Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Cloudbuster Nine
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.annerkeene.com/
CITY: Austin
STATE: TX
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2018060594 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018060594 |
| HEADING: | Keene, Anne R. |
| 000 | 01395nz a2200193n 450 |
| 001 | 10742999 |
| 005 | 20180505073206.0 |
| 008 | 180504n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2018060594 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca11330785 |
| 040 | __ |a ICrlF |b eng |e rda |c ICrlF |
| 100 | 1_ |a Keene, Anne R. |
| 372 | __ |a Creative nonfiction |2 lcsh |
| 374 | __ |a Authors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a Females |2 lcdgt |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 378 | __ |q Anne Raugh |
| 670 | __ |a Keene, Anne R. Cloudbuster nine, 2018: |b title page (Anne R. Keene) jacket flap (Austen, Texas-based writer who focuses on narrative nonfiction, a graduate of the Univeristy of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism, began her professional career as a speechwriter on Capitol Hill, she is passionate about historic preservation and athletics, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, lives with her family in Austin) |
| 670 | __ |a Crossnore Group, Apr. 30, 2018 |b (Anne Raugh Keene, president and founder, has enjoyed a 25-year career across all disciplines of the communications sector including work as a radio news and television documentary researcher; press secretary and speechwriter in both Congress and Bush ’43 administration; and account management roles in both the public relations agency (Tracy-Locke PR) and client sides (Fannie Mae) of communications, journalism graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) |
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Received degree from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Crossnore Group, founder and president. Worked previously as a public relations CEO, and a governmental speechwriter and press secretary. Texas Our Texas, advisor.
AVOCATIONS:Children’s fitness, veteran’s fitness, athletics, historic preservation.
MEMBER:Friends of Libraries and Archives of Texas (member of board), Texas State Archives Historical Records Advisory Board (member of board), Society for American Baseball Research, Longhorn Aquatics.
AWARDS:Nonfiction Award, Writers’ League of Texas.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Anne R. Keene studied journalism while attending the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She continues to work within the field, and her primary focus rests on one of her main personal interests: sports. She has written extensively on the subject; the majority of her work lends to the production of nonfiction television and radio programs. Her work has also earned her numerous accolades, including one from the Writers’ League of Texas nonfiction. Additionally, she is aligned with several organizations devoted to either athletics or Texas history, including Longhorns Aquatics and the Texas State Archives Historical Records Advisory Board.
The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II serves as Keene’s introduction to the literary nonfiction genre. In an interview featured on the Daily Tar Heel website, Keene explained to interviewer Kellie Nattress what influenced the book’s creation. “My father spent years during WWII at the pre-flight base, and he always told stories about it,” she said. “He was a batboy for the Navy pre-flight team and he grew up to become a professional player, but he didn’t make it to the majors. When he passed away, I wanted to honor him.” She also told My Statesman interviewer Joe Gross that baseball formed a major component of her early years. Her grandfather had also been involved with the sport, having helped to lead a baseball club at her alma mater.
The Cloudbuster Nine focuses primarily on the lives and careers of baseball players during and after the Second World War. Some of the men in this group include notable figures such as Ted Williams. Much of her research comes from personal accounts she obtained from journal entries penned by her father, who wrote extensively about the titular group. She also interviewed some of the surviving men to learn more about their own perspectives and experiences. These men served in the Navy throughout the Second World War. Because of the time period, the men’s training as baseball players and as Navy soldiers quickly became intertwined. In addition to their baseball training, the Cloudbuster Nine also had to undergo education on preflight procedures. When the men spent time on the field, Keene’s father lent them his assistance as a bat boy. At the time, Keene’s father was only a child, but his time spent with the group came to shape his life from that point forward. Keene’s father came to know many of the Cloudbuster Nine personally throughout his time helping them, and he wrote about them within his journal. Keene shares some of her father’s anecdotes throughout the book, as well as many other pieces of her research.
