Appalachian Figures
Shelbiana sits where railroad tracks, coal seams, and the Levisa Fork all meet. On paper it is an unincorporated community and coal town in Pike County that grew up around a major rail yard on the Chesapeake and Ohio line, now CSX. In practice it is one of those places where the tracks run so close to the houses that children grow up measuring time in passing coal trains.
One of those children was a boy the neighbors knew as Charles Johnson. Baseball record books remember him instead as John Francis O’Neil, a shortstop who played for the 1946 Philadelphia Phillies, logged more than sixteen seasons in professional ball, and set an organized baseball record for most at bats without a home run.
For decades the trail between those two identities puzzled both local historians and baseball researchers. Was the major leaguer really the same person as the Shelbiana kid in the census and Pikeville school records. Why did he use two names. And what did that story tell us about mountain families, college athletics, and opportunity in the mid twentieth century coalfields.
Charles Robert Johnson of Shelbiana
The paper trail begins not under the name O’Neil but with vital records and census entries for Charles Robert Johnson in the Shelbiana area of Pike County.
Pike County researchers working with Ancestry and FamilySearch located a Kentucky birth record for a Charles Robert Johnson born on April 19 in the early 1920s in the Shelbiana neighborhood. They also found a separate birth record for a John O’Neil with a very similar date of birth in the same community. The Pike County Historical Society’s “In Search of John O’Neil” article uses those records as the starting point for the name mystery and concludes that the Johnson birth entry belongs to the future ballplayer.
The 1930 United States census shows Charles Johnson living in the Shelbiana and Elkhorn area with his parents, Dewey and Lula (Roberts) Johnson. Dewey worked as a brakeman on the railroad, a job that fit the town’s role as a coal and freight hub. The 1940 census again enumerates Charles in the household of Dewey and Lula, still in Pike County.
A clipping from the Big Sandy News in 1918 adds genealogical color. It reports a double wedding involving railroad worker Dewey Johnson, his bride Lula Roberts, Lula’s sister, and another man who also worked the rails. The Pike County Historical Society uses that notice to confirm Lula’s maiden name and to underline how deeply railroad work shaped the Johnson and Roberts families in the Shelby Creek country.
Taken together, those early documents place a boy named Charles Johnson in a railroad family at Shelbiana and establish the core details that baseball reference works later ascribe to John O’Neil.
School on the hill at Pikeville
Like many Pike County students in the 1930s, Charles Johnson headed up the river to Pikeville for high school and junior college. There he stepped into the world that would eventually force him to juggle two identities.
A 1940 yearbook from Pikeville Junior College, located by researchers on Ancestry, includes a photograph of a campus history club. One of the students is identified simply as Charles Johnson. The Pike County Historical Society notes the find and suggests that this is likely the Shelbiana student, though the yearbook alone cannot prove it.
Stronger evidence comes from a questionnaire that John O’Neil submitted in 1954 to a minor league office. In that form he stated that he had graduated from Pikeville College Academy in 1937, that he played basketball there, and that he played baseball at Pikeville Junior College, which at the time offered two year programs.
His World War II draft registration card, filled out in July 1941 under the name Charles Robert Johnson, lists a birth date of April 19, a birth in Kentucky, residence in Pike County, and two years of college. It shows a young man who had already started a professional sports career by 1939 and somehow found time to get college coursework in along the way. The same packet of Selective Service records notes that he was classified 4F, not acceptable for military service, though no reason is given.
From a historian’s standpoint, those school and draft papers tie the Shelbiana railroad man’s son to Pikeville classrooms and to the educational track that would later collide with college amateurism rules.
Two homes in the 1940 census
If the story ended there, the leap from Charles Johnson of Shelbiana to John O’Neil of the Phillies would be much simpler. The trouble is that the 1940 census seems to find Charles in two places at once.
In Pike County the enumerator recorded Charles Johnson still living at home with Dewey and Lula, which makes perfect sense for a young man in his late teens. Yet baseball records show that O’Neil was already playing professionally that year in the minor leagues.
A second census entry for 1940, this time in Winston Salem, North Carolina, lists a boarder named John O’Neil with the occupation of “ballplayer.” That matches the roster of the Winston Salem Twins in the minor leagues and lines up neatly with later accounts of O’Neil’s long tenure in professional baseball. Both the Pike County Historical Society and the Mountain Sports Hall of Fame point to this double enumeration as a key piece of the puzzle, with the most likely explanation being that the Pike County enumerator wrote Charles down as living at home based on his parents’ report while he was actually away playing ball in North Carolina.
