Mound Cemetery

Saturday morning some University of Dayton football players were introduced to Ray Brown. Actually, they first had to pull some of the weeds from around his grave and pick up a pair of crumpled potato chip bags and some twigs that were littered around it.   Then they could fully read some of the career highlights that were etched on the back of Brown’s shiny black headstone, which is a story in itself and one we’ll get to later.Brown was one of the greatest big-time baseball players ever to call Dayton home. He’s enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame in Havana and he’s celebrated in the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City. He was known as the “Sunday pitcher” for the mighty Homestead Grays. Negro League teams sent their best pitchers to the mound on Sunday to draw a crowd and no one was better than Brown.A right-handed pitcher with a vicious curveball, he started for the Grays from 1932 to 1945 and led them to eight pennants in nine years. He’s second all-time in lifetime winning percentage in the Negro League and fifth in wins. -- Although baseball’s color barrier kept him from the Major Leagues, he still showed his dominance against big league teams when he got a chance, including throwing a no hitter against the New York Yankees in Puerto Rican winter ball in the 1940s.He starred in Cuba and Mexico, as well, and played for the Dayton Marcos.Originally from Alger,Ohio and once a pitcher at Wilberforce University, he ended up in Dayton, worked at the Sunshine Biscuit Company and died poor and uncelebrated.His 1965 death notice in the Dayton Daily News was on line. There was no mention of baseball, just that friends could call at Bowman Chapel and burial would be at Greencastle Cemetery.But friends stop calling soon after and for 43 years he was buried in an unmarked grave in the new Greencastle Cemetery on Nicholas Road. It...