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Swinging a piece of lumber as a slugger for the Pleasant Garden High School baseball team, Roger Smith took aim at the commercial lumberyard that started where the weedy grass in right field ended.

If a ball reached the yard, a home run usually resulted. While the batter raced around the bases, the opposing team's right fielder zigzagged through the yard chasing the ball.

During his time at Pleasant Garden, Smith's teams won the Class C state championship (for schools with fewer than 200 students) three straight years: 1939, 1940 and 1941.

They didn't just win they massacred opponents, especially the '41 squad. Using a 29-hit barrage, including a Smith homer, Pleasant Garden trounced Rock Springs of Lincoln County 22-0 in the state semifinal game.

Then, in the championship game played in Chapel Hill, Pleasant Garden thrashed like wheat Clarkton of Bladen County 19-4. Smith again hit a home run.

"We had talent," says Smith, now 85 and a McLeansville resident. "The boys just played together. The coach, Paul Hockett, saw the talent and brought it out of us."

The sports lexicon lacked the word "three-peat" back then, but it defined the Gardeners, as they were called.

The town of Pleasant Garden surely would have had a big celebration after the team's third championship. But 1941 was a bad year for exuberance. A war loomed.

Now 66 years later the team's accomplishments are getting recognition. At a ceremony Sept. 30, the Pleasant Garden Historical Society brought back five of the six survivors from the 1939-41 teams Smith, Doyle Quate, James Kirkpatrick, Branson Marley and Emmett Tucker Jr.

More than 125 people crowded into the town firehouse, where plaques were presented to the five and to families of departed teammates.

Phil Way, a society member, historian and retired from the Highway Patrol, recalled how the cocky Clarkton team was positive in 1941 of beating a bunch of farm boys from Pleasant Garden, a rural community south of Greensboro.

The score was more like football than baseball.

"Those boys were ashamed to go back home because they had been beaten so badly," Way says of Clarkton's nine.

He adds that Clarkton might have been irritated, too, because Pleasant Garden's success over three years had much to do with the play of four Dunham brothers: George, Edwin, Willard and Marcus. The Dunham family had moved from Tarheel near Clarkton a few years before.

Way and the historical society decided on a resolution honoring the team after Way kept hearing stories from old-timers. Each time he'd mention a good ball game, an elderly person would pipe up and say, "You should have been around in 1939, 1940 and 1941."

Way called the N.C. High School Athletic Association. The association confirmed the three championships and said the feat hadn't been duplicated. An association official said the team probably would have won a fourth if not for World War II.

Many players left school to join the military.

In 1962, Pleasant Garden, Alamance and Nathanael Greene high schools consolidated to form Southeast Guilford High.

Smith recalls that the lumberyard at the end of right field wasn't the only oddity about the team's home field. A fence in right field, belonging to the Methodist parsonage, stood so close to home plate that a ball hit over the fence was scored a double instead of a home run.

The lumberyard side of the field lacked a fence. Batters who hit balls in the yard had to run the bases and beat the ball to home plate for a home run.

The field lacked team benches. Players sat on the ground.

Each solicited local businesses for money for a $20 uniform. In return, the back of the jersey bore the business' name. Smith remembers one year being a walking, running ad for Cheek's Mercantile, a general store. Players who couldn't find uniform sponsors played in overalls.

Talk about team spirit.

"The first year, I played without a uniform," Smith says. "A player with a uniform came up to me and said, 'You're better than I am,' and gave me his."

After the '41 season ended in May, the approaching war put baseball in the background. According to research by society member Jane Kimel, one player, W.A. Moser, was killed in Pacific fighting. Emmett Tucker Jr. became a POW. He pitched only one game in '41, and it was a no-hitter. Roscoe Taylor pitched all the rest and often struck out as many as 15 players.

The society hopes money eventually can be found for a permanent marker to the '39, '40 and '41 teams. Reminders are few. Most players are dead. Their ball field is occupied by a building that's part of Pleasant Garden Elementary School.

The lumberyard is still in business but has moved.

Kimel, in an article about the teams, says the Major Leagues have players in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., "but Pleasant Garden boys from the teams of 1939, '40 and '41 are in the Hall of Fame in our hearts."

Contact Jim Schlosser at 373-708 or jschlosserat news-record.com