Charles Neal Gault

From major league ball player to teacher, athletic director, and coach, young Charles never could have imagined a long career in sports when he was first entering the world of work. The United States census lists his occupation in both 1920 and 1930 as a salesman.

His parents came to Philadelphia from Ireland and raised their family of two girls and two boys at 1831 South 57th Street, just east of Mount Moriah in the Kingsessing neighborhood. His high school years aren’t documented except that he was in school as a 16-year-old. Perhaps he honed his skills in baseball as he cheered the Philadelphia Athletics to World Series titles in 1910, 1911, and 1913.

He was called Charlie, a salesman for Schell-Longstreth & Co., a yarn manufacturer, when he registered for the draft in June of 1917. He put his job on hold when he was inducted three months later. Before the year was out he was promoted to Sergeant with the 312th Field Artillery Regiment at Fort Meade, Maryland. 

His training ended there the following June when he was selected for the Field Artillery Central Officers’ Training School at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. School was out after the summer was over; Charlie received his commission as a 2nd Lieutenant and went on to Camp Funston, a training camp on the grounds of Fort Riley, Kansas. Fortunately, his arrival was after a big outbreak of the flu had subsided.

Camp Funston reported some of the first cases of what became a worldwide influenza pandemic, known at the time as the Spanish flu. Over 500 soldiers came down with the illness just after the first case was identified in March of 1918.

The Paris Peace Conference got underway on January 18, 1919 to set terms for peace after the war. Two weeks later, Charlie was honorably discharged and reunited with his family. It was a good year until the very last day of  1919. On New Year’s Eve his father was killed. Working as a foreman for a contractor, he fell off a building and died of a skull fracture. The girls eventually married but Charlie and his older brother, John, remained in the house with their mother until she died in 1930.

When he wasn’t selling, Charlie must have kept at his baseball game. His obituary says he broke into the major leagues when he signed with the New York Yankees in 1921. He was a bullpen catcher, which meant he didn’t get behind the plate very often, but it was still a young club, formed in 1913.  

It was the dawning of the golden age of the Yankees. Charlie joined the club a year after Babe Ruth, and shared in the first World Series win for the team in 1923. Of course, his salary was a tiny fraction of the $52,000 a year being paid to the Babe, but it was certainly the high point of Charlie’s career.

The Yankees kept him through the 1926 season, but another source said he spent the 1925 season managing a minor league team, the Easton (Maryland) Farmers. Then he returned to Philadelphia and a sales job, this time in leather goods. But sports was always a good recreational outlet. Various local posts of the American Legion had baseball teams, and Charlie coached one of them to a championship in 1930.

The Depression may have cost him his livelihood as a salesman but it showed him how he could enjoy sports and get paid for it. Sometime in the 1930s he became a physical education teacher at the private Haverford School. Besides coaching baseball, his basketball team had an undefeated 1936-37 season. (Charlie is shown here in the upper right.).

The timeline isn’t clear, but he was connected in some manner to the football program at Muhlenburg College in Allentown. He began officiating college football games as a field judge or head linesman. He also scored a big win when he married Margaret Getty in 1934. Their only child, Charles Neal Gault, Jr., was born in 1936.

Charlie then worked for a period of time as a physical education teacher and football coach at Valley Forge Military Academy. Later during World War II he did the same at Germantown Academy. He officiated regularly at football games, including the annual clash between the champions of the city’s Public High School Conference and the Catholic High School League.

After the war, Charlie even served as a field judge for the National Football League when he wasn’t a scout for the Philadelphia Athletics. He was also on the staff of their travelling baseball school, teaching baseball fundamentals to over 10,000 kids each year. 

Then in 1950 he joined the University of Pennsylvania as coach of the 150-pound football team and as assistant coach of varsity baseball. This photo of him ran in the newspaper in March of 1957. It appears he slimmed down from 15 years earlier. On his draft registration card in 1942 he said he was six feet tall and a stocky 223 pounds.

Charlie suffered a heart attack one year after this photo was taken, while he was at home. He lived 63 variety-filled years, and was buried in the same plot as both of his parents. Listed under his name is his wife, Margaret, who died in 1981.

His brother, John, has a military headstone in the same plot. (He served as an apprentice seaman in the Navy in World War I and became assistant superintendent at Philadelphia General Hospital just before he died in 1939.) Both of the sisters joined their husbands at another cemetery.