LJ baseball: Olsen 'the legend'

Ed Olsen, La Jolla High first baseman
1951-52-53 (Photo by Ed Piper)
 

By Ed Piper

I went to Ed Olsen's house yesterday (May 8).

It was quite a walk through old-time baseball.

At the La Jolla High Alumni Baseball Game March 1, Howard Frank introduced me to a couple of people, including Olsen. I was hungry. I was looking for folks who lived and can tell about the history of high school sports in San Diego.

"He (Olsen) is one of the true legends of La Jolla High baseball," Frank informed me at the time.

I'm a transplant from elsewhere, though from within California. Hence, the desire to learn more about the place where I moved 25 years ago.

Ed Olsen certainly fills the bill.

And he can tell a story. Multitudinous (as my mother would say), even.

For two hours, we sat in his (increasingly) warm living room, me looking up at the walls, mostly covered with framed photos of Babe Ruth (several, including in the downstairs bathroom), Lou Gehrig, and other baseball icons, while the former Viking baseball player regaled me with story-after-story about the old days.

Though he only reached the minor leagues as a player (a .273 career average, he told me), he coached and managed in the Yankees and Padres organizations, as well as at El Capital High and Grossmont College.

The fun part for me was that the 83-year-old (soon to turn 84 next month) cited the names of major leaguers I read about as a boy in the 60's--but he also met or interacted in person with many of them.

Bob Skinner, the Pittsburgh Pirate star--he's a local story in himself. Bill Bevens--Yankee pitcher in a photo on a wall. Whitey Wietelmann. I said his name out loud to Ed, incorrectly pronouncing his last name "White-elman". "Wee-telman," Olsen corrected me.

Minnie Minoso was in the same photo. One or two others I recognized.

Being selected as one of two bat boys (one for the home team, one for the visitors) for the old San Diego Padres of the high-minors Pacific Coast League at the end of the 1940's, "I got to sit with the coaches," Olsen reported. "I learned a lot of baseball."

Many of the managers and coaches in the PCL, at the AAA level, were former major league stars, even Hall of Famers: Mel Ott, the Giants' home run hitter, among others.

And in two hours, we only covered Ed's early years. "We didn't get to the later stuff yet," the Viking Hall-of-Famer advised me as I left, pages and pages of notes written as fast as I could, trying to keep up with his vast stream of memories.