James Rada
Emmitsburg Dispatch
(8/16) Many a young boy picks up a bat,
walks to the plate and dreams of slugging his way into immortality. Tolbert
“Percy” Dalton was such a boy and he did manage to find his own type of
immortality. Not because he is forever remembered as one of baseball’s greats,
but because he is one of the few major league players whose death date is
unknown.
Dalton was also a lay preacher for the
Columbia Primitive Baptist Church in Burtonsville, Md.
“The church he was an elder in, to my
knowledge, had other smaller worship locations in the state of Maryland. As an
elder we understand that he would make occasional appearances at Sunday
services at the main church He would speak to certain topics relevant to the
beliefs the church had. He would also baptize new members,” said Richard
Bozzone with the Society for American Baseball Research. Bozzone has been
researching Dalton to try and find where and when he died.
On August 1, 1948, two deacons from the
church visited Dalton’s Emmitsburg home. Dalton had failed to show up for a
church meeting on July 4.
Dalton had only lived in Emmitsburg for a
year, having moved here from the Baltimore area to become editor for the
Emmitsburg Chronicle when it restarted publication after a five-year hiatus
during World War II. He and his wife lived with his wife’s daughter and
son-in-law, Lois and George Heller.
The two deacons couldn’t find Dalton. No
one in his family knew what had happened to him. Since that day no one has ever
been able to ascertain his whereabouts.
Dalton who went by the name of Jack during
his baseball career played four seasons of professional baseball. He was an
outfielder who started in the minor leagues in Des Moines where he batted .208
in 1910. He was invited mid year to join the Brooklyn Robins, predecessor to
the Dodgers. He slumped and was sent to the minor league team in Newark, NJ. He
returned to the Robins in 1914 and then played for the Buffalo Blues in 1915
and Detroit Tigers in 1916. His best year was 1914 when he batted .319. The
following year his batting average was .293 with 28 stolen bases. He finished
his career in 1916 playing most of the season for San Francisco in the minor
leagues and eight games for Detroit.
However, by 1948, at 62 years old, his
glory days were forgotten. Dalton was living in Emmitsburg with his second
wife, Thelma Bradshaw.
Though Dalton was too old to steal bases,
he possibly found one thing he could still steal. Ralph Harris, a former member
and editor of the Primitive Baptist Church paper, knew two of Dalton’s sisters
(now deceased). He asked them what happened to their brother.
“Their response was that he had absconded
with the subscription funds for the church paper. Although Cary did not have
firsthand knowledge of the theft, the story was confirmed by several of the
church leadership when he became editor,” Bozzone said.
Dalton happens to be one of the very few
20th Century major league players for whom death information is not known.
“There are 15 20th Century players for
whom we do no have death details but Dalton is, by far, the most well known of
the players,” Bozzone said.
Bozzone has been assisted in his search
for Dalton by another SABR member Al Quimby. What has made the task so
difficult is that not even the family of Jack Dalton has information on what
happened to him.
No missing persons report appears to have
ever been filed with the Maryland State Police. No articles about his death
have ever turned up. He simply vanished.
SABR member Bill Haber of Brooklyn, NY
also worked on the Dalton case. Though now deceased, Haber’s research over 20
years has corrected errors in more than 200 professional baseball players’
biographies. Haber tracked some of Dalton’s relatives to Emmitsburg in 1978. He
was told that Dalton had simply fallen off the face of the earth and never made
contact with any of his relatives after he left Emmitsburg. He did not even
show up for his brother’s funeral in 1954.
Dalton was born July 3, 1885 in Henderson,
Tenn. He had three sisters Lura, Lena and Lola and one brother Pleasie.
Following Dalton’s baseball career, SABR
determined that in 1921 and 1922 he was a salesman living in Baltimore. In
1930, he was living in Elkridge, Md. By 1940, he was living at Catonsville, Md.
at 2 North Prospect St. In April 1942, his World War II registration cards
lists him as a clerk in the Finance Office of the U.S. Army’s Third Corps
headquarters in Baltimore. After the war, he became involved with the Primitive
Baptist Church and moved to Emmitsburg.
Bozzone is seeking any additional
information. You can reach him at boz9@msn.com or by phone at (860) 872-6743.
Dalton’s disappearance can also be found on www.aafla.org.
