It was 1966 and already hot in Little Rock in early May about the time Arthur Stanley Deras of Hamtramck, Mich., pulled into the parking lot at Travelers Field, where even the mosquitoes had sense enough to stay in the shade.

A few blocks away, Sandy's Drive-in was still pushing its Lenten Special: a fish sandwich, fries and a drink for 44 cents. Just across the street at Park Plaza shopping center, a kid could score a pair of trendy PF Flyer track shoes--black with three white stripes on the sides--for $4.99.

Young men avoided looking into their mailboxes for fear of finding a personalized invitation from the White House to attend its war in Vietnam. A headline in that day's Arkansas Gazette read "How Heathen Chinese Became No. 1 Power."

Deras walked on through the side gate of the aging ballpark, where his first order of business was to settle in with the Arkansas Travelers in their inaugural season as a Class AA farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals. On the way, he may have walked right past Travelers' legend Ray Winder, unaware perhaps that this was the old guy who had single-handedly kept professional baseball alive in Little Rock for the past half-century and, with great reluctance, had pretty much called it quits.

Just as likely is the notion that Winder knew little of Deras' background except that the Cardinals had outlasted the Detroit Tigers in a bidding war a couple of years prior to sign Deras, mainly on the strength of his promise as a baseball prodigy.

Maybe his reputation didn't exactly proceed him into the Traveler locker room but Deras was, and still is, widely considered to be the "greatest little leaguer there ever was."

As the Little League World Series gets underway this week in Williamsport, Va., the........

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