johnson team. So I was always a pretty good hitter.

Gill Did you jack any out your senior year?

Soergel You bet. I could hit one out. (Laughter)

Gill Okay, how special is it for you to be part of the only OSU baseball team that won a NCAA championship?

Soergel Well, I think it’s very special to be a part of it. I’m just amazed that

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Oklahoma State hasn’t won more championships with as good of baseball teams as we’ve had. But everything has to work right. And that’s what I’m saying, our team had the chemistry. It fit together and things worked out, just really worked out right.

Gill You think about Chet Bryant, he got to the finals one year as a runner- up. Of course, Gary Ward got there two or three times and runner-up, he got into the finals but never got there. So out of all those years and the great teams that we’ve had, the great players, the Robin Venturas, et cetera, the 1959 team was the only team that made it all the way.

Soergel I know it. I know it. You know, I pitched—I played for another team, a semi-pro team, and we won the National Championship in 1964 in Wichita. I got to pitch the final game in that one too, got the win.

Gill Two national championship game wins!

Soergel So, it was chemistry again. We had a team there in Wichita and I was living in Stillwater at the time and almost everybody on that team played in the big leagues. We had a great semi-pro baseball team. But I was fortunate enough to get to pitch the final game.

Gill Well Dick, speaking of different eras and teams, how do you think the 1959 team ranks in relation to some of the outstanding teams in the Gary Ward, Frank Anderson eras?

Soergel Oh, I doubt if the ’59 team would stack up on an individual basis. But on a team basis they would, because they pulled together so much. Athletes, on an individual basis, I would say Horlen would stack up with any of them. Because Joel, I mean he had a slider at that time that was really good, and he also kept the ball down. And that was one of the things that we worked at. You didn’t give hitters a good pitch to hit. Make them hit it on the ground. Keep that ball down around the knees. It was also a different era in baseball where we didn’t mind intimidating hitters. It was pretty much a given that if you got two strikes and no balls on that batter, you were going to knock him down. That was just the way the game was played. If a guy hit a home run off you, if he came up the next inning, he was going to taste the dust. You were going to back him up. That’s the way we played the game and there wasn’t anything wrong with it.

Also you didn’t have helmets. Nobody wore batting helmets, just had the old baseball cap. The hitters knew. They knew it was part of the intimidation of the game. You’d get some hitter and you’d watch him. He’d get up to that plate and he’d start digging in and trying to dig those spikes in there and making a big hole he was going to stand in. Well,

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you’d loosen him up a little bit. Didn’t mind dusting him off. It was just that was part of the way the game was played. All of our pitchers, they didn’t have any fear about knocking batters down. Generally, if you’d knock a batter down and he’s up there and next pitch you’d throw that curveball low and away, he has a hard time chasing it.

Gill He’s leaning back a little bit, isn’t he?

Soergel It’s not easy. It’s not easy. And we had pitchers, all of our pitchers had good control. We didn’t walk a lot of people, didn’t put people on. And had good defense behind us. But as far as if you’d take individual positions, ’59 team I doubt if it, there’s not a Robin Ventura or there’s not a [Pete] Incaviglia on there. But they were all good. See we had a number of guys that signed professional contracts.

Gill Which ones were those?

Soergel Well, Dobson signed, Bond signed, Mersch signed, Peterson signed. We had a lot of them that signed contracts. Probably the guy that—and I don’t know what happened to Dobson, because when he was a junior or a sophomore in college I mean he was absolutely terrific and all through college, but something happened to him later, might’ve been football. He tried to play football, might’ve been that he got his shoulder hurt in football. But I thought he’d make it to the big leagues because he was really gifted. That’s another thing, Jerry, we had four guys on that national championship team from Capitol Hill High School in Oklahoma City.

Gill Really?

Soergel Yes. See, I was from Capitol Hill, our catcher Ray Bond was from Capitol Hill, James Dobson was from Capitol Hill, my brother Don was from Capitol Hill. Then we had two from Stillwater, Bob and Bruce Andrew played short and second, they were Stillwater guys. Connie McIlvoy, he was from Southeast in Oklahoma City. Toby Bensinger was from Midwest City. Grayson Mersch was from up around Grand Lake. We were Oklahoma kids. Bancroft was a Texas boy. And Horlen was from San Antonio. But the rest of us were just little Oklahoma kids that just liked to play. And we played hard.

Gill Was Horlen the only one that made it to the pros?

