Bud Kane, Deceased

Frank (Bud) Kane

We regret to report that our long time Browns Fan Club member and Treasurer, Bud Kane, passed away on March 4, 2014.

Bud joined the Fan Club when it was organized in 1984 and served as its treasurer for 26 years. He’s been a Brownie fan going way back to the 1930s. Bud is also a member of SABR (Society for American Baseball Research). His business career, of over 40 years, was in the trucking business.

Bud was somewhat of a walking encyclopedia of baseball with a heavy focus on the history of the St. Louis Browns. One of Bud’s many memories was attending the first night game in Sportsman’s Park against the Cleveland Indians and Bob Feller.
 
There is no funeral as he donated his body to St. Louis University. More information on Bud's contributions will be in Pop Flies due out next month. 

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Dear Brownie Fans, Friends, and Colleagues . . . . From Bill McCurdy

I'm only ten minutes into the news that we've lost Bud Kane, so please forgive me if I cannot find all the words to fill the need I immediately had to reach out to all of you. I have only known Bud since 1996, the first year I came to St. Louis for a Browns banquet with Jerry and Mary Witte, but I can tell you this much. - Bud Kane was one of the big reasons I joined the club and kept coming back for several other banquets over the years. Like many of you, I felt like the lucky new kid on the block who just met the one guy who got me into the sandlot game that was already going on.

http://sabr.org/latest/memoriam-frank-bud-kane

Bud was that kind of guy. He made strangers feel welcome. And he helped those of us newbies who loved the Browns to quickly realize that , if we loved the Browns, we never were strangers at all.

Bud was a little older than me, but we came from the same Irish-American ethnic and religious pot that ladled its way all over the USA from the 19th century forward. We were children of the Great Depression, but summer citizens of the sandlot that once owned American kids in every city and state back then and in the immediate years that followed WWII.

Over the years, Bud and I have kept in regular, if sporadic touch, on everything from our shared sandlot experiences to the Saturday serials, westerns. and B movies of  Charlie Chan that we also treasured at our local neighborhood movie houses in the separate, but connected picture show worlds of St. Louis and Houston.

I already miss you, Bud. Now there's one less of us in this world who remembers both Baby Doll Jacobson and Al "Lash" LaRue.

Rest in Peace, Friend, The Big Field of Dreams Come True - is now all yours - in all you now do.

I wrote a poem many years ago about my own reawakening to the sandlot. I call it "The Pecan Park Eagle" - the name our gang once  gave to our sandlot baseball team in Houston. The poem wrote itself through me after my son Neal, then age 8. had gone to a nearby abandoned school to throw the ball around and play some flies and rollers.

On the way home, I thought I saw an old baseball in the weeds. So I pulled it out, only to find that it was only an old baseball cover. Still, I kept it as we headed down the two block walk home.

"What are you going to do with that old ball cover, Daddy?" Neal asked.

 "I have no idea," I said.

When we got home, I plunked the cover down on the kitchen table and reached for a pen and paper. The poem wrote itself in about ten minutes.

Thank you, Bud, for being open to taking in new old friends, even those of us who only found you late in each other's "Gasoline Alley" comic strip lives.

Love and Peace, Your Pal, Bill McCurdy