The Bob Cobb story-Part 2
Note: My next book, No. 6, may focus on Bob Cobb, the owner of the legendary Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood and a Billings man who played a key role in the city getting a professional baseball team 78 years ago. I’ve written a chunk of text for a possible manuscript, and I’m be sharing that during coming weeks. In case you missed Part 1, it’s available on my website, www.treasurestatepress.com
Your comments are welcome!
Bob Cobb, visiting Billings in 1944, told a Billings Gazette reporter that he planned to visit the Greenough ranch near Red Lodge for about a week, but that he would spend most of his stay in Billings.
Cobb’s mother, Mrs. C.A. Cobb, had owned the Cobb restaurant in Billings. She and his two sisters, Shellie and Marty, were by 1944 living in Hollywood.
Cobb got his first look at Southern California in October 1918 when he and his father, C.A. Cobb, visited an exhibit of fruit and other products from the area. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce staged the event, which was said to be the largest of its type in the country, according to an October 22, 1918, article in the Gazette.
While in the LA area, Cobb attended lectures and movies offered daily, and they planned to visit other places of interest there.
According to the Gazette, Cobb’s 1944 visit to Billings was his fourth since leaving his hometown. Other stays occurred in 1924, 1936, and 1943.
It’s not clear when Cobb first got the idea that Billings needed a professional baseball team. By November 1947, however, his inclination had turned to full-scale planning for what would become the Billings Mustangs.
On November 5, 1947, Billings people who wanted a professional baseball team in the city filed articles of incorporation for the Billings Pioneer Baseball Club with the Montana Secretary of State’s office in Helena. The event rated an article in Reno’s Nevada State Journal.
The articles listed eleven directors, including Cobb and, officially, Gordon S. Cochrane of Detroit, better known as Mickey Cochrane, the famed catcher and player-manager of the Detroit Tigers who had come to Billings earlier in the decade to sample hunting and fishing in the area and in Wyoming. And Cochrane’s liking for Montana probably contributed to the decision that his younger brother, Archie, made in 1945 when he purchased an existing Ford dealership in Billings and moved his family to the place he would call home for the rest of his life. And Archie Cochrane, who had played college baseball but had never achieved major league success comparable to Mickey’s, became an official in the Mustangs organization during the club’s formative years.
News about the new Billings baseball club got national attention. Stories about the development got ink in the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Pittsburgh Press, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Miami News, the Omaha World-Herald, and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, as well as in dozens of smaller newspapers.