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JUNE 19, 1924–OCTOBER 26, 1969

Major League Career

1948; 1951

Time as a Red

1948; 1951

Position

PITCHER

MANY PLAYERS IN THE 1940s LOST SIGNIFICANT YEARS from their baseball careers while serving in the military during World War II. Jim Blackburn nearly lost his life.

Born in Warsaw, Kentucky, Blackburn grew up in Northside, after the family moved to Cincinnati during the Depression. “Things were bad. You couldn’t make any money down on those little farms,” says Jim’s brother Millard. “My dad got a job at a box-springs factory.”

Blackburn attended Chase Elementary and Hughes High School, where his pitching prowess caught the eye of major league scouts. A big (6′4″ and 190 pounds), hard-throwing right-hander, he was signed by the Reds after graduating, going to the minors when he was 17. He spent two years in D ball in the Georgia-Florida League, not pitching particularly well, and then moved up to AA Syracuse in 1943, where he was 0–3 with a 5.31 ERA in 39 innings.

According to his profile on baseballinwartime.com, he was inducted into the Army in March 1944 and was stationed at Fort Wheeler in Georgia until he left for Europe. During the infamous Nazi counter-offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge, Sergeant Blackburn led a light machine-gun troop into combat, where his ankle was shattered before he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp. He was declared missing in action on December 23.

“That was a Christmas present my mom didn’t want,” recalls Millard. “We didn’t find out what happened until April. You just didn’t know. We didn’t want to think he was killed.”

While a prisoner, he nearly starved to death, dropping to 115 pounds, says Millard. After being released in April 1945, he was sent to an army hospital in Cleveland to recover. Still rail thin from the war, he returned to the Reds for spring training in 1946, where he earned the nickname “Bones.”

“He never got his full weight back,” Millard says. “And with his bad ankle, he never was the same pitcher.” Somehow he recovered enough that, after three years at Class A Columbia, he made his major league debut, on July 24, 1948. When starter Johnny Vander Meer was shelled in the first two innings, Blackburn came in and pitched 4.1 innings, giving up two runs on six hits. He remained with the Reds that season, appearing in 16 games, all in relief. With a 1.608 WHIP (he surrendered 38 hits and 14 walks in 32.1 innings), he wasn’t exactly putting out fires and was sent to the minors. Then in 1950 at AA Tulsa, he posted a 21–7 record with a 2.73 ERA in 234 innings, which put him back on management’s radar. He was called up in 1951, appearing in two games in relief. In 3.2 innings, he gave up seven runs, including three home runs.

He didn’t pitch in the majors again. The Reds traded him to the Yankees, and he put in a couple more minor league seasons before calling it quits at the age of 29.

He took a job at a Coca-Cola bottling plant, where he worked for a number of years. During that time, he taught himself archery, mastering the sport well enough to run a program for the Cincinnati Recreation Commission. Several of his students went on to national and world competitions, including Nancy Vonderheide Kleinman, who became a world champion.

He also became an accomplished fisherman and, according to his obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer, “was a professional fly tier” and a recognized horseman.

“Anything he got his fingers into, he would go all the way with it,” says Millard. “That’s how he was with baseball and with other things later.”

Blackburn eventually became a manager at Brendamour’s Sporting Goods downtown. He and his wife, Coral, had no children, but he took a keen interest in teaching young people. Then at just 46, he suffered a fatal heart attack and died suddenly. Millard says heart problems were hereditary and not associated with his war experience. After packing so much into a short life and defying so many odds, Jim Blackburn’s time simply had come.