Harry’s been gone five years. Not a week goes by — or even, sometimes, the breadth of a summer day here in the heart of baseball season — when his fishing buddy, Bob Johnston, doesn’t think about Harry and the good times they had together for more than 30 years.

“Harry was one of life’s special people,” Bob said over lunch at Belle Meade the other afternoon. “To meet him, you might not have realized what extraordinary things he accomplished. He was so naturally modest and down to earth, he never spoke about anything he did — only others. In my experience, great men often are like that in life.”

Bob Johnston has unique insight into the accomplishments of great men. After graduation from Allegheny College in the early 1950s, he went on to become a beloved history teacher at the Kiski School, an outstanding independent school for boys founded by Woodrow Wilson’s cousin in Saltsburg, Pa. Among other things, he became an expert on Abraham Lincoln and coached varsity baseball. His love of baseball stemmed from a boyhood spent growing up near Pittsburgh and worshipping Pirates named Kiner and Mazeroski.

Kiski stressed solid academics, good athletics and character development. Bob Mathias, the Olympic gold medal decathlon champion, was a Kiski kid. The school’s football teams also produced a string of college All-Americans. Year in, year out under Bob’s leadership, its baseball teams were outstanding. One of Bob’s top players, an infielder with an excellent bat, was Jack Hanna, the naturalist and colorful wild animal advocate.

In time, Bob went on to become the headmaster at Durham Academy in Durham, N.C. After that, he was recruited to head up the University School in Milwaukee, Wis. It was there that he crossed paths with Harry Dalton, who walked into Bob’s office one day in 1977 to enroll his three daughters in the school. Dalton was the new general manager of the hometown Milwaukee Brewers.

“We hit it off pretty much right away,” Bob recalled, “especially our wives. My Ruth and his Pat were like oldest of friends, almost overnight. We also had two sons and a daughter about the age of their girls, so a natural family friendship developed. In winter we went cross-country skiing together. In the summer, of course, we went to Brewers games. Harry spoiled us rotten. His box was fantastic. Harry was rebuilding the Brewers the way he built the Baltimore Orioles.”

If Bob Johnston was a modest man at the top of his craft, so was Harry Dalton.

A native of Springfield, Mass., and a graduate of Amherst College, Harry had ambitions of being a writer but instead took a low-level administrative job with the Orioles organization in 1954, not long after the team moved to Baltimore from St. Louis, where it had been known as the Browns. Moonlighting as a cab driver, Harry worked his way up through the organization to director of minor league operations — creating the kind of farm team organization that baseball dreams and pennants are made of.

Considered a shrewd trader and a brilliant evaluator of talent, Harry brought along stars like Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, Steve Barber, Dave McNally and Jim Palmer.

In 1965, he engineered one of baseball’s greatest trades by sending pitcher Milt Papas to Cincinnati for slugging outfielder Frank Robinson. In 1966, Harry was named the Orioles’ general manager, Robinson won the Triple Crown, and the Orioles won their first World Series, upsetting the Los Angeles Dodgers.

As a very minor aside to this tale of friendship among great and modest men, and purely in the spirit of fair journalistic disclosure, I should point out this was about the time my Uncle Carson Jewel, a foreman at the Baltimore Kelly tire plant and fanatical Birds fan, took me to my first Major League Baseball game at Memorial Stadium.

I got to meet big Boog Powell and have my new Rawlings fielder’s mitt signed by Golden Glove third baseman Brooks Robinson, enjoy my very own National Bohemian Beer from a paper cup, and listen to my leather-lunged uncle hurl astonishing verbal abuse upon umpires in general and the loathed New York Yankees in particular. I was 13 when this pure religious experience first took place, marking me a Birds fan for life.

“Here’s the first rule of being a true Birds fan,” Uncle Carson advised on the way home from the first of many summer trips to the home of the Birds. “Anything we do or say at the stadium is something your Aunt Leona and mother probably do not wish to hear about. What they don’t know, pal, won’t hurt them.”

The Glory Years

In the middle of the 1968 season, Harry Dalton promoted brilliant, crusty and equally profane Earl Weaver to the manager’s job, and the glory years continued. Weaver led the Birds to three consecutive World Series (losing to the Mets and the Pirates in ’69 and ’71, beating the Reds in ’70) with a battery of all-stars like Cal Ripkin Jr. and four young pitchers who collected six Cy Young awards among them.

Weaver, who endeared himself to my Uncle Carson’s Oriole-orange Irish heart by being routinely ejected from games over the 17 years of a career that led him to Cooperstown, once said of Harry Dalton: “Harry was level-headed and I was hot-headed, but I knew my place. He was my boss, a Hall-of-Famer at what he did.”

After the Orioles lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1971 series, Gene Autry recruited Harry to head up the Los Angeles Angels. He spent six years making them respectable. One of his ­little-known trades that underscored his reputation as a brilliant evaluator came about in 1971, when Harry convinced Autry to trade his favorite player, all-star Jim Fregosi, to the Mets for a struggling pitcher named Nolan Ryan.

