Coming soon  ·  Wichita, Kansas  ·  1963

TheBone
Yard
Boys

A true story of grit and determination

Written by H.D. (Dee) Cartwright

Fifteen teenage scrappers. A rookie coach. Arguably the worst diamond in Kansas. Sixty years later, they're finally ready to tell it.

Tell me when it's out Read the story

Printed through Barnes & Noble Press  ·  Soon on Amazon

The Bone Yard Boys — front cover

From the preface

Sixty years is a long time to sit with a story.

Long enough for the rough edges to wear down. Long enough for the arguments to fade, the details to blur, the losses to soften into something almost noble. Long enough, if you're not careful, to turn what really happened into something tidy. Something safe.

But that's not what this is. This story didn't stick because it was easy. It stuck because it was hard. Because the odds said it couldn't work out the way it did.

H.D. (Dee) Cartwright  ·  Preface

A player holding a hand-lettered sign reading The Bone Yard Rocks

The field

They named it
the Bone Yard

Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School was known for academics, football and basketball. Not baseball. What the team had was a patch of Kansas ground that gave up rocks faster than fifteen boys could haul them away.

Tight budgets. Uniforms barely more than hand-me-downs. A coach who had never run a program before. Every reason to expect nothing at all.

So they picked up the rocks. And then they learned to play on what was left.

Players clearing rocks from the field by hand
Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School, Wichita, Kansas, circa 1956

Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School  ·  Wichita, Kansas  ·  circa 1956

The name on the building

The school was built
on a promise

Engraved portrait of Chaplain Emil J. Kapaun
Chaplain Emil J. Kapaun  ·  1916 – 1951

On November 2, 1950, at the Battle of Unsan, Chaplain Emil Joseph Kapaun was captured by North Korean forces after refusing to abandon wounded American soldiers on the battlefield. In the prison camps he shared what little food he was given, tended wounds, stole rations at great personal risk to keep other men alive, and stayed at the side of the dying until the end. He died on May 23, 1951, and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The men who survived those camps came home and refused to let him be forgotten. They raised the money themselves and gave it to his home diocese to build a school in his name. Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School opened in Wichita in the fall of 1956.

Seven years later, a baseball team walked out onto its worst piece of ground.

Chaplain Kapaun lives and will live in the walls of the new high school in Wichita.

Bishop Mark Carroll  ·  September 6, 1956

1961 – 1963

The Cardiac Kids

Thirty-cent gasoline. Black and white television. The sound of wooden bats. A young Catholic president and a country sure of itself.

And in Wichita, a team nobody had any reason to watch, playing its way toward the 1963 Kansas State Baseball Championship — coming apart and holding together, more than once, along the way.

Illustration of a Kapaun pitcher in his delivery
The 1963 Kapaun Crusaders baseball team
Enjoy the ride. When you finish, you may never whine again.

Bill Kentling  ·  Prep Editor, Wichita Eagle-Beacon  ·  From the Foreword

15
Teenage scrappers
1
Rookie coach
60+
Years of keeping it
Illustration of a meeting in the Kapaun coach's office

The men who wrote it

Told by the boys
who lived it

"I pity the poor soul who takes on the writing of a book as a solitary effort."

Three teammates surveyed and interviewed every one of the eleven remaining players — and their coach — then met with him every few weeks for his perspective and his blessing. What they built is not a memoir. It's the team's account of itself, checked against itself.

H.D. (Dee) Cartwright

Author. Carried the writing, and reluctantly agreed to put only his name on the front.

Leo (Andy) Anderson

On board from the get-go. Co-conducted the interviews with every surviving teammate.

Hiram (Hi) Lewis III

Joined midway with the memories, the editing, and a way to finish it well.

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