1961 Owls relive days on the field Part 1

These boys of summer may be in the autumn of their lives, but they still had something of a spring in their step as they headed out to the mound between games of a double-header Saturday night at the Statesville High School ballpark.
A starting line-up’s worth of players from the 1961 Statesville Owls of the old Western Carolina League all had plenty of memories and enough stories to write fill a book.
There was the day Dickie Simpson hit a monstrous homerun that cleared the centerfield fence by such an incredible distance that describing it as a “tape-measure” blast would be to minimize its lure. Simpson’s shot would end up being compared with those hit by baseball legends Jimmie Foxx and Josh Gibson, who had made stops in Statesville during the once-popular barnstorming tours.
“That thing landed in a fork in the road out there somewhere, the V, where the road splits off,” recalled Vito Porta of Simpson’s bomb. Porta was the Owls' third baseman and he hit 10 homers himself that year. But the record books credit him with only nine.
“With one of my homeruns in Lexington, a kid got the ball and threw it back over the fence,” Porta said. “I was just jogging around the bases and they threw the ball in and tagged me out at home. I guess they gave me credit for a triple.”
Lexington and Statesville developed something of a rivalry that year: one that more than once ended up with boys being boys.One of the brawls nipped in the bud the promising pitching career of Walter Darton.
Darton, of California, was 4-0 on the year for the Owls and had gotten the call to move up to Triple A Dallas-Fort Worth Rangers and was sent to the hill for a tune-up game against Lexington.
Darton said he had struck one of the Lexington players out three times and, in the hitter’s fourth at-bat, may have come a little bit inside with what some might call “chin music.”“
The guy came running out at me,” Darton recalled. “The next thing I know, I’m on the ground.”
He had torn the ligaments in his pitching arm and his career as a pitcher was, for all intents and purposes, over. He never pitched in Texas.
But in the kind of strange circumstances that can only happen in minor league baseball, Darton was called on to call balls and strikes in a game against Salisbury. The umpires apparently got lost on the way to the game so one player was chosen from each team to ump. Darton got the plate assignment and is believed by some to be the first black umpire in the Western Carolina League and one of the first black umps in minor league history.