Ryan, on the heels of a mediocre season, was actually considering retiring from baseball. Ryan went on instead to a Hall of Fame pitching career with the Angels, Houston Astros and Texas Rangers.

After the 1977 season, Harry moved on to Milwaukee, where he acquired pitchers like Rollie Fingers, Pete Vuckovich and Don Sutton and brought along sluggers Robin Yount and Paul Molitor, thrusting the lowly Brewers into the thick of several pennant races and their only World Series appearance in 1982, which they lost in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals.

During these years, while Harry was fishing for all-star talent in baseball, he was often fishing for smallmouth bass with headmaster Bob Johnston on a beautiful lake in Canada.

Bob and Ruth had a summer getaway place on Lake Loughborough near the village of Battersea up in Ontario, a modest seasonal camp on a gorgeous cove where they’d been going for years. The lake was mere feet from their back porch steps, full of largemouth and smallmouth bass, Northern pike, lake trout and perch. Dusk brought the haunting call of loons. They nicknamed the retreat “Loon’s Landing.”

“That water was the view that greeted us every morning,” Bob remembered. “No TV. Only one small radio. Water came from the lake. We heated the place with one old wood stove. Pretty simple, actually. Three small bedrooms, the kitchen, the living room, the porch. That was it. Great sunsets. That was our great escape place.”

“Harry and I loved being there with Ruth and Bob,” agreed Pat Dalton. “Fishing was probably Harry’s other great passion in life, and he adored being with Bob. Ruth and I never knew what they talked about, quite honestly. That was their special time together. They were both such intelligent men, and they so enjoyed being with each other on that lake.”

Harry and Bob, aging boys of summer, fished in one boat, their wives in another. “They called ours the Ladies’ Boat,” explained Pat.

“We talked about everything except what was happening in the world,” Bob noted with a wry smile. “The idea was to get away from whatever was in the news. We talked about a lot of other things that interested us — history, our wives, you name it. Harry was in Mensa. I liked to kid him that wouldn’t help him catch fish, though. We talked a lot of baseball, to be sure. I never got tired of reminding Harry about when my Pirates beat his Orioles in the World Series in 1979.”

‘Like Old Times’

True friends, Cicero once observed, have everything in the world in common.

Harry Dalton retired in 1994. That’s roughly when Bob Johnston began his one-man campaign to have Harry installed in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Baseball executives — the people who build championship teams behind the scenes — are rare entries in the Cooperstown hall. But executives and fishing buddies like Harry Dalton are even rarer. Harry’s already in two halls of fame in Baltimore and Milwaukee.

Even after Bob and Ruth moved on to headmasterships in Charlotte and Rabin County, Ga., the Daltons and the Johnstons remained close friends. Not long after Bob retired and he and Ruth moved to the Sandhills, Bob’s last school in Georgia built their first baseball field and named it after Bob — Robert Johnston Field. Harry and Pat were among the first to go see the new ballfield after its dedication. Bob has snapshots of Harry winding up on the pitcher’’ mound.

“Jim Palmer he wasn’t,” said Bob.

Harry Dalton died from complications of Parkinson’s disease in late October of 2005. Ruth and Bob were prevented from attending the memorial service out in Arizona because Ruth Johnston was in the midst of her own challenge with cancer. But Bob wrote a touching tribute to his fishing buddy that was read at Harry’s service.

Ruth Johnston died here in the Sandhills a little over a year later.

“Before Harry died,” Bob recalled, “Ruth and I spent a wonderful 10 days or so with Pat and Harry out in Carefree. It was like old times up in Canada. Harry’s memorabilia took up half of their three-car garage.”

‘Never Ends’

After Harry’s death, Pat Dalton went through her husband’s “museum” and sent much of it to a leading sports gallery in Dallas. She sent two banker’s boxes full of Harry’s meticulous management notes on some of the most crucial baseball transitions of all time on to Cooperstown.

Pat and Harry Dalton married during the Major League All Star break in 1960. Last Friday, as another All Star break approached, they would have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Ironically, both Harry’s Orioles and Bob’s Pirates are in dead last place of their respective divisions.

“I still think of Ruth and Harry being with us,” Pat Dalton remarked from her home in Carefree. “A friendship like the one we enjoyed never ends.”

She is deeply touched by Bob’s campaign to see his old friend Harry put into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. He’s considering a letter-writing campaign and hopes a column by a diehard Birds fan who saw his first game and drank his first beer at age 13 in Memorial Stadium might help spread the word and assist the cause.

“It’s so rare for a baseball executive to make it to Cooperstown,” Pat said. “But if that were ever to happen, why, I believe I would cry my eyes out with happiness.”

If anybody deserves to be in the hall, Bob insists, “it’s Harry — and I believe it will happen someday soon.”

Great and modest men, as either Cicero or my Bird-crazy Uncle Carson Jewel might say, sometimes have a way of just knowing these things.

Award-winning author Jim Dodson, Sunday essayist with The Pilot and editor of PineStraw magazine, can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.