Tale unravels like a loose thread on an old baseball

He claimed to be a former player. Even his wife was fooled.

By Times Wires
Published September 6, 2007

LAKELAND - Everyone here knew Bill Henry as an old major-league pitcher - at church, around the golf course and certainly at home.

Henry, 83, didn't like to boast, but he had stories. The boys at the 19th Hole lounge at the golf course had to pry for nostalgia, but Henry knew his stuff - his appearance in the 1961 World Series with the Cincinnati Reds, the 1960 All-Star selection, the 16 years in the majors.

But it turns out this Bill Henry was not the Bill Henry who played major-league ball, and the tales he spun are quickly unraveling a week after his death following a heart attack.

News of Henry's death appeared first in a paid obituary in the Ledger last Thursday. On Saturday, a brief news item about Henry's death appeared in the Ledger's sports section. That item was picked up by the Associated Press.

And then Bill Henry - the lanky left-hander from Texas who debuted with the Boston Red Sox in 1952 and went on to a career record of 46 wins, 50 losses, 90 saves and a career earned run average of 3.26 - caught wind of the story. Needless to say, it took him by surprise.

"Let everybody know that I'm still kicking," the retired ballplayer told the Ledger on Tuesday from his home in Texas. "I don't know what to think," he said of the man who took his identity. "I'm baffled."

He's not alone. The widow of the retired salesman from Michigan and his stepchildren are equally baffled. Elizabeth Henry just wants to mourn her husband, the man she had retired to Florida with nearly 20 years ago, the man she now fears she never really knew.

"I just took his word that that's who he was," she said Tuesday. "It's an awful shock. It's hard."

A baseball buff in Boston uncovered the hoax.

David Lambert, a genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, noticed a discrepancy in the age mentioned in an obituary.

Henry, the retired major-leaguer, was born Oct. 15, 1927, in Alice, Texas. The deceased Henry was born Feb. 1, 1924, in Moberly, Mo.

When he phoned the former pitcher's wife in Deer Park, Texas, to check the facts, Lambert said he wasn't prepared to talk to Bill Henry.

"He is definitely the real player," Lambert said of the man in Texas.

Lakeland's Bill Henry, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease in the past few years, had virtually no evidence of the career of his alter ego.

There were similarities. He and the ballplayer were both 6-foot-2 lefties.

Besides that, the real Bill Henry featured on the baseball cards looked just like the one in Lakeland. "It's creepy striking - the nose, the face, the squinty eyes," said Jeanine Hill-Cole, the wife of Henry's stepson David Cole. "I mean, I'm still here looking at the picture we put in for his obituary, and you'd swear that it was the same man."

Lakeland's Henry left behind a handful of honest-to-goodness Bill Henry baseball cards, one of which is autographed, although no one's sure if it's authentic.

His widow and third wife, Elizabeth, said her husband was fond of showing the cards to friends, even though the biographical information on the back of the cards didn't match his own.

She said he just told everyone that the printing company made a mistake on the cards by saying that he was born in Texas in 1927. The fake Henry also told friends and relatives that the different birth dates were a deliberate deception when he was a prospect to make scouts think he was younger - something that does happen occasionally, even today.

As a surprise about 10 years ago, Elizabeth Henry even painted a portrait of her husband, using a Bill Henry baseball card from his days with the Cincinnati Reds. Henry, 79, said her husband's first and second wives died years ago, as did his two biological children, and she assumed that all of his possessions, photographs and memorabilia from his baseball career were long lost.

"I was married to somebody that maybe I didn't know," she said.

Information from the Ledger in Lakeland and the Associated Press was used in this story.

[Last modified September 6, 2007, 01:09:57]