Lynton Ross 'Dusty' Boggess: A Legacy in Major League Baseball Umpiring (1904–1968)

Lynton Ross “Dusty” Boggess, major league baseball umpire, was born in Terrell, Texas, on June 7, 1904, to Henry Ross Boggess and Mattie Elizabeth (Montgomery) Boggess. He moved with his family to Waco, where he worked as a batboy with the Waco Navigators of the Texas League. At Waco High School, Boggess was a multi-sport athlete. According to his New York Times obituary, he acquired the nickname “Dusty” as a running back on his high school football team “when his long runs with the ball over the dry, sunbaked Texas playing fields kicked up long trails of dust.” An alternate explanation was his habit of picking up a handful of dirt and rubbing it through his hair before going to bat.

Boggess turned pro at age sixteen when he played for the Cleburne Generals of the Class D Texas-Oklahoma League. Since he was still in high school and wanted to maintain his amateur status, he played under the name Bogus. While the alias was appropriate to the situation, it did not mask his identity, and Boggess was ruled ineligible for high school baseball. He returned to Class D ball after graduating in 1922. He also worked for several years as a scout and assistant coach at Waco High School.

As a third baseman and shortstop (though he was versatile enough to play all nine positions in one game on three occasions), Boggess began a steady climb upward. Along the way he played for a number of Texas minor league teams, including the Longview Cannibals, Waco Indians, Marlin Bathers, Mount Pleasant Cats, and Houston Buffaloes. His playing career peaked at age twenty-one with a roster spot on the Double-A Syracuse Stars in 1926. Boggess’s stay there was limited to seven games, and he then returned to the Class A Texas League. He revisited Waco to play for the newly-established Waco Cubs and added the San Antonio Bears, Dallas Steers, Beaumont Exporters, and Galveston Buccaneers to his Texas resume. He reinvented himself as a catcher in 1930 and played that position until he retired as a player in 1933.

Had the Great Depression not intervened, Boggess might have gone on to a career as a manager. In 1932 he spent his life savings to purchase the Muskogee Chiefs of the Class C Western Association. Re-branding them the Nighthawks, he ran the team himself from the front office as well as the dugout, while still occasionally playing as catcher, but struggled to generate revenue for the team. After thirty-four games, Boggess moved the team to Hutchinson, Kansas, where the financial situation was no better, and the team disbanded the following month. This instability was not unique to Boggess’s team. Only two franchises (Springfield and Bartlesville) in the six-team league finished the season where they started. The league was suspended for 1933. That year Boggess was player–manager for the El Dorado Lions of the Class C Dixie League, before retiring half-way thorough the season.

After he retired as a player at age twenty-nine, Boggess decided to shift to officiating. In 1939 he began his career in professional umpiring by hitchhiking from San Antonio to his first gig in Mitchell, South Dakota. His first season as an umpire in affiliated baseball was with the Class D Western League (formerly known as the Nebraska State League). Boggess umpired for the Texas League from 1940 to 1942 and for the International League for the first half of the 1943 season. While some umpires were called up for military duty during World War II, Boggess, age thirty-nine, was not. Listed at 5’11” and 228 pounds in his playing days, he had blood pressure problems that forced him to sit out the remainder of the 1943 season.

Boggess ascended to the National League and made his big-league debut on opening day (April 18, 1944) at a Pittsburgh Pirates–St. Louis Cardinals contest in St. Louis. Another member of the umpiring crew was fellow Texan Lee Ballanfant, who joined Boggess in the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1997. Except for the 1949 season, in which he umpired all but sixteen games for the Class AAA American Association, Boggess spent the following nineteen years as a major league umpire.

By the time he retired after the 1962 season, Boggess had umpired in 2,591 regular season games. He also officiated at five All-Star Games: 1946 at Fenway Park in Boston; 1952 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia; 1955 at County Stadium in Milwaukee; and 1960 at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City and at Yankee Stadium in New York (from 1959 through 1962, two All-Star games were played each season). Boggess also worked four World Series: Philadelphia Phillies v. New York Yankees in 1950, Brooklyn Dodgers v. Yankees in 1952 and 1956, and Pitsburgh Pirates v. Yankees in 1960. Boggess participated in two of the most storied World Series games: Don Larsen’s perfect game against the Dodgers in Game 5 (1956) at Yankee Stadium and Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run concluding the Pirates upset of the Yankees in Game 7 (1960) at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

 Following his retirement, Boggess was the first recipient of the Bill Klem Award. Named after thirty-seven-season veteran National League umpire Bill Klem, the award was established by the Houston chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. Boggess subsequently worked as a scout for the Chicago White Sox and as a scout for the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League. He also represented Lone Star Beer. In 1966 he authored (with Ernie Helm) Kill the Ump!: My Life in Baseball, which offered career highlights as well as his opinions about the state of the game as of the mid-1960s.

One day after his sixty-fourth birthday (June 8, 1968), Boggess died at Parkland Hospital in Dallas of a chronic lung ailment. He was buried at Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas. Boggess married Lucille Katherine Hill on December 29, 1928, in San Antonio. Following their divorce, he married Manalee Wilmeth on October 21, 1942, in Dallas County. Although Boggess had no heirs, his will had a unique proviso: that he be buried with a baseball autographed by all the other major league umpires he had worked with. Boggess was posthumously inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1973.