Some men, loyal to extremes, support their cause and alma mater regardless, even if it means surgical proof that they truly bleed Carolina blue.

Carl Baber, 83, of Mount Holly, is known as the man who built Gaston County ballparks – fancy ballparks, with lights, concession stands and fences, so children could have finery when they played. He got partners, land and financial donations with commas after the dollar signs, but when it came to a personal medical ordeal, Baber landed in a dilemma.

In the late 1980s, Baber had open heart surgery. A UNC-Chapel Hill graduate with a degree in Parks and Recreation Administration and a few master’s courses to his credit, Baber felt entitled to a surgeon from Carolina. He got one from Wake Forest.

“He let me know that’s where he was getting paid. He said, ‘When you’re in the hospital in this kind of shape, you’re going to have to take anybody,’” Baber says.

The surgery was successful, until Baber peeked at his chest the next day. The surgeon, using orange Mercurochrome, had signed his work with a big ‘WF.’

“I’ve had open heart surgery twice,” Baber says. “The second time, I got to choose a guy from Carolina.”
That brand of persistence made Baber a staple in Gaston sports and put him in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame to honor a career that created approximately 50 athletic fields, parks, a few tennis courts and had the fishing hole at Poston Park in Gastonia named Carl Baber, Jr. Lake, marked with a green and tan sign.

His loyalty toward his 26-year task as Gaston County’s director of parks and recreation played out in his devotion to children and his partnerships with county leaders and donors.

“I knew how to do it, and if I had the right partners, we could accomplish something,” he says. “So, throughout the county, you have these matching grant programs. It was good PR for the county commissioners also, getting the match and getting something nice. The biggest thing to me was, I didn’t do all this stuff by myself. I always had partners.”

Baber’s parks profession, in reality, was Plan B.

He started at the University of North Carolina as a pharmacy major. “That’s what my family wanted me to do. My uncle was a druggist and had drugstores,” he says, “but Carolina had a quarters system, so we had Saturday classes and there would be 60,000 people going to Kenan Stadium and I’d be in there trying to make aspirin tablets. So I changed my major.”

Baber played baseball four years at Mount Airy High School, then joined the military before getting his degree and becoming assistant director of parks and recreation in Mooresville (“It’s a town the university liked to use to train people,” he says. “A lot of parks directors throughout the state start in Mooresville.”)

He came to Gaston County in the fall of 1973.

“Of course, not having any staff or money or land, it had to be creative to get going. So I thought, the first thing we needed to do was have a master plan,” he says, “and the first thing I did was ask for 100 acres in Dallas. And that’s now known as Dallas Park.

“Another thing we needed to do was form a park grading crew, because the county owned a lot of equipment like bulldozers and so forth, and we’d take the machines out and use them for grading.”

Longtime friend Aaron Goforth, a 2016 Hall of Fame Community Spirit Award recipient, remembers Baber’s persistence. “None of the baseball fields in Gaston County would have been built, if not for him,” Goforth says. “He did parks all over the county.”

Goforth cites the $10,000 raised for a concession stand at Mount Holly Middle School, which was doubled by a matching grant, and the $50,000 in matching funds for Costner Field facilities. Lights went up, the school had a new place, and Babe Ruth teams were invited to play there, too. “And when we needed a new gym, the school system didn’t have the money, but somehow or other, he did a deal with the county commissioners, and they did it,” Goforth says.

Baber’s work can be seen at places such as Bessemer Middle School – “probably the only middle school in the state with four lighted athletic fields,” he says – and East Gaston High School’s baseball and softball fields, concession stand and press box, as well as its tennis courts.

“They (East Gaston) had 2 x 4s for a foul line. And we fenced it, lighted it, and put the softball field right next to it. And we did most of that with the Stanley American Legion, and that made it good for the high school and the community,” Baber says.

His work ventured into soccer, resulting in the Gaston United Soccer Club. “You know, soccer didn’t come into Gaston County until the mid-1980s, and we didn’t have the staff and we had to get a partner, and that’s when Gaston United was formed (in 1992),” he says. “We furnished the field, and they ran the program.”

Throughout his career, Baber found few obstacles to stop his mission. Even nature couldn’t halt his progress.

“At Hunter Huss,” he says, “the school board had a big renovation project, and we graded the land and got enough land to have a high school baseball field. But we had to re-route a creek in order to do that. Just kind of helped it move along.”

He says his MHSHOF induction is “humbling.”

“It’s appreciated by me and my family. I’m just pleased they’d think of me and want me in there,” he says. “Sometimes, baseball is what kept kids in school, and then they’d go on to college and get an education, and you feel good to have had a part in that, in making their lives better. So, it means a lot to be recognized where I live, by people I know.”