In the middle of a multi-sport athletic career at Freeport, Harry Crytzer saw it was time for a more vital calling.
Crytzer, as many did during that era, quit school during his junior year and left to serve in World War II. He had just helped lead the Yellowjackets to the 1944 section baseball title as the starting shortstop at the tail end of the previous school year and had also played football and basketball.
“I had four brothers in the service at the time,” Crytzer said. “I had started my junior year and they were taking 17-year-olds. It was No. 1 on everybody’s minds to win the war, so for me it was an easy decision to join.”
Prior to that, Crytzer played baseball for the Freeport and Natrona American Legion teams from 1942-44. In the summer of ’44, he represented Pittsburgh in the National Pressman’s baseball tourney, losing in the finals to a Detroit team.
“We were called the ‘Milk Truck Team’ because we traveled to the games in a milk truck,” Crytzer recalled.
For his decades-long contribution playing and coaching multiple sports, Crytzer will be one of 10 inductees at the 51st Alle-Kiski Valley Sports Hall of Fame banquet on May 21 at the New Kensington Quality Inn.
At 94, he will be the hall’s second-oldest inductee next to 2019 inductee Dan Hawkins, then 95.
Crytzer continued playing baseball while stationed in Guam with the Naval Air Corps, playing for the Agana Naval Squadron when not serving as a radioman and nose turret gunner. Crytzer remained on Guam after the war as his team was island champs in 1947.