While much of the book focuses on the nine men themselves, Keene also delves into her father and his own attempts at sustaining a livelihood as a baseball player. Despite his high hopes for success, Keene’s father was unable to reach the heights he strove for. Over time, this came to tarnish his adoration of the sport, though he continued to share his memories of his time as a player and assistant with his family for many years. In addition to highlighting the life of her father and his involvement in baseball, Keene also expounds upon the impact baseball has had upon her own life and others. She takes the time to explore the legacy the Cloudbuster Nine has left behind through their children and grandchildren. One Kirkus Reviews contributor expressed that “the story [Keene] has found is historically significant, and she does not neglect the fact that many professional athletes enlisted in the military and that very few do so today.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II.
ONLINE
Anne Keene website, https://www.annerkeene.com (August 1, 2018), author profile.
Daily Tar Heel, http://www.dailytarheel.com/ (April 25, 2018), Kellie Nattress, “UNC grad Anne R. Keene discusses pro baseball at UNC during World War II in new book,” author interview.
Hornfischer Literary Management, https://www.hornfischerlit.com/ (August 1, 2018), author profile.
My Statesman, https://www.mystatesman.com/ (May 23, 2018), Joe Gross, “Author tackles one of the greatest baseball teams you’ve never heard of.”
Anne R. Keene
Anne R. Keene is the author of The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II (Skyhorse, May 2018).
A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism, she began her professional career working as a speechwriter on Capitol Hill. Today, she earns national awards as a storyteller for corporate clients and has been honored with the Writers’ League of Texas nonfiction award. Passionate about historic preservation and athletics, Anne is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. She lives with her family in Austin.
About Anne
Anne is drawn toward history that defines peoples’ truths. She began her career as a writer after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a journalism degree, working in radio news/television documentary research and production, and serving as a press secretary and speechwriter in both Congress and a Presidential Administration. Ten years ago she founded a public relations firm in the historic district of downtown Austin, earning national awards for her clients, along with the Writers’ League of Texas nonfiction award for two books in development.
Anne served as a governor-appointed board member to the Texas State Archives Historical Records Advisory Board dedicated to the preservation of the state's archives and documentary heritage. She serves as an advisor to Texas Our Texas, a Texas PBS documentary and education network, and a board member supporting the Friends of Libraries and Archives of Texas. She swims masters with Longhorn Aquatics at the University of Texas and is passionate about supporting fitness for veterans and children.
Keene, Anne R.: THE CLOUDBUSTER NINE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Keene, Anne R. THE CLOUDBUSTER NINE Sports Publishing/Skyhorse (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 6, 1 ISBN: 978-1-68358-207-6
A thoroughly researched but somewhat cluttered account of Ted Williams and other professional baseball players who enlisted in the military in World War II and also managed to play some baseball.
In her debut, Keene, a trained journalist and former Capitol Hill speechwriter, recounts how she stumbled across this story in 2013 when, going through some things that had belonged to her late father, a former minor leaguer and lifelong baseball fan, she found materials relating to the Cloudbuster Nine. Her father had been the batboy for this Navy team undergoing their preflight training in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a team that featured, among others, Red Sox standouts Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky. But the author has more than one story to tell (despite the focus suggested by her subtitle). She narrates the sad arc of her father's baseball biography, the development of the preflight training regimen, the lives of many others involved in the program, her own immersion in the sport (which came much later in her life), her research, and her interviews of some elderly sources and some descendants of her principals. Her research is exhaustive and impressive, but the work suffers from all her work, as well. It appears that Keene struggled with what she needed to include or exclude. As a result, the narrative continually takes offramps to stories and facts the author unearthed, information which, though sometimes interesting, often serves as a distraction. Keene also often employs conventional and even cliched expressions--e.g., "an unshakable bond," "fit him like a glove." Still, the story she has found is historically significant, and she does not neglect the fact that many professional athletes enlisted in the military and that very few do so today.
An important story enriched by solid research and authorial commitment but weakened by
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
excess.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Keene, Anne R.: THE CLOUDBUSTER NINE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375169/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0759049a. Accessed 16 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375169
2 of 2 7/15/18, 11:43 PM
Author tackles one of the greatest baseball teams you’ve never heard of
insight-and-books
By Joe Gross - American-Statesman Staff
0
Tom McCarthy Jr.
