Fifty years having passed since he helped the Lakeside All-Stars become the first team from Tennessee to win the Dixie Youth World Series, Perry Perkins decided it was time to get as many of those 16 boys as possible to come together again for a golden reunion.
“As soon as I’d reach them,” Perkins recalled this week, “it was like we were all 12 years old again.”
Forever young. Isn’t that what our best childhood memories keep us? And could it get any better for a bunch of 11- and 12-year-old boys than winning a youth league world title?
So nine of the 16 made their way to City Hall on Tuesday evening to hear that Chattanooga mayor Andy Berke was proclaiming July 9, 2019, as “Lakeside Dixie Youth Baseball Day.”
No youth league team in Scenic City history has deserved such an honor more. For the 1969 Lakeside All-Stars weren’t just the first team from Tennessee to win the Dixie Youth World Series, they were also the first integrated team to do so. And they did it in Montgomery, Alabama, with George Wallace, the state’s segregationist governor, even sharing a dugout with them for one of their victories.