By Mike London
Salisbury Post
SALISBURY — In 1955, the Greensboro Daily News picked a 16-man All-State high school baseball team, including players from the mountains to the coast.
Four of those 16 — Boyden pitcher Tom Eaton, Granite Quarry catcher Virgil Bernhardt, Statesville shortstop Deems “Butch” Allie and China Grove shortstop Richard Snider — played for the Joe Ferebee-coached 1955 Salisbury American Legion team that won state, regional and sectional championships and made it all the way to the World Series in Minnesota. A seriously good coach was blessed with seriously good talent, and a perfect storm resulted.
Allie who would go on to be a captain for Duke football was quicker, so Ferebee played Allie at shortstop and moved Snider to third base. The position change didn’t affect Snider’s mighty bat, and he would provide much of the power for that historic team that captured the imagination of baseball fans and changed Legion baseball in Salisbury forever.
Snider died on Feb. 24 at 87. He was the last of that All-State fearsome foursome to pass.
Richard Eugene Snider was a popular fellow at China Grove High, 6-foot-2 and movie-star handsome. He graduated with the the Class of 1956. He played basketball for coach Lope Linder, but baseball, where he could launch rockets with his wood bat, was clearly his thing. He probably was the Red Devils’ second-best athlete as Carl Drye, a 250-pound Shrine Bowler and Duke football recruit who could play baseball, basketball and just about everything else exceptionally well, had to be No. 1.
Drye was the landslide winner in the Senior Superlative vote by his China Grove classmates as “Most Athletic.” Snider probably didn’t mind settling for “Best Looking.”
Snider was born on Nov. 8, 1938, so he was still just 15 when he arrived for tryouts at Newman Park in the summer of 1954. The 1954 Salisbury Legion team gets lost in the shadow of the famous 1955 squad, but they were good. They set the stage for the next summer. Eaton was already wild and totally un-hittable. There was a night the southpaw struck out 15 and walked 15 but finished the game.
Snider immediately established himself as the 3 hitter in front of cleanup man Bernhardt in a stout 1954 lineup. There was a night in June at Lexington’s Holt-Moffitt Field when Snider posted a 6-5-4-4 boxscore in a 20-4 Salisbury romp. He didn’t hit a homer that night, but he did have a triple.
There was a night early in the 1955 season when Salisbury beat Spencer, 19-4. Snider accomplished something unheard of in that game for the wood-bat era — socking two homers and driving in seven runs. To put that explosion in perspective, Salisbury hit only 13 homers that entire season, seven by Snider.
The 1955 Salisbury crew was an even better offensive team than the 1954 squad, so stacked that Snider often batted fifth behind Bernhardt.
Snider crushed a booming homer in the playoff series with Winston-Salem and hit another against Burlington.
When Salisbury pounded Shelby in the Western North Carolina championship series, Shelby coach Pop Simmons, who had coached Shelby to the national title 10 years earlier, said Salisbury was the hardest-hitting Legion team he’d ever witnessed.
In the state championship series with Wilmington, Salisbury needed those big bats to come through, and they did. They won two games in that series by 13-11 scores.
In the sectional game in which Eaton pitched his famous no-hitter against North Charleston, S.C., Snider belted a home run that got overlooked.
Snider also delivered three hits and three RBIs in the sectional victory over New Orleans that punched Salisbury’s ticket to the World Series. Back home, baseball fans went crazy. A town of 20,000 had beaten a city of 500,000.
Salisbury played only three games in the Legion World Series, and won only the opener in which Eaton was injured. In the devastating 7-6 loss to Washington, D.C., that doomed Salisbury’s run, Snider had three hits and four RBIs. He was 6-for-15 in the World Series.
For the 1955 American Legion season, Snider batted .356 with a team-leading 50 RBIs in 38 games. Besides the seven homers, he had 11 doubles and five triples.
The Cincinnati Reds scouted North Carolina high schools and Legion teams aggressively in the 1950s, so it wasn’t surprising that they signed Snider. He played minor league ball in the Reds organization from 1957-59. He didn’t get to play shortstop or third base, but he played first base, outfield and even caught some.
His best pro days were in the 1958 season when he helped the Geneva (NY) Redlegs win the championship of the New York-Pennsylvania League. He powered 22 homers that season, whacked 20 doubles and drove in 84 runs.
But Snider had a blind spot at the plate, and opposing managers and pitchers figured it out. His contact was violent and powerful, but he was striking out way too much.
In 1957, Snider moved up to Class C ball with the Reds farm team in Visalia, California, but his numbers leveled off to 13 homers, 19 doubles and 59 RBIs. He was finished with pro ball at age 21.
He became a driver during his working years, for Johnson Motor Lines, UPS and Food Lion.
He is survived by a son and daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
There will be a graveside service held for Snider at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, March 4, at Rowan Memorial Park.
