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on to a pro career that also included managerial stops with the Yankees and Cubs. As general manager and then as a superscout, he is widely considered to be the man most responsible for the turnaround in the fortunes of the Yankees by the mid-1990s, when the team became a perennial contender and stopped trading prospects for quick-fix players. He was one of the most highly regarded baseball minds in the country. The baseball field at Kent State would be named for him until replaced by the current Schoonover Field in 2005.
    Kent State became well known nationally during Thurman’s rookie season with the Yankees when National Guardsmen killed four student demonstrators during the height of Vietnam war protests going on across the country. It was in many ways the lowest point of the antiwar campus protests: Americans firing on Americans.
    Although his sympathies were surely “antihippie,” Thurman was not drawn into the nation’s great debate over Vietnam. He and his friends—teammates mostly—concentrated on getting into the Army Reserve as a way of avoiding the draft. None of his high school friends can recall anyone from Lehman being killed in Vietnam, and as the Class of 1965, they were out of school before the war issue became divisive. College, then, provided an escape from the draft during the late 1960s.
    Just as there were few teams known as the Polar Bears—his high school team’s nickname—at Kent State he played for the Golden Flashes, a unique college nickname. His sophomore and junior years, when he became a full-time catcher, saw him mature into a pro prospect.
    Thurman lived in a dorm for all of his Kent State years, although he was a member of a fraternity. He started out as a business major but switched to health ed, with an eye toward teaching.
    “Moose Paskert, our coach, was ‘old school,’” says Steve Stone. “He was a believer in seniority. If you were there longer, you earned the captaincy. If you were a senior, you pitched the big MAC tournament games instead of the sophomores. He had his rules. He was big and gruff. And we’d get on him.
    “He used to say to us, ‘Boys, I can go anywhere in the country and within five minutes, someone will come by and say, “How ya doin’, Moose?”’ So we go to Durham, North Carolina, to play Duke on this one trip, and the umpire comes to the dugout, leans in, and says, ‘How ya’ doin’, Bruce?’ Ha! He called him Bruce. So on the bus trip home, Thurman and I sat in the back and every twenty or thirty minutes, one of us would holler to the front of the bus, ‘How you doin’, Bruce?’
    “We never had a budget to take a Southern trip like other schools. Lynchburg, Virginia, was our idea of a Southern trip. It would be thirty-three degrees in Canton, then we’d bus it to Lynchburg, we’d get off the bus, and it would be thirty-two.
    “One time we stayed in a place that wasn’t quite a motel. It had a gym on the third floor, a pool on the second floor, the boiler room on the first floor, and we stayed below that. The place was crawling with giant cockroaches. Moose probably got a deal and we stayed for free. Thurman kept a bat in his bed and kept swinging at the cockroaches, trying to kill them all as they crawled from the pipes. It was ugly. Finally Moose comes in and says, ‘All right, cut the crap. Anyone who wants to can go sleep in the bus for all I care.’
    “Well, guess what? We all got out of bed and started to head for the bus. Moose blocked the door and made us go back to our bunks.”
    On the field, Thurman was blossoming.
    “Thurman already carried himself like a star,” says Stone. “He had no doubt that he was going to be a major league star. None. Amazing self-confidence. He was so gifted; he had this phenomenal ability, a heart the size of Long Island, and all of it wrapped in the wrongbody. He shouldn’t have been squatty; he should have been six-three with the grace of an antelope, not five-eleven and 195. But you