Career
He lost his life at age 27 while leading flight training for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, when his aircraft crashed into Flushing Bay, off the Borough of Queens in New York, in early 1945. The son of Baseball Hall of Fame manager Billy Southworth, he was born in 1917 in Portland, Oregon, where the elder Southworth was playing as an outfielder for the Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League. Southworth Junior. grew up in Columbus, Ohio.
He graduated from East High School and attended Ohio State University.
An outfielder like his father, Southworth signed with the Saint Louis Cardinals, for whom Billy Senior was then a minor league manager, in 1936. He played five seasons in the Cardinal and Philadelphia Athletics organizations, reaching the top minor league level for 15 games with the 1940 Toronto Maple Leafs of the International League.
After the end of that season, on December 12, Southworth enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps and, according to the website Baseball in Wartime, he was the first United States. professional baseball player to enlist in the armed forces prior to World World War II, almost a year before the Bombing of Pearl Harbor.