Anne Keene found this scrapbook after her father, Jim Raugh, died in 2014. He had been the baseball team batboy and base mascot for one of the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight Schools, the World War II-era naval aviation training facilities. This one was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was run by Keene’s grandfather, James P. Raugh Sr. Tom McCarthy Jr. for AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Posted: 12:00 a.m. Wednesday, May 23, 2018
When Anne Keene, the Austin author of “The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team that Helped Win World War II,” was growing up, she knew that her father both loved and hated the game of baseball.
She knew he adored it, loved the old players, told stories about them to the point that it became something of a family joke.
But she also knew that he harbored a bit of resentment toward the sport, toward the game that broke his heart.
“Baseball was the narrative of my childhood, and a lot of it went over our heads,” Keene said. “I knew that my father was a pitcher, pitched in college and in the minor leagues and made it to tryouts with the Detroit Tigers.”
It wasn’t until he died in January 2014 that Keene, a public relations executive and former congressional speechwriter, started to understand the complicated nature of her father’s relationship with the game.
She began going through his things and found a scrapbook. There they were: photos of her father, Jim Raugh, all of 9 years old in 1943, serving as batboy to a team made up of players such as Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Joe Coleman, Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky, Boston Braves pitcher Johnny Sain and his teammate Louis “Buddy” Gremp.
And, oh, yeah, Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.
“My dad talked a lot about those childhood days, sitting in the dugout talking to Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky, who were essentially his babysitters,” Keene says. “He was on that field every day with them.” But it wasn’t until she found the scrapbook that she understood the full scope of her father’s relationship with the game, how formative that season was.
Imagine being a 9-year-old kid, getting to hang out with your idols — journeymen professionals and actual superstars in the game you wanted to play — for an entire summer. Traveling on the team bus, seeing every game, the works.
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These men were training at one of five U.S. Navy Pre-Flight Schools, known colloquially as Pre-Flight. The men were doing ground training in order to become naval aviators, one of the more complicated and dangerous jobs in the service during World War II. This school was a makeshift naval base at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was run by Keene’s grandfather, James P. Raugh Sr., an Annapolis graduate, naval vet and businessman.
The flight schools trained some folks who would become famous in other fields, including George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, John Glenn and Paul “Bear” Bryant.
Some of the men training there were also playing on the Cloudbusters, a morale-boosting exhibition team that went on trips and played games to entertain factory workers and service members. Perhaps the highlight of the team’s journey was a July 28, 1943, exhibition game at Yankee Stadium, a war-bond fundraiser, against a team called the Yanklands — a mix of Yankees and Cleveland Indians, who were in town at the time — managed by Babe Ruth.
Keene’s father was batboy for the Cloudbuster and base mascot, for lack of a better term.
Their schedule was student-athlete-like, the nature of their games somewhat informal: When they weren’t on rickety buses headed off to play exhibition games, they trained during the day, leaning how to fly and dogfight. They played all sorts of teams, from the minor-league Durham Bulls to college teams to Ruth’s Yanklands. At least 23 pro ballplayers came through this base and played on or coached for the team over the course of the war.
Inspired by her finds in her father’s papers, Keene began researching the team and its exploits.
“I thought there would be all kinds of books on this team,” Keene says. This was not the case — it would be mentioned in passing in books about Williams, but no such monograph existed. So Keene began to go through her father’s papers and her grandfather’s papers, finding all sort of information on the team, the players and life at Pre-Flight. The result was this multi-pronged look at her father’s past, a team about which little is known and the Pre-Flight schools, which cranked out pilots by the hundreds.
As for Keene’s father, his baseball career was ultimately a frustrating one. He was an All-American pitcher for UNC in 1957 and did time in a number of minor-league AA and AAA teams in the Detroit Tigers system. But he failed to make it on to the Tigers roster and retired from the game in 1961.
