Dewey Johnson and Peter Reddoch took different paths in honoring the 1956 Little League World Series champions from their hometown of Roswell — Reddoch on film, Johnson on paper.
But their visions were similar, as reflected by the titles of their works.
Johnson’s book: “That’ll Be the Day.”
Reddoch’s documentary film: “Roswell, Where?”
This weekend, the 70th anniversary of the Lions Hondo Little League All-Stars’ improbable triumph in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, will be celebrated in Roswell. The team remains the only New Mexico squad to have won a Little League World Series baseball championship.
Johnson’s book, published earlier this summer, and Reddoch’s award-winning documentary will provide back-to-back centerpieces.
At 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Lions Hondo Little League field, Johnson will sign copies of his book. At 8, there will be a screening of Reddoch’s film, which won a Diamond Award as the best New Mexico feature at the 2026 Mindfield Film Festival in Albuquerque. “Roswell, Where?” also is scheduled to be screened at the Otto Bookstore in Williamsport on Aug. 28, with Reddoch scheduled to attend.
Amy McVay Tellez, executive director of the Historical Society for Southeast New Mexico, said there’ll be a free offering that night of snacks reminiscent of the ’50s: “Hot dogs to licorice to Cracker Jack.”
At 2 p.m. Sunday, Johnson will make a presentation at the Historical Society’s Archives Facility.
Tellez said team members Tom Jordan Jr. (pitcher-second base), Jim Valdez (shortstop), Ferrell Dunham (pitcher-second base), David Sherrod (third base) and possibly Harold Hobson (left field) are expected to attend.
Johnson has a unique perspective on the 1956 team. He was 10 years old, himself a Roswell Little Leaguer, at the time — not a terribly good one, he writes. His father, Dewey Johnson Sr., the Roswell High football coach, had taken the Coyotes to New Mexico big-school titles in 1953 and ’55.
An Albuquerque Presbyterian minister, but always a Roswellian, Johnson is the author of “One Last Double-Header — Joe Bauman’s Homerun Summer,” tracing minor-league legend Bauman’s 72-home run season with the Class C Roswell Rockets in 1954.
In 2005, Johnson wrote a novel, “Summer of Champions,” pegged around the 1956 Little League team but with the lead character a Roswell kid who didn’t make the squad. The Journal’s Toby Smith, in reviewing the novel, wondered why Johnson didn’t simply write a nonfiction story about those 1956 champions.
Now, he has.
Reddoch, some 40 years Johnson’s junior, was working on a documentary about the history of Roswell and southeastern New Mexico — “