Once a year, we go visit family in northeastern North Carolina and it’s always in July. We were just there and we met some longtime friends for dinner in Hertford, N.C.

Hertford is just a blip on a map but if you’re a baseball fan all you need to know is that Jim “Catfish” Hunter is from there. He’s the most famous person from that area and was a great pitcher back in the day. He played for the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees and his resumé is quite impressive.

Catfish won a Cy Young award in 1974, was an 8x MLB All-Star, won five World Series titles between the A’s and Yankees and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1987.

My first sports writing job in 1999 was at a daily newspaper in Elizabeth City, N.C., and we covered all the high schools in the area.

Of course, we covered the town of Hertford, and the high school there was called Perquimans County, which is where Catfish attended in the 1960s.

When you think of small rural high schools, Perquimans County fits the bill. The press box at their football stadium was more like a deer blind and one of the ends of the football field bumps up against the local cemetery, with a fence dividing the two.

If a kicker for either football team had a strong enough leg, he could clear the goalpost and the fence and send the ball into the cemetery where a ball boy would go retrieve it after a field goal or extra point.

By the time I started at the paper, Catfish had been diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease but was still around the area and living on his farm.

He made a few public appearances and whenever he did, you could see the damage the disease was doing to his body. His arms just kind of dangled by his side.

I had joined the newspaper’s softball team and on one September day we were practicing when news came that Catfish had passed away. He had taken a fall and hit his head about a month prior and never recovered.

The senior sportswriters at the paper had to leave softball practice because he was assigned the job of writing about Catfish’s death.

A few days later Catfish was buried in his hometown of Hertford – near the football field of course. Plenty of the locals attended, but what was amazing is that a lot of his former teammates from the Yankees and the A’s descended on that little town to pay their last respects.

One of those who attended the funeral was Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, who described Catfish as a “fabulous human being. He was a man of honor. He was a man of loyalty.”

My only regret is that I never got the chance to meet Catfish, but I did meet his family and got the chance to know one of his sons – Todd – pretty well.

If Todd and his siblings took after their dad, then Catfish must have been a super nice guy as Reggie Jackson said because Todd and the rest of the Hunter family certainly were.

Since Catfish passed away some 25 years ago, the Hunter family runs a softball tournament every year and the proceeds go to fight ALS.

The last time I checked they had raised more than $200,000, so at least something positive has come out of his untimely death.

Hopefully, one day they’ll find a cure for the horrible disease that robbed Hertford, N.C. of its most famous resident – Jim “Catfish” Hunter.