A large cross-section of baseball players found their way into military service in the WW2 and Korean conflicts. Morrie Martin was no exception, being drafted into the Army at the outset of 1943. He quickly became a member of the First Army’s 49th Combat Engineers, a position that was the opposite of cushy public relations roles some athletes enjoyed.
The war was very eventful for Martin. He began with Operation Torch in North Africa, fighting to recapture North Africa. He followed this in 1944 by landing in the early waves of D-Day at Utah Beach. He successfully cleared obstacles so heavier equipment could land and proceeded inland. The next month he took part in the following stage of the Normandy invasion as part of Operation Cobra. He was hit by shrapnel in Saint-Lo, receiving the Purple Heart for wounds in his neck and pitching arm.
He continued with his unit, enduring frostbite in the Ardennes as the Battle of the Bulge commenced. Fighting continued with the Allies repulsing attacks and resuming the offensive in 1945 with inroads into Germany. Members of Martin’s unit took overnight shelter in a building in Elsdorf. He and two fellow soldiers slept in the basement while the rest took refuge among the upper floors. A shell scored a direct hit on the structure, killing most of the occupants and collapsing the building down into the basement. Martin and the two soldiers with him spent most of the next day digging themselves out of the rubble, only to emerge into an ongoing battle.
Martin remained with his unit until he was shot by enemy fire the next month. He was evacuated to France, but by the time he arrived his wounded leg was becoming gangrenous. The attending physician recommended amputation to save his life, but a nurse strongly advocated for treatment with the newly developed drug penicillin. Two months later Martin was able to leave the hospital with the same number of legs with which he had entered.
BASEBALL
Martin spent extensive time in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system after returning to the United States. Although he got a few starts with the big league club, it was the Philadelphia Athletics that truly made him a major leaguer. The A’s drafted him in 1950 and threw him into the rotation. He managed as well as a pitcher could on such a team and eventually settled into a role as a middle-reliever. He even posted a winning record with Philadelphia, an impossibility for most pitchers.
WHO IS TOM KENNEY?
A $3 eBay auction landed a Morrie Martin card for my 1952 Topps set. The corners are rounded and a few minor creases snake around just below the surface, but it displays well. A previous owner stamped his name on the back. When I first received the card I didn’t think much about the stamp as this sort of “personal vandalism” is a common feature of older cards. The mark came back to mind when browsing another collector’s (Dean Gearhart) 1952 set on YouTube. The same “Tom Kenney” stamp can be seen in the lower left corner of the video below on the back of Card #81 featuring Vernon Law. It is brief but can be clearly seen for a few seconds.
So who was Tom Kenney? He could have been any one of a number of faceless kids who passed through the 1950s on the way towards living out the rest of their lives. Apparently he had at least two 1952 Topps cards in his collection and my guess is there are more with the same stamp floating around. A check of a names database showed more than 200 current Americans with the name Tom/Thomas Kenney, so more detail about the origin of the card will be needed to solve this mystery. I did come across two minor celebrities with the name, one of which would have been of card collecting age in 1952: Fordham University had a noted track athlete by the same name in the early 1960s. Another Tom Kenney (sometimes written as Kenny) was a producer of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon reboot of 2003.