“He never really got over it,” Keene said. “It was like walking on a broken leg for the rest of his life. He used to joke about players today and how they spent more on dinner than he made in an entire year (in the minors). All he ever wanted to do was ride the bus and play.”
STATESMAN SELECTS AT BOOKPEOPLE
Anne R. Keene will speak and sign copies of her new book, “The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team that Helped Win World War II” (Sports Publishing, $26.99), at 7 p.m. May 25 at BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd. Only books purchased at BookPeople will be signed. Find out more at bookpeople.com.
UNC grad Anne R. Keene discusses pro baseball at UNC during World War II in new book
UNC grad Anne R. Keene discusses pro baseball at UNC during World War II in new book Buy Photos
Author Anne R. Keene, a 1987 UNC graduate who lives in Austin, Tex., and wrote the book, "The Cloudbuster Nine." Photo courtesy of Anne R. Keene/Twitter.
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BY Kellie Nattress
Once upon a time, major league baseball players thrived in Chapel Hill. Author Anne R. Keene recently released a book, titled "The Cloudbuster Nine," about a team of Major League Baseball players who played while at a Navy training school at UNC in 1943. The team of fighter pilots never had their story told until now, by Keene, the daughter of their bat boy.
Staff writer Kellie Nattress spoke with Keene, a 1987 UNC grad who worked at The Daily Tar Heel and currently lives in Austin, Tex., on Wednesday about baseball in Chapel Hill ahead of her book's release on May 1.
The Daily Tar Heel: What inspired you to write this book?
Anne Keene: My father spent years during WWII at the pre-flight base, and he always told stories about it. He was a batboy for the Navy pre-flight team and he grew up to become a professional player, but he didn't make it to the majors. When he passed away, I wanted to honor him. I went down to the basement and got his trunk. I found a number of wonderful pictures and a scrapbook with him front-and-center with the most famous major league players ever. I told the story, got many questions at the funeral, came back and put my thoughts on paper.
DTH: Obviously a lot of research went into this. Can you tell me about the research process?
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AK: It took years. I was able to find some old thesis papers, but the mothership is at Wilson Library. This gentleman by the name of Kidd Brewer was the pre-flight base publicist. He was a colorful personality, and because of that when he handled publicity for the base, he went to extra lengths to have it captured on film and print. There were hundreds of magnificent pictures, documents and memos that my grandfather had written. I had a good fortune of working with a literary agent by the name of Jim Hornfischer. I felt the responsibility to take this research and honor it.
DTH: What was the writing process like?
AK: I submitted it to a state writing contest, having no idea that I would even place and I actually won it. My name wasn’t on it, so I was pitching it to Jim Hornfischer, and he realized it was me after the fact, so we sat down and talked it through. He said that any military historian could write a wonderful book about the base, any baseball historian could write a wonderful book about this team. He said my story as the daughter was about the human condition, so he encouraged me to pursue that path. It took several years.
DTH: Tell me about the group of famous people who passed through Chapel Hill at this time.
AK: We had Bear Bryant, John Wooden, even Jim Crowley. Then you get into the baseball team, and initially I thought we might have eight or nine players. There was Johnny Pesky, Buddy Hassett, John Sain, Joe Coleman and more. We think there were around 23 to 25 major league players coming through at various times. We were able to trace where the baseball players lived down to the dorm room. Then I found out who their roommates were, and from there I was able to contact the children of some of the roommates. These people were friends for life.
DTH: How do you think or hope this story will influence the sports world?
AK: Today, I believe we’re down to less than 50 surviving World War II MLB players. We need to treasure these men in this generation. They put their careers on hold and walked away from huge contracts. They wanted to serve their country and they did it willingly. I think they’re role models. A lot of the evidence and the history that those bases were there is slipping away, so I hope people will honor and appreciate this story. The cadets came in and they not only went through training, they mastered academics and then the ball players got on buses late at night and went to different towns.
That’s really what my book is about. It's about that third job that they took on. They didn't get a penny for their efforts, but they did it gladly.
@kellie_nattress
@DTHSports | sports@dailytarheel.com