In the spring of 1949, the minor league baseball team in Duncan, Oklahoma got a new name stitched across its uniforms in red lettering. Not a bird, not a local industry, not the winner of a fan contest. The team's owner was a man named Otto Utt, and the team became the Duncan Uttmen.
Naming a ballclub after a person was not unheard of in that era. Early baseball did it for famous managers and stars: Cleveland played as the Naps for over a decade in honor of player-manager Nap Lajoie, and Brooklyn spent years as the Robins under manager Wilbert Robinson. Company owners got teams named for them too, most famously A.E. Staley, whose Decatur Staleys football team went on to become the Chicago Bears. But those names honored national figures or the businesses bankrolling the club. Otto Utt was neither, and for decades the Uttmen name has sat in the record books looking like the purest ego trip in minor league history. The real story, buried in the Duncan and Ardmore newspapers of April 1949, is much better than that.
Start with the man. Otto Frederick Utt was born in Sugar City, Colorado in 1904 and raised in Pueblo, where, according to his obituary, he grew into the kind of all-around athlete small cities used to produce: a Western State College athletic scholarship, Colorado heavyweight championships in both amateur wrestling and boxing, a stint as a professional roller skater, and a career as a catcher in semi-pro and professional baseball. The professional record that survives shows him hitting .342 with 12 home runs for Norton of the Class D Nebraska State League in 1930 before moving up to Class B Wilkes-Barre in 1931, where the local paper welcomed its new catcher by praising his receiving, his fast and accurate throws to the bases, and declaring that he "performed like a major leaguer."
Utt's path eventually led him to Duncan, a southwest Oklahoma oil town with real baseball history. Duncan's first professional club, the Oilers, won two Oklahoma State League pennants back in 1922 and 1923. The town is also the founding home of Halliburton, the oil well cementing company Erle P. Halliburton built there starting in 1919, and in the 1930s the company's semi-pro team, the Halliburton Cementers, won two national semi-pro championships. So when the Class D Sooner State League formed in 1947 with six Oklahoma towns, Duncan's charter franchise took the name everyone in town already associated with winning baseball, the Duncan Cementers, and Halliburton backed the arrangement in the most practical way possible: the company bought the team's uniforms.
The operation Utt built was a family business in the most literal sense. The league's 1947 directory listed Otto F. Utt as president and manager, and the club's secretary and treasurer was Mrs. Otto F. Utt. The front office was, more or less, the Utt household on Chestnut Street. The owner did not stay in the front office on game days either: at age 43, Utt put on the catcher's gear and hit .351 in 40 games for his own team. He recruited the way an owner-operator recruits, bringing young athletes from his hometown of Pueblo into professional ball at Duncan, and running first-person newspaper ads across Oklahoma in 1948 inviting any boy who wanted a career in professional baseball to a five-day tryout school: bring your shoes and glove, make the club, and your expenses would be paid and a 1949 contract signed.
Here is a detail the record books miss: the town never really called them the Cementers anyway. As early as July 1947, the franchise's first season, the Duncan Banner was using "Cementers" and "Uttmen" interchangeably, sometimes within a single game story. It was the old sportswriter's convention, the same one that turned Wilbert Robinson's Brooklyn club into the Robins: the team was Utt's men, so the papers called them the Uttmen. The official name stayed Cementers, though, for the most practical of reasons. Halliburton was paying for the shirts.
Then, in the spring of 1949, Halliburton stopped. The Banner's sports editor broke the story on April 1, noting that it was no April Fool's joke: after buying Duncan's uniforms for two seasons, the company had refused, reportedly because a Halliburton official had decided the Duncan players were "not gentlemen on the ball field." The team, in other words, was too rowdy to advertise a cementing company. Utt's response was pure owner-operator logic. He had spent $1,200 of his own money on new uniforms, and as he told the Banner, he was paying for the suits, so he might as well get the publicity out of them like anyone else would. If the company would not put Cementers on the chest, the chest would say Uttmen, in red lettering. Two weeks later the Ardmore paper confirmed the change to the rest of the league under the headline "Call Them Uttmen Now," observed that Halliburton would no longer be getting its free advertising, and could not resist a shot at a club coming off two straight last-place finishes: "A last-place club by any other name would smell as sour."
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So the strangest team name in the Sooner State League was never really vanity. It was an invoice. The papers had called the club Utt's men from the beginning; when the sponsorship broke, the name simply moved from the sports page to the jerseys, because the man it described was now the man paying for them.
The renamed club was, to be fair, the best team Duncan fielded in the league. The 1949 Uttmen, under new manager Eddie Marleau and with Pueblo righthander Frank Golob (one of Utt's Colorado recruits) in the rotation, went 65-74 and drew 36,678 fans to the Duncan Bowl, around 528 a game, in what turned out to be the league's best attendance year. Opening night that April had the full small-town treatment: the Marlow High School band parading through downtown to the ballpark, the mayor throwing out the first pitch, admission a dollar, box seats a quarter more. That winter, Utt made one more characteristic move, signing pitcher John Meier, the league's hard-luck pitcher of 1948 who had lost 12 games by a single run before spending a year in the Army.
It was not enough. The 1950 season collapsed, and so did Utt's interest in running a ballclub. That year he bought two roller skating rinks in Duncan, returning to another sport from his athletic past, and left baseball entirely. The team fell to 51-85, the gate cratered to 15,950 for the year, and on August 18, 1950, with the season still underway, the franchise abandoned Duncan for Shawnee, Oklahoma, where it became the Hawks, and promptly transformed: 96-44 in 1951 behind player-manager Lou Fitzgerald, then a Brooklyn Dodgers affiliation from 1953 through the league's final season in 1957, with future major leaguers Don Demeter and Stan Williams starting their careers in Shawnee. Counting its Duncan years, the franchise fielded a team in every season the Sooner State League operated.
Duncan never got another professional team, and Otto Utt never sought another one. He ran his rinks for a decade, went into ranching in 1960, and retired in 1965. He died of an apparent heart attack in June 1966, at 63, and is buried in Duncan Cemetery, in the town where, for two seasons, the ballclub wore his name in red lettering because he was the one who paid for the shirts. The Uttmen lost far more than they won, but no one who hears the name ever forgets it. For a boxer, wrestler, roller skater, and catcher from Pueblo, Colorado, that is a fitting kind of immortality.
Our Duncan Uttmen design reaches back past the name change to the franchise's roots, featuring a cement worker leaning on a baseball bat, a nod to the Cementers name and the Halliburton legacy that gave Duncan its baseball identity in the first place.
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