Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
She married her high school sweetheart and best friend on June 23, 1948. Hundreds of people came to her wedding. Most of them had to buy a ticket. The event attracted a fair amount of media coverage.
“More than1,900 baseball fans jammed Bell Park Wednesday night to see the Clovis Pioneers win their sixth straight game … and to witness the marriage of Pioneer center fielder Wilcy Moore to Miss Mary Arnold of Muleshoe,” the Clovis News-Journal reported.
“The wedding ceremony at home plate was scheduled to get under way at 7:15, but at the time there was such a press of patrons trying to buy tickets to the park that activities didn’t get started until 7:40.”
Mary and Wilcy and their escorts marched to home plate from the pitcher’s mound under “an arch of baseball bats held by members of both the Borger (Texas) and Clovis clubs.”
After the ceremony, the paper reported, the game began with Wilcy Moore in center field and Mary Moore in a reserved box seat behind home plate.
The crowd was the largest in the history of Bell Park, where Clovis High still plays its baseball games today. Fans and friends of the couple filled all the seats, then spilled out beside the stands and lined the foul lines behind first and third base.
Fans also passed a hat for the newlyweds, collecting $550, mostly in coins and dollar bills.
Wilcy had three hits in the game that night and scored a run. His professional baseball career lasted 11 more years.
Visitors to the Moore family home in Muleshoe were treated to the baseball stories for decades longer. For new friends, the story usually began with how they got married.
“Them ballplayers said, ‘Why don’t you get married at the ballpark?’” Wilcy recounted in a 2010 interview. “I said, ‘Well, Mary’s mother would kill me if we did that.’”
But it turned out Mary and her family were game.
Stacy Conner, the family’s pastor and friend, tells the story of their relationship like this:
“One of the privileges of knowing these two is watching them take care of one another. In private moments, when we were talking baseball, Wilcy would say ‘Mary made so many sacrifices so I could keep playing ball. She would load up (our) two little girls and drive across country, by herself, to be wherever I happened to be playing at the time.’”
The Moores were married 73 years.
We lost Wilcy in 2021. He was 92. Mary died Saturday at age 93.
They were great teammates.
David Stevens is publisher of Clovis Media Inc. Email him at: