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little thing where we’d tip our caps to each other when one or the other of us got a hit,” recalls Bob Beldon, who went on to play quarterback for Notre Dame and then spent two years with the Dallas Cowboys as a backup to Roger Staubach. “And we’d do it when we passed each other in town too; it just became our thing.”
    “He always had fun at sports,” says Joe Gilhousen, who went to the Worley School with him and played with him in American Legion ball. “He was always the best player at whatever he did, but he did it all with fun. Later he recruited me to go to Kent State with him. I was like his little brother there; he looked after me.”
    In 1964 Thurman drove with his father and Duane to a tryout run by the Pittsburgh Pirates, in Columbus, Ohio.
    “It seemed like it was two hundred degrees that day and we sat around a lot waiting for Thurm’s name to be called to take a few ground balls and bat,” says Duane. “He was a shortstop then, and when he took those ground balls after sitting in the hot sun for what seemed like an eternity, he was less than spectacular. Then when it was his turn to bat, he swung at the first and only pitch he got and hit a one hopper back to the pitcher, and the rest is history. The Pirates didn’t know what they had missed.”
    His classmates remember him as funny, mischievous, realistic, mature, and generally good to be around.
    Recalls Joe Kociubes, “We shared a delivery route for the afternoon paper, the
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. I think he was transitioning it over to me so he could spend more time at sports. One day he was talking about his grades, and he said, ‘I could work hard and turn myself into a solid B or B-plus student. Or I could continue to put my energy into sports and try to become a professional ballplayer. Why doesn’t it make sense for me to get C’s and take a shot at the big leagues instead of putting my energy into getting B’s?’”
    “He was smart though,” says Susie Wilson. “And he enjoyed himself. I remember biology lab the day we had to dissect frogs. I was atthe table behind him with a guy on each side of me. Thurman leaned over and said, ‘You ready for this?’ He was laughing. But I was ready, and the two guys I was working with couldn’t deal with it. No sooner did I cut open the frog than the guy on my left passed out and the one on my right started to get nauseous. Thurman was loving it. He called up front—‘Mr. Mutchmore, Mr. Mutchmore, we’ve got one down here and another one on the way!’”
    Perhaps the most important moment in Thurman’s life came in 1959 when he spotted a pretty girl in the schoolyard.
    Thurman was twelve when he met Diana Dominick at the Worley School. They had both served on the Junior Patrol, walking children across the street. Thurman considered her a “rich kid” because she got thirty cents a day in spending money from her parents, and he didn’t get any. And she’d spend the money on potato chips and Coke for Thurman.
    Neither of them was a rich kid.
    “I was with him the day he met Diana,” recalls Susie Wilson. “We were in the Worley School playground when this pretty girl appears, and Thurman said to me, ‘Who’s that? She looks nice.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s Diana Dominick.’ He liked her at first glance.”
    Thurman would always call her Diane, almost as though he hadn’t heard the name right or just wanted to save a syllable. His friends and teammates would be introduced to her as Diane. But she called herself Diana. Eventually, after Thurman died, she was Diana to everyone. But she was always Diane to him, and to those who knew her through the Yankees.
    She would follow him on his paper route, and Thurman remembered running a mile to her house, giving her a kiss, and then running back to his own home on Frazer Avenue. “Not a bad way to get my running in,” he’d say.
    Diane became a regular presence at Thurman’s side, attending all his games, making her home open to him,