Jim Bradshaw: Ville Platte star found beagles after baseball

Lots of folks had stories about him when Henry John (Zeke) Bonura visited Ville Platte in January, 1954.
The “famous … baseball star” was then a “prominent New Orleans sportsman,” according to the newspapers.
That’s why he’d been invited to speak at the first meeting of the Ville Platte Beagle Club.
Bonura was well remembered as a hard-hitting first baseman who played for some pretty obscure south Louisiana teams while on his way to the big leagues. One of them was in Mowata, the Acadia Parish community that originally named itself Morewater for its deep wells.
According to a long-told story, the board for the sign on the town’s first railroad depot wasn’t long enough for the full name, so the painter shortened it to Mowata.
That may or may not be true, but I’ve never heard any other explanation for the name.
Zeke showed promise as an athlete at a young age. In 1925, when he was 16 years old, he won the national championship in the javelin throw, beating the 1924 Olympic gold medalist and setting a U.S. record.
He went on to stand out in football, baseball, and track at Loyola University.
That’s where he caught the eye of Lawrence Fabacher, who helped develop the south Louisiana rice industry because he needed rice for his Jackson brewery. Zeke starred on the Mowata team (which was named the Mobeers), went on to play in the Evangeline League, then returned to his native New Orleans to play for the Pelicans, which was owned by the Cleveland Indians.
They sent him to their Texas League team in Dallas, where he was the Most Valuable Player in 1933, the year his contract was sold to the Chicago White Sox.
In 1934 he joined a White Sox team led by Hall of Fame pitcher Ted Lyons, a native of Vinton in Calcasieu Parish.
Bonura hit 27 home runs in his first year, a rookie record that stood for nearly 50 years.
Over the next four seasons he hit 79 home runs and became popular enough that the White Sox declared June 11, 1937, as Zeke Bonura Day.
He showed off with a home run, two doubles, and a single.
But while his bat was booming, his critics said, Zeke had a certain nonchalance in fielding.
One biographer claimed that “as easy grounders bounded by untouched, he waved at them with his glove.” The gesture became known as the “Bonura Salute.” Zeke always claimed that was a bum rap. He told a New York sportswriter in 1940 that he never claimed to be the best fielder in the league, “but I ain’t the worst.”
When he was traded in 1938 to the Washington Senators, he was welcomed by Vice President John Nance Garner, one of his biggest fans. Before his first game, Zeke promised to hit a home run especially for Garner. He hit the third pitch he saw as a Senator into the center field seats.
During his playing career, one sportswriter characterized Bonura as “a hustler who likes to win,” and a man “of cheerful demeanor … [who] doesn’t smoke, curse, or drink.”
He was a nice guy, everyone said, but he didn’t back way from a challenge, or forget one. In 1939 New York gossip columnist Dale Harrison reported “a fairish feud” between Bonura and Leo Durocher of the New York Giants. It began in a game when, in Harrison’s words, “Mr. Durocher’s spiked shoe came calamitously close to Mr. Bonura’s.”
The two men lived on different floors of the same New York hotel, and this worried its manager. “
As a consequence of this ticklish situation,” Harrison wrote, “If Mr. Bonura enters an elevator it immediately takes him to his floor and the same goes for Mr. Durocher.
If Mr. Durocher happens to be coming down, and the signal rings for a stop at Mr. Bonura’s floor, the operator pays the signal no heed … it might be Mr. Bonura.”
But when Zeke visited Ville Platte, he’d been retired for six years and his interest was in beagles, not baseball.
According to the Ville Platte Gazette, 51 dogs competed when the Ville Platte club sponsored the first beagle trials ever held in Evangeline Parish on Jan. 31, 1954.
The first-place winner in the 18-inch class was a dog named Fuzzy Autumn owned by Zeke Bonura.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.