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 On July 23, Elmer Austin Rising (1906-1987), will be inducted into the
Maine Baseball Hall of Fame in Portland, Maine. He was born in
Rockland, Maine in 1906. His mother Laura (Kalloch) and his father
Harry were lifetime Mainers’ was born in Rockland, Maine in 1906. As a
sophomore at Rockland High School Elmer first demonstrated his
incredible baseball talent. In the first game he pitched for Rockland,
the season opener against Vinalhaven, he struck out 22, winning the game
4 to 2. He went on to set the Maine high school pitching record by
striking out 26 in one game. Then, three days later, he pitched a no
hit, no run game. He averaged two strikeouts per inning in high
school. In 1923, at the age of 17, and a senior in high school, he
received a letter from Clark C. Griffith, President of the Washington
Senators, offering him the opportunity to come to Washington and “help
you develop into a big league pitcher”. Due to his age his parents
wouldn’t let Elmer go to Washington. If he had accepted that offer, he
would have been on the Senators team that won the World Series in 1924
against the New York Giants behind the great pitching of Walter
Johnson. Instead, Elmer attended Higgins Classical Institute and then
Hebron Academy in order to prepare academically for a baseball
scholarship to Dartmouth College. In the meantime, he pitched for the
professional team, the Easterns of Brewer. In his first game with the
Easterns, against Boston University, he struck out 12 and won 6 to
5. He went on to win many games for the Easterns. One special win was
on “Rising Day”, against his hometown team, the Rockland Texacos. The
game drew a crowd of over 3000. At the end of the game he was presented
a gold watch for his baseball achievements as a Rockland native. Along
with ace pitcher Danny MacFayden (MBHOF ’71) they led Hebron Academy to
an undefeated 1926 season and the State Baseball Crown. He went on to
pitch numerous no hit, no run games. One day, while walking across
campus at Hebron, he slipped on the ice, severely damaging his left
shoulder and ending his baseball career. At Hebron, he had hoped to
attend Brown University on a baseball scholarship. But, following his
injury, he instead pursued his artistic talent, attending art school in
Boston. Upon completion of his studies, he accepted a position at
Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. His first assignment was to
illustrate Up from the Ape, a book by world-renowned anthropologist Dr.
Ernest Hooton. He went on to spend 42 years at Harvard as a Technical
Illustrator. During his career at Harvard, one of his responsibilities
was to create and continuously update the enormous official Harvard
University Map, which was on public display in Harvard Square. He
retired from Harvard in 1972. Following the death of his wife Betty and
retirement, he began devoting himself to his artwork, with detailed pen
and ink renderings of scenes of his beloved state of Maine. Due to
total color-blindness, he worked strictly in pen and ink and one art
reviewer called him the “Black and White Andrew Wyeth”. His works were
shown in many art exhibits, including one-man shows at the Farnsworth
Museum in Rockland, Maine and the Addison Gallery of American Art at
Phillips Academy. His originals are in the museum collections of
Harvard University, Bowdoin College, Bates College, Hebron Academy, the
Portland Museum of Art, the Monhegan Museum of Art, the Rockport Art
Association, among others. Many of his art works can be seen in the
book The Pen Renderings of Elmer Rising: New England in Black and
White, FER Publishing, 1985. He died in 1987 at the age of 81. Thanks
to his mother Laura’s scrapbook, in which she saved numerous news
clippings, we are able to appreciate the tremendous baseball career of
Elmer Rising. Despite the injury that ended his baseball career Elmer’s
family never heard him talk about what could have been.
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