Les McNeece was a second baseman from Fort Lauderdale when he was chosen to play a demostration game at the 1936 Olympic Games. Here, he’s pictured shortly after arriving at the “Olympic Village” in Berlin.
Leslie McNeece was never very well known in Vero Beach, even though he lived here for the last eight years of his life. He had quietly retired to Indian River County in 1985 to enjoy the pleasures of hitting a golf ball around the Vista Plantation golf course, and when he died in 1993 at age 77, the Press Journal ran a brief obituary that merely mentioned he “was on the 1936 Olympic baseball team.”
A half-century earlier, however, McNeece was the hero of a game that drew the largest crowd ever assembled anywhere to watch baseball—125,000 people—though most of them had not the slightest idea of what the great American game was all about.
So let’s go back to the night of Aug. 12, 1936. The setting is Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in Nazi Germany, on the last day of the Olympic Games. The game was played on the final day because baseball was not then an official Olympic sport but rather a “demonstration sport” between two American teams, one named the U.S. Olympics and the other the World Champions.
Read the entire article in the Summer 2006 issue
True Tails is a series written by Amy Robinson for Vero Beach’s dog lovers. Ask Amy about your dog’s behavior by clicking below.
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