For genealogists, this is a useful reminder that census entries are snapshots written by human beings who sometimes filled in lines from memory or second hand information. For O’Neil’s story, the two census pages show a single young man living under two different names in 1940 while his life stretched between the Shelbiana rail yard and out of town ballparks.
The Lexington column that solved the mystery
For all the value of those records, they still left an uncomfortable gap between the Shelbiana born Charles Johnson and the professional shortstop named John O’Neil. The turning point came not from a federal archive but from a single newspaper column in Lexington.
Digging through old Kentucky papers, Doug Kretzer and others eventually turned up a December 26, 1955 “Pressbox Pickups” column in the Lexington Herald. In that short piece, sportswriter Billy Thompson interviewed John O’Neil, who was then back in Lexington finishing his degree and helping coach baseball at the University of Kentucky. The column described how he had attended Pikeville Junior College, begun playing professionally in 1939, and adopted the name John Francis O’Neil as an assumed name so that he could continue to qualify as an amateur under his real name while in college.
In other words, the column lays out the scheme plainly. The talented infielder from Shelbiana wanted both a professional paycheck and a chance to suit up for his college team. The solution was to sign minor league contracts as “John O’Neil” while remaining “Charles Johnson” on campus rosters. According to the Lexington account, it worked. He played professionally under the assumed name starting in 1939 while still participating in college ball as Johnson.
Later in life he appears to have embraced the O’Neil identity fully. When he died in 2012 his obituary, reprinted on the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame site, listed him as John F. O’Neil, gave his birthplace as Shelbiana, Kentucky, and named Dewey and Lula Roberts Johnson as his parents.
That short Lexington column, combined with the obituary, does most of the heavy lifting for historians. It confirms the dual identity, gives the reason for the name change, and ties the John O’Neil in baseball record books back to the Johnson family in Pike County.
Jamestown, proud parents, and a record without homers
Once you step into the baseball side of his life, the sources change from draft cards and census entries to box scores, team photographs, and small town sports pages.
Chautauqua County in western New York became O’Neil’s second home. The Jamestown Falcons of the Class D PONY League used him as a shortstop in 1941, and local papers like the Post Journal quickly adopted him as a fan favorite. The Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame has digitized clippings with titles such as “Meet Falcons of ’41 Season,” “O’Neils of Kentucky Have Reunion Here,” and “Proud Parents See Son Feted by Falcons Fans.” In those pieces his parents travel from Kentucky to watch him play and are identified as Mr. and Mrs. Dewey Johnson, further stitching together the Shelbiana and Jamestown strands.
O’Neil’s major league window came in 1946, when the Philadelphia Phillies brought him up for a stretch of that season. Official stats compiled by Baseball Reference and summarized by SABR and Wikipedia show that he appeared in 32 games, logged 94 at bats, hit .266 with three doubles, drove in nine runs, and scored twelve.
He never hit a home run in the majors, and that absence became a defining statistic. In a 1983 article in the Society for American Baseball Research’s journal, researcher Bob McConnell calculated streaks of players who never cleared the fence. He found that in organized baseball O’Neil went 4,635 consecutive at bats without a single homer between June 12, 1942 and the end of his career. That total includes 4,541 minor league at bats plus his 94 for the Phillies in 1946.
McConnell’s essay treats him as the record holder for organized baseball in that category. It is an odd kind of distinction but one that fits a player remembered as a reliable contact hitter, fielder, and steady clubhouse presence rather than a slugger.
Pacific Coast League star and traveling man
Most of O’Neil’s sixteen professional seasons unfolded far from the Levisa Fork. Baseball reference sites and the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame’s photo gallery trace him from Jamestown to the West Coast and back again.
During the 1940s he spent several seasons in the Pacific Coast League, then one of the top minor leagues in the country. With the Portland Beavers in 1944 and 1945 and the Seattle Rainiers in 1947 and 1948, he played in stadiums from the Northwest to California and made at least one Coast League All Star team. Official programs and team photographs preserved by the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame show him in Beavers and Rainiers uniforms, often in the front rows of team portraits.
In 1949 he joined the Hollywood Stars, a Pacific Coast League club that played in front of movie industry crowds. Hollywood used him through the 1951 season and again in 1953. One series of photographs shows him in the Stars’ famous short pants uniforms, a quirk of that franchise’s marketing that left an impression on fans and sportswriters alike.
