Mount Union borough

Charlie Secrest, Ten Seasons in the Minors

Charles Jackson Secrest was born in Mount Union on January 9, 1935, a son of Jackson L. and Bessie F. Arnold Secrest. His death notice calls him Buckwheat. A 1959 Oregon newspaper and his baseball card call him Charlie. The notice says he graduated from Captain Jack High School in 1954, lettered in three sports and was known locally as an athlete.

He batted and threw left-handed and played the outfield. Baseball-Reference's minor league register counts ten professional seasons from 1954 through 1963, with 992 games and a .282 batting average. He started with five games at Ada in 1954, a Baltimore Orioles affiliate, and the register lists every club after that as a Kansas City Athletics affiliate.

In 1955 he played 140 games for the Seminole Oilers, a Class D club, and hit .307 with 153 hits. In 1958 he played 154 games for the Little Rock Travelers, a Double-A club in the Southern Association, and hit .281 with 21 home runs and 99 runs batted in.

On March 31, 1959, the Herald and News of Klamath Falls, Oregon, reported that he was coming to the Portland Beavers "as additional outfield help." The paper said he was "considered one of the fastest men in the league" and expected him to give the club's center fielder from the year before "a real run for that position." He hit .287 in 90 games with Portland, a Triple-A club, that season. After that came Dallas-Fort Worth, Shreveport, a return to Portland, Albuquerque and, in 1963, Binghamton, where he hit .261 in 102 games.

Topps included him in its 1959 set as card No. 140, listed with the Kansas City Athletics. His death notice says he "played professional baseball for Kansas City Athletics." The records we opened show him with that team's minor league clubs. Baseball-Reference's list of major league players, Retrosheet's biographical file and Major League Baseball's own player search have no Charles or Charlie Secrest, so we found no major league game for him.

He retired from Standard Steel in 1998 as a crane operator. He belonged to Sugar Run Church of the Brethren and liked woodworking and antiques. He and his wife were married 63 years. He was living in Burnham when he died on October 10, 2019, at 84.

Checked against the record. We checked his birth and death dates, position and career against Baseball-Reference's minor league register and StatsCrew, which agree on them, and against the death notice posted on his Find a Grave memorial. We did not see that notice as first printed, so his school, work and family details rest on the posted text. His season lines come from the register. His 1958 line and his move to Portland also appear in the Herald and News of March 31, 1959, which we read as a machine-read transcript, not the page image. That paper gives his 1958 doubles as 53 where the register has 33, so we left doubles out. The two stats sites differ on career runs batted in, so we give no career total. For the major leagues we searched Baseball-Reference's list of major league players, Retrosheet's biographical file and Major League Baseball's own player search, and went through that league's season player lists for 1954 through 1963. None has him, while those lists do carry other players of his era. The near spellings there, Secrist and Sechrist, are other men. That finding rests on those lists, not on team records. Still open: whether he is in the Huntingdon County Sports Hall of Fame, whose own list we have not seen.

Sources

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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