Mormon Elder Pitched A Fast Ball

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 11

Mormon Elder Pitched A Fast Ball

ipHE softball was old and x grubby but the Californian’s lean fingers slid round it affectionately; there was a distant look in his eyes as if he was hearing the call to.action once again. “It feels good to have a ball ip my mitt again," said Paul H. Dunn, one-time pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and now an elder in the Church of Latter-Day Saints. “Once you have baseball in your blood you never really lose it. - Elder Dunn was standing on a lawn amid the pleasant surroundings of the Latter-

Day Saints' chapel in Fendalton road—a far cry from the cauldron of American major league baseball: But the touch of the old softball, which bore mute testimony to the battering it had received on a Papanui backyard diamond, rolled back the years for Paul Dunn. Once again he was on the mound for the Cardinals; once again he twirled into his wind-up. Instantly he transmitted the sense of unbridled speed from the days when he used to project the ball at a batter so fast that it looked no bigger than an aspirin. Elder Dunn cut his baseball teeth with the New York Yankees. As a boy he joined the team under its “farm” system of gradual development of young players. Lou Garrig, one of the great names of baseball, was his idol. “It was a strenuous life, living out of a suitcase ail the time,” he recalled. “I think it wears the players out more than the game.” He signed with the Cardinals in 1942 but after a few

months he exchanged his baseball kit for an Army uniform and saw heavy fighting in Guam and Okinawa. He rejoined the Cardinals in 1946 and played through to 1949, when he broke a small connecting bone in the shoulder of his throwing arm and gave up the game. In his five years at St Louis he pitched to many of the notables of American baseball, including Joe diMaggio, Stan Mustal and Bob Feller. But, he reflected, pitching was a hard way to make a living.

Before his injury he had begun to study education and later he was to take three degrees at the University of Southern California. Now, he is one of the Mormon Church’s 38 general authorities and one of the two responsible for New Zealand. “And I don’t know of a more delightful area to be responsible for," he said. “This is my first trip to New Zealand—the first of many." Elder Dunn’s five yean in major league baseball were not wasted. These days he finds his background of and continued interest in sport fora* a basis of <WywMinn with many of the young people he meets in the course of his travels.