Later he moved to the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern Association and wrapped up his playing career in the early 1950s with teams like the Salinas Packers in California and a return stint to Jamestown in 1954. Letters, contracts, and telegrams from that period, digitized by the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame, include a 1950 letter from the Hollywood front office, correspondence about trades to New Orleans and Salinas, and a 1954 telegram offering him a slot back in Jamestown.
Those documents are primary evidence for the journeyman side of his career, where a man from a small Kentucky coal town negotiated contracts with far flung clubs while still writing home to Shelbiana.
General manager, scout, and elder of Jamestown baseball
Even after he hung up his spikes as a player, O’Neil stayed close to the game. According to his Jamestown obituary and the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame biography, he served as general manager of the Jamestown Tigers in the early 1960s. Museum photos show him in jacket and tie on the Municipal Stadium field, posing with front office staff and local dignitaries.
From 1964 into the mid 1980s he worked as a scout for several major league organizations, including the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Both the Hall of Fame exhibit and modern reference works note that he helped sign outfielder Bill Robinson and catcher Mike Scioscia, among others. The Chautauqua collection preserves scouting badges, credential passes, and team jackets from that phase of his life.
In 2011, at age ninety one, O’Neil returned to Jamestown’s ballpark, now named Russell Diethrick Park, for a celebration of the stadium’s seventieth anniversary. As the last living member of the 1941 Falcons, he threw out a ceremonial first pitch in a white Jamestown uniform and was honored by the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame. The following February he entered the Hall as its oldest inductee.
He died on April 18, 2012, one day shy of his ninety second birthday, in Jamestown’s WCA Hospital. The Post Journal obituary, reproduced on the Hall of Fame site, remembered him as “a native of Shelbiana, Ky.” and summarized more than forty five years of work in professional baseball as player, manager, general manager, and scout. He was buried in Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, where his grave marker simply reads “John F. O’Neil, 1920-2012.”
Remembering a Pike County ballplayer
For mountain historians, what makes O’Neil’s story matter is not just that he briefly reached the majors. It is the way his life illustrates how deeply the coalfields and railroads of eastern Kentucky were tied to national institutions like organized baseball.
The Johnson family’s work on the railroad in Shelbiana, the Pikeville schools that nurtured his athletic talent, and the web of alumni and coaches that later brought him back to Lexington all belong to the infrastructure of opportunity for a smart, sports minded kid in a coal town. The use of an assumed name to preserve amateur status mirrors earlier episodes in sports history and reflects the pressures that students from working families faced when the rules of college athletics did not always line up with economic reality.
The fact that this entire story had to be reconstructed from scattered census records, draft cards, college questionnaires, minor league programs, and an obscure Lexington column says something about how easily Appalachian lives can slip into the margins of national narratives. Without the efforts of Pike County historians, Mountain Sports Hall of Fame researchers, and the staff of the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame, John Francis O’Neil might have remained just another name on a roster instead of a fully sketched figure with roots on Shelby Creek.
Another John O’Neal in the records
The name O’Neil (and O’Neal) appears in other Kentucky records as well, which can complicate genealogical work for families trying to connect their ancestor to the ballplayer.
Civil War era rosters for the Thirty Ninth Kentucky Mounted Infantry include at least one John O’Neal in Company E. That roll, originally printed in Pike County, Kentucky Historical Papers volume five, has been cited in Kentucky Ancestors and reprinted through the Kentucky Historical Society’s digital collections.
Those nineteenth century entries describe a man born around 1830 and associated with Union service during the war. They belong to a completely different generation from the twentieth century ballplayer and should not be conflated with the Shelbiana shortstop. The overlap in surnames does, however, show how Irish and Scotch Irish names like O’Neal and O’Neil threaded through Pike County’s population long before the coal and railroad boom that framed O’Neil’s youth.
