The Birthplace of Claude Berry

Losantville, Indiana, is the birthplace of a little-remembered baseball player named Claude Elzy Berry (1880–1974). Berry was a catcher for professional baseball teams between 1902 and 1917, though he played in the minor leagues for most of those years. In 1904 he made his major league debut and played three games for the Chicago White Sox, and later Berry also played for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Pittsburgh Stogies. With the Stogies, he caught a no-hitter for pitcher Frank Allen in 1915. [1] Despite being a middling baseball player, Berry earned a spot in baseball lore for being the first player to wear a protective cup. [2] After his career in sports ended, Berry moved to Richmond, Indiana, and became a real estate agent. In 1967, a few years before his death at the old age of 93, Berry told Richmond Palladium-Item and Sun-Telegram reporter Don Fasnacht one more story of historical import: His mother was a schoolmate of the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and when he was a young boy, he was once hanging out at the train station a town away from her home in North Star, Ohio, when a man paid him 50 cents to deliver a package of steak to her door. Apparently he was “so excited at meeting the woman marksman that he rode his father’s horse into the ground on the return trip,” and it later died. [3] Berry’s enthusiasm followed him into adulthood, though in a less punishing manner; he earned the nickname “Admiral” for being a snappy dresser. [4]