| Norman Willis, CAS ’71
In 1932, Norm Willis’s father took him for the first time to see his beloved Washington Senators play baseball. Despite his asthma, young Norm relished playing ball in the street, on abandoned lots, or anywhere else he and his friends could find around their District neighborhood.
The next year, Willis sat in the stands and watched New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth belt one over the wall of D.C.’s old Griffith Stadium. It was a magical season for Willis as the Nats, as they were known, captured the American League pennant. It was the last time a Washington baseball team won a title.
Norman Willis grew up a Washington Senators fan and recently published a book on the franchise. He now roots for the Washington Nationals.
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“I just fell in love with baseball as a kid,” Willis says. “The first time I saw the big leaguers handle the ball like they did, I went right home and wanted to play.”
Now 80, Willis last year fulfilled a lifelong dream when he released his book, Washington Senators’ All-Time Greats, which chronicles the finest men to ever don the Senators uniform from 1871 until the team departed for Texas following the 1971 season. Legendary Senator Frank Howard, better known as “Hondo,” wrote the forward to the book.
“When I started [researching], all I could find were two books about the Senators, yet there were a million on the Redskins,” Willis says. “It was a labor of love.”
After graduating from McKinley Tech High School in Washington, Willis went to work in intelligence for the U.S. Army. In the mid-1950s he earned a few credits from American University, taking mathematics and statistics classes at night in a downtown office the university rented at the time.
Willis’s academic pursuits fizzled in the middle of his 38-year career with the National Security Agency (NSA), but in 1965, he decided to continue his undergraduate education, taking one night class a semester year round at AU’s Northwest Washington campus. In 1971, at the age of 47, Willis earned his degree in general studies.
After retiring from the NSA, Willis began researching his Senators book. He started the initial draft in 1997, typing with one finger on a friend’s laptop. It was released early last year, just a few months before Major League Baseball announced that the Montreal Expos would move to Washington and become the Nationals.
Willis and his wife of 59 years, Frances, now live on an 80-acre farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, but that doesn’t stop him from heading to RFK Stadium to catch the new Nats. He’s a season ticket holder.
“When the Senators left, I was unhappy,” Willis says. “I would go to some Orioles games with friends and halfway root for them, but I would not be enthusiastic. It’s good to have baseball back in Washington.” —Mike Unger
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