A baseball player wanted to help after a natural disaster. The public brought emergency supplies to a baseball stadium. A group loaded the goods onto an airplane.
The story has echoes of the scene this week outside of PNC Park, where Pittsburghers turned out in droves to donate emergency supplies for the Pirates’ upcoming Puerto Rico relief mission.
But for Tom Walker, Neil Walker’s father, that scene played out in almost the exact same way — in 1972.
Walker, a former MLB pitcher, was playing winter ball in Puerto Rico in the winter of 1972 when Roberto Clemente made his fateful flight to Nicaragua. Walker had played on Clemente’s winter ball team the year before, and he helped Clemente load materials into vehicles at Hiram Bithorn Stadium and onto the airplane.
He asked to join Clemente’s mission to aid earthquake victims in Nicaragua, but the plane was full, and Clemente told Walker to stay home and party instead — after all, it was New Year’s Eve.
Walker, 23 at the time, left the airport, got something to eat, went to his apartment and heard a knock on his door. His friend asked if he’d heard about Clemente. No, he replied, but he had just seen him in person. Then, his friend told him about the crash.
“The world stopped for me right there,” Walker said. “I was very young, but it still stopped for me, because you still had to process this, you know, ‘What if?’ And today, at 68, I still process it differently because it means so much more to me.”
Walker, who remains close with the Pirates organization nearly two years after his son was traded to the New York Mets, filled up his SUV with donations and drove to PNC Park on Tuesday. He has a fractured foot, so he couldn’t move the items himself, but watched with admiration as car after car was unloaded, glad to see Clemente’s philanthropic ethos live on in Pittsburgh.
Still, he experienced déjà vu, as memories of helping Clemente load his plane resurfaced. “This is just eerie,” he told a friend who works in the Pirates’ front office.
“I was having a real hard time emotionally with processing all of what was going on, because in my mind, I had seen this before, but in a different way,” he said.
As Walker drove home up I-79, he had to turn off the radio. When he saw his wife, Carolyn, at home, he gave her a hug and told her he loved her, and that he was emotionally drained from reliving that day in 1972.
“It’s just one of those moments that got to my soul,” Walker said. “It really did. But I’m happy about it. … I’m happy that his legacy and spirit still lives on.”
Elizabeth Bloom: ebloom@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1750 and Twitter: @BloomPG.
First Published: October 4, 2017, 8:20 p.m.
