Baseball friends set to reunite
Fred Peritore and Joe Levy read a 55-year-old newspaper article on the Downey Dodgers winning the Connie Mack League championship. (Courtesy photo)
DOWNEY – Throughout most of the 1960s, Fred Peritore was an exceptionally successful youth baseball coach of Downey teams in the Pony, Colt and Connie Mack Leagues, posting winning seasons, capturing league and tournament championships and sending players on to high school, collegiate and professional careers.
On Saturday, September 18, several of Peritore’s former players will salute their old coach with a tribute dinner at the Embassy Suites’ Brickstones Grill.
At Peritore’s request, the dinner is being held in Downey, scene of so many memorable seasons more than half a century ago.
Former players will come from throughout the western states to join in paying homage and thanking Peritore for his lessons on the game and in life.
Among those attending the dinner is Phil Meyer, a hitting and pitching star who signed with the Philadelphia Phillies organization after a storied three-sport career at Pius X High School. Meyer explained Peritore’s success didn’t come by accident.
“If you were on a team that Fred coached, you were expected to commit yourself to a packed schedule of summertime practices interspersed between the league and all-star games that would consume time that would bleed into the latter stages of one school year and usually end just before another one began,” said Meyer.
“As I can only speak for myself, I can say that I’ve been lucky enough to learn a thing or two from nearly every coach that I’ve been linked with. I was able to see, though second-hand, the tactical genius that Cerritos’ coach Wally Kincaid would display in practice sessions, as well as numerous coaches at a professional level, but the measurement of myself as a ballplayer as a result of an association, from beginning to end, was never greater than it was with Fred.”
Jack Harrington, another pitching star of Peritore teams, echoes Meyer’s sentiments. Harrington pitched for two collegiate Hall of Fame coaches, Cerritos’ Wally Kincaid and USC’s Rod Dedeaux. He said that Peritore deserves to be enshrined with them.
“One coach that isn’t in the Coaches Hall of Fame but certainly deserves to be is Fred Peritore,” said Harrington, who posted a 10-0 season for Kincaid at Cerritos and then pitched on a national champion for Dedeaux at USC. “Fred was a unique combination of Coach Kincaid and Coach Dedeaux. He understood the game as well as anyone and delivered an emotional impact to his players that resulted in incredible accomplishment.
“His motivation stimulated me to throw back to back no-hitters in an L.A. County Tournament. Now that was an accomplishment that I totally attribute to Coach Peritore and the tremendous team he put together for us.”
Originally from New York, Peritore moved with his family to Downey in 1954.
“It took me a year to get used to California,” said Peritore, an avid stick ball player in New York, who was shocked to find the game didn’t exist on the West Coast. He also got into fights when his new classmates made fun of his New York accent.
In 1956 Peritore played in what was then called the Middle Leagues and later became the Babe Ruth League. He had quite a season, leading the league in RBIs and making the all-star team as center fielder.
“It was the only time I actually thought I might be a professional ball player,” Peritore said.
The next year, however, he played junior varsity ball at Downey High. The competition was better, and he didn’t enjoy a great year. It probably was just as well he wasn’t playing varsity that year. It was Wally Kincaid’s final year as Downey’s head coach before he founded the baseball program at Cerritos.
“I was terrified of him,” Peritore admitted.
Although baseball was his true love, Peritore joined his classmates every Friday night to cheer on the likes of Randy Meadows, Dallas Moon and Pete Yoder as Downey won consecutive CIF football championships.
After graduation from Downey High in 1958, Peritore enrolled at Long Beach State. After two years, he left school, accepted a job at Downey’s North American Rockwell and embarked on his coaching career. His first endeavor was as a Pony League assistant coach. A season later he became a Pony manager, leading his teams to three straight winning seasons, going 18-2 in 1963.
Peritore and most of the players he knew from Pony League, moved up to Colt League in 1964, and Fred’s Giants won the L.A. County Tournament of Champions behind Harrington’s two no-hitters. After one additional season in Colt League, Peritore and company moved up to Connie Mack ball the following year and won the Metropolitan League championship with Meyer hitting a cool .510.
Peritore left both coaching and his Rockwell job to return to Long Beach State and pursue his dream of becoming a teacher. He was hired as a history teacher at Arcadia High School, and in the spring of 1970, he became the school’s frosh-soph coach. He took over the junior varsity team in 1971 for two years, posting records of 23-0 and 21-2. He then founded the Arcadia Astros, who competed in the Senior Babe Ruth League. His first team posted a 32-0 mark, giving Peritore a 97-3 record over a three-year span. His teams won the Senior Babe Ruth national championship in 1973 and 1977. Although Peritore has retired both from teaching and coaching, the Astros still compete almost 50 years later.
The tribute dinner/reunion will begin at 7 p.m., preceded by a cocktail hour that starts at 6 p.m. Former players interested in attending or sending greetings to Peritore are welcome to contact Dan Armstrong at 949-493-4763.