Soergel Made it to major leagues. Yeah. He’s the only one that made it. Bond had a good chance, he signed with the Cardinals and was doing pretty good but he happened to come along right at the time Tim McCarver was playing in front of him and he couldn’t push McCarver out. And

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Dobson, now I don’t know what happened to him, something happened that he just didn’t hit like he did as a youngster.

Gill Did you ever think about baseball as opposed to trying pro football?

Soergel Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, whether I was going to sign a baseball contract or a football contract.

Gill Did you get an offer?

Soergel Not really. I wasn’t going to sign a baseball contract unless they paid me good. And I told them that. Because I didn’t want to kick around in the minor leagues. It wasn’t worth it to me. If you had a chance to go right to the big leagues it’d be fine. But I had too many friends that played class D league, class B league, class C league, and that wasn’t any kind of life, and again I had a family. I was interested in my family, interested in supporting them. I wasn’t going to do that. I didn’t have the greatest speed. I could throw fairly hard but I wasn’t just overpowering. Old Mickey Cochrane told me one time, Mickey Cochrane was a long-time Hall of Fame catcher, he was a scout, I forget who, I used to talk to a lot of scouts, he said, “You know, you need to develop one more pitch.” I never had the time to really work on developing another pitch. I was always doing too many other things. And he was right. I had a good fastball. I had a couple of curveballs that I threw, but I needed one more pitch. I needed to learn how to throw a knuckleball, or a slider, or a sinker. Sinker would’ve been the pitch. But I never worked on it.

And so I really thought I’d make the football team, because I could throw the football even though I hadn’t thrown drop back passes and such. I could throw the ball. I thought I could make that football team and I was disappointed that I didn’t. In fact, the coach, when he cut me, I was very disappointed because I’d talked to him earlier, I said, “You know, if you’re going to cut me I need to know early because I’ve got a family. I need to take care of them and I’d like to go someplace…” and he said, “Oh no, we’re going to keep you.” Until we played the last exhibition game and that was right before the season started and if you played, if you were there during the season then they had to pay you what your contract said. So that’s when they cut me and that’s when I said, “You know, professional sports is a pure business.” And that was it.

Gill Have you followed the baseball programs in the years since here at OSU?

Soergel I followed them certainly when Chet [Bryant] was here because I was still part of the university and then when Gary Ward came in I followed

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them some. Not nearly as close. You know they play so many games anymore, I don’t know how they go to school. See that’s one of my concerns about baseball. I’ve always been an advocate of trying to move college baseball to the summer. I think it should be played in the summer.

Gill Gary Ward felt that way too, didn’t he?

Soergel I think to some degree he did. To play enough games, you need to play in the summer. And there needs to be some way to finance it. I think Gary had a plan as to how to do it, but he couldn’t get enough support to get it done. But I don’t know how these kids can play 50 and 60 games in the spring and go to school and make their grades. And to me, education is just too important. That’s the reason I came to college. I wanted an education. Again, I’m grateful that I had that opportunity and that Oklahoma State did give me a good education. I felt like I got a good education here.

Gill What do you think about Frank Anderson and the team nowadays, the program? Have you had a chance to watch some of the games under Frank?

Soergel I think he’s going the right direction. I think their pitching is getting better. That’s the disappointment that I’ve had with OSU’s baseball is their pitching. They give up too many runs. With Gary, when Gary Ward was here, their hitting, they could score runs, but their pitching was suspect. And then when [Tom] Holliday took over, same thing. I thought when Frank came in, he was touted to be such a fine pitching coach at Texas, I thought we’d really, really do a lot better pitching. Last season they started doing better pitching, and I hope that continues this year. Because I’m a great believer that if you don’t give up many runs, you’re going to be in the ballgame. And there’s something about that pitching and defense, that’s just absolutely important to me.

Gill It is. Kind of winding up here, I’m thinking of Dick Soergel the football player, the basketball player, the baseball player, the student athlete, the business manager for 18 years. A lot of people know you and through the years, how do you want people to remember Dick Soergel? How do you hope they’ll remember you?

Soergel Oh, that’s a hard question. I would probably say I’d like to be remembered first of all as someone that kept his word. I don’t know of anybody I’ve lied to, and that may be to a fault. I’d also like to be remembered as being a friend. Someone that takes care of their friends. I’d also like to be remembered as a husband and a father. I think those

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are the things that I’d like to be remembered for.

------End of interview ------

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