For anyone working in Pike County genealogy, the lesson is simple. Always match names with dates, places, and family networks rather than assuming that one John O’Neil is the same as another.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Census, 1930 and 1940, entries for Charles Johnson in the household of Dewey and Lula Johnson in Pike County, Kentucky, and the 1940 Winston Salem, North Carolina enumeration for boarder John O’Neil, occupation “ballplayer,” accessed via Ancestry and other online databases as described in the Pike County Historical Society’s work on O’Neil.Pike County Historical Society
World War II draft registration card and Selective Service classification records for Charles Robert Johnson of Pike County, Kentucky, July 1941, noting birth on April 19, Kentucky birthplace, two years of college, and 4F classification, as discussed in “In Search of John O’Neil.”Pike County Historical Society
Pikeville College Academy and Pikeville Junior College records, including a 1940 yearbook photograph of a history club featuring a student named Charles Johnson, and a 1954 league questionnaire in which John O’Neil states that he graduated from Pikeville College Academy in 1937 and played basketball and baseball there.Pike County Historical Society
Lexington Herald, “Pressbox Pickups,” December 26, 1955, Billy Thompson column on John O’Neil’s return to Lexington and explanation of his use of the assumed name “John Francis O’Neil” while playing professional baseball and maintaining amateur status as Charles Johnson at Pikeville Junior College, cited by both Pike County Historical Society and later reference works.Pike County Historical Society+1
Jamestown Post Journal and Jamestown Sun articles, including “Meet Falcons of ’41 Season,” “O’Neils of Kentucky Have Reunion Here,” “Proud Parents See Son Feted by Falcons Fans,” and later pieces on his managerial and scouting roles, preserved as scanned images through the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame exhibit on John O’Neil.Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame+1
“John F. O’Neil” obituary, Post Journal (Jamestown), April 19, 2012, reproduced on the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame website, giving his full name, identifying him as a native of Shelbiana, Kentucky, naming Dewey and Lula Roberts Johnson as his parents, and summarizing his forty plus years in professional baseball.Pike County Historical Society+1
Photographs, letters, contracts, scouting credentials, and team programs for the Jamestown Falcons, Portland Beavers, Seattle Rainiers, Hollywood Stars, New Orleans Pelicans, Salinas Packers, and Jamestown Tigers, held by the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame and digitized on its “John O’Neil” page.Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame+1
John O’Neil player pages at Baseball Reference, Retrosheet, MLB.com, and Baseball Almanac, providing major league and minor league statistics, biographical details, and confirmation of birthplace at Shelbiana, Kentucky and death at Jamestown, New York.Society for American Baseball Research+2Wikipedia+2
Bob McConnell, “The Non Home Run Hitters,” Baseball Research Journal 12 (1983), Society for American Baseball Research, which identifies John O’Neil as holding the organized baseball record for most consecutive at bats without a home run, a streak of 4,635 at bats between June 12, 1942 and the end of his playing career.Society for American Baseball Research
Pike County Historical Society, “In Search of John O’Neil,” a detailed narrative essay that reconstructs the Johnson and O’Neil identities using birth records, census entries, draft cards, college questionnaires, the 1955 Lexington column, and the Jamestown obituary, and situates him among Pike County’s professional athletes.Pike County Historical Society+1
Pike County Historical Society, “Professional Baseball Players from the Mountains” and related “Sports and Athlete’s” pages, which briefly profile O’Neil alongside other Big Sandy Valley ballplayers and link to the longer essay.Pike County Historical Society+1
Mountain Sports Hall of Fame posts on John Francis O’Neil of Shelbiana, Pike County, Kentucky, especially social media articles that share early drafts of the “In Search of John O’Neil” research and help connect Pike County readers to his baseball legacy.Facebook+1
Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame, “John O’Neil” biography and digital exhibit, which compiles photographs, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, and links to video interviews and tributes, and emphasizes his status as the oldest inductee in that Hall’s history.Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame+1
Society for American Baseball Research, BioProject entry “John O’Neil,” which presently offers a brief stub confirming his full name, dates, and birthplace but links to the more detailed statistical record and calls for a fuller biographical essay.Society for American Baseball Research
Wikipedia, “John O’Neil (baseball),” which synthesizes Baseball Reference, the Jamestown obituary, the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame exhibit, and the 1955 Lexington column into a concise overview of his career and the Johnson identity.Wikipedia+1
Pike County, Kentucky, Historical Papers, especially volume five, which prints the “Roll of Company E of the Thirty Ninth Mounted Infantry Volunteers of the Union Army in the War Between the States” and includes a soldier named John O’Neal in nineteenth century Pike County military records.Internet Archive+1
Kentucky Ancestors, volume 44 number 2, and associated indexes that cite entries for men named John O’Neal in Civil War era census and military databases, illustrating the presence of O’Neal families in Kentucky long before the twentieth century ballplayer.Yumpu+1
Local histories of Shelbiana, the Sandy Valley and Elkhorn Railroad, and the Elkhorn coalfield that describe the development of the rail yard and coal operations along Shelby Creek and help contextualize the Johnson family’s work as railroad employees in the early twentieth century.Wikipedia+2Pike County Historical Society+2