Don Tabron, 93: SS For Chatham Colored All-Stars
Bill Schenley
FROM: The (Ontario) Chatham Daily News ~
By Mark Malone, Daily News Staff
One of the most storied teams in Chatham sports
history has lost its final surviving player.
Don Tabron of the 1934 Chatham Colored
All-Stars [1] died Dec. 19 in Detroit at age 93.
Tabron was a shortstop and pitcher for the Colored
All-Stars, the first Chatham team to win an Ontario
Baseball Association championship and the first
all-black team to enter the OBA playdowns.
The team was inducted into the Chatham Sports
Hall of Fame in 2000.
The Toronto Blue Jays saluted the Chatham Colored
All-Stars by wearing their replica uniforms for
a game July 13, 2002 [2].
"I never anticipated anything like this," Tabron said
at the time. "At no time in my life did I think
something like this might happen."
The last two surviving players -- Tabron and Sagasta
Harding -- received a pre-game tribute at the
SkyDome and threw out the ceremonial first pitches.
Harding died in December 2002.
Horace Chase, a son of former All-Stars player Earl
(Flat) Chase, spoke annually with Tabron for the
past few years.
"He was a nice man," Horace Chase said. "Very
easy to talk to. Very social, jovial."
Tabron was recruited from
Detroit to play for the Colored All-Stars as an
18-year-old. He lived with teammate Wilfred
(Boomer) Harding and his wife.
"I remember them talking favour-ably about him,"
said their son, Blake Harding. "He stayed with them
for about a year, a year-and-a-half."
Tabron's baseball skills saved him from paying rent
to the Hardings.
"They wanted him to play ball," Blake Harding said.
"I guess that was worth the rent. He was quite
a player."
Tabron later played against legendary pitcher Satchel
Paige and visited segregated states in the southern
U. S. with the Detroit Stars.
He threw out the first pitch at Comerica Park before
a Detroit Tigers game in 2003.
Even if the major leagues had been desegregated in
the 1930s, Tabron wasn't sure if he could have made
a team.
"I thought I might have made the No. 1 minor
(league)," he said in 2002. "I thought my hitting as
a shortstop would have kept me out of the majors.
I was not a great hitter."
Tabron returned to Detroit in 1935 and became an
electrician. In 1944, he opened the Tabron Electric
Co., a family business that ran for more than 50
years.
He suffered in recent years from dementia, prostate
cancer and congestive heart failure.
He is survived by his wife Velma, sons Donald Jr.
and Gerald and daughter Jo Ellen.
---
[1] Canadian Provincial League
[2] The Blue Jays, behind seven shutout innings from
Chris Carpenter, beat the Red Sox 4-1.
http://espn.go.com/media/pg2/2002/0724/photo/a_bluejays_sp.jpg
Thanks to Tom Hawthorne for passing this obit along.