Daily Hampshire Gazette – “[F]or four or five months in 1942–43, five major league baseball players were enrolled in the Civilian Training Program at the college,” writes Szlosek, a Boston Red Sox fan. “This was their first step toward earning their wings in the Naval Aviation training regimen.”
“The quintet consisted of Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky of the Red Sox, Johnny Sain and Lewis (Buddy) Glemp of the Boston Braves and Joe Coleman of the Philadelphia Athletics,” Szlosek writes. These athletes were among 30 men who participated in the program on the Amherst campus, who “each received 35 hours of flight training, 20 of which were solo time. Additionally, they partook of classroom courses that included mathematics, meteorology and navigation, among others. The chief instructor was an Amherst professor of astronomy, Warren Green ….”
“Prompted by the suggestion of a knowledgeable baseball acquaintance,” one of Szlosek’s classmates and a College archivist recently undertook research into the 1940s program. For Szlosek, “it remains an amazing fact that two of my boyhood heroes walked the same pathways and sat in the same classrooms as I did a decade and a half later.”