After the Commissioner's ruling and my signing with the St. Louis Cardinals, the waiting period began for spring to start. I knew I would be going to Daytona Beach, Florida, training with the Rochester Red Wings of the AAA International League. Not that I was qualified to play at that level, but it was an opportunity for the manager, coaches and scouts to make a so-called "book" on you at a very early stage of your career.
The time did pass and the day did come for me to catch the bus from Leavenworth to Kansas City on the first leg of my journey to Daytona Beach. At St. Louis I transferred to a super train where I had a compartmentÑbasically a tiny bedroom. That was to be my sleeping and sitting room for the next 1,200 miles, unless I wanted to spend time in the club or dining car.
Not long afterward an elderly gentleman approach me and introduced himself. He asked if I would like to be a "fourth" in a game of Hearts. I didn't know how to say "no," so I joined in. After a few hours I realized the only way I was going to get out of this game was to die or have one of the other players beat me to it. I knew nothing about the game of Hearts when I agreed to play. When we finished I felt as though I could have beaten the person who invented it!
I finally fell asleep about 2 in the morning. The porter rapped on the door three hours later to announce that we were nearing Daytona. It was like awakening to a magic land. I took a cab to the hotel. With no workout scheduled for the first day I took a walking tour of this beautiful city. When I returned to the hotel I met the three other young men who were within months, one way or the other, of my age. All of us realized we weren't there to make the ball club. But we were there to be seen.
We soon realized that a AAA roster was made up of three groups of players: One, in it's mid-twenties, striving for the Majors. A second group that had been up and down too many times, with any one of them looking for his release any day. The third group was comprised of men playing for a paycheck. Their fifteen minutes of glory was gone.
I managed to get into four games in the almost six weeks we were thereÑtwo innings in each game. I didn't tear the world apart, but on the other hand my world wasn't torn apart either.
Spring training came to a close. All four of us were told we were being assigned to a minor league training center in Albany, Georgia. We boarded a train later that day headed for a new experience. After arriving in Albany and getting settled into our hotel we took a cab to look at the complex. Everything below our feet was sand. It's almost imossible to grow grass in sand. There were seven full fields, six with about fifty wood bleacher seats. The seventh was reserved for the Albany Cardinals, a member of the Class D Georgia-Florida League. As it turned out I would be assigned to this team for the entire 1950 season. I lost track of my three friends and never saw them again. I made around thirty starts for the year and struggled to win seven games, losing nine. It was a total difference, compared to good semi-pro ball.
Thanks to the generosity of Walter's brother Gary, here are some of the stories of Walter Montgomery when he was playing for the Omaha Cardinals.