Oral history - Colin Smith

Colin Smith's introduction to baseball was in the early 1950s at Boulder Central primary school in the Goldfields town of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. His schoolmates Roy and Ron Graffin brought a simple form of baseball to the playground using tennis balls, something for a bat, and bare hands to catch the ball. One day deputy headmaster Bill Liddicoat, himself a baseballer, asked Colin "would you like to play real baseball?". "Yes, or course," was Colin's answer. "Tell all your mates to be at the Boulder Oval, 9 o'clock on Saturday morning."

The word got around and on Saturday there were dozens of kids there, when a lone cyclist arrived on a bicycle with a hessian sugar bag over his shoulder. In the bag were at least nine old baseball gloves, a set of old catching gear and a few bats and balls. The cyclist was Jim Puckett, of the renowned Puckett sporting dynasty. For Colin and his mates, that's when their 'real baseball' playing days started...with Jim and Bill on Boulder Oval.

At the time there was no junior baseball competition in the Goldfields, so for the next couple of seasons the primary school baseballers played against another newly-formed group of players from the high school. When the older boys were about to leave school at age 14, Jim Puckett and some other players split from the Chaffers senior team to form a second senior team and the junior players joined Chaffers No.2.

Colin's career playing senior baseball in the early 1950s was interspersed with selection in representative Goldfields junior teams that competed against State junior teams and visiting metropolitan junior teams.

In 1953, at the age of 15, Colin and his three mates, Neil Mitchell and twins Roy and Ron Graffin, were part of a representative Goldfields team to compete in the Coronation Week Carnival in Adelaide. Making up the rest of the team were senior players Jim Puckett (captain), Jack Warburton, Allan D'Alton, Phil Giblett, Jim Sullivan, G. Williams, Clive Rogers, Don Weir, Cliff Read and Kevin Carter.

Colin continued playing in the senior League for 13 years and served as secretary/treasurer of the Goldfields Baseball Association for several of those years, until 1964 when he moved to Esperance in south-west Western Australia. In the 1970s Colin was posted to Darwin in the Northern Territory, where he took up baseball again, as a player/coach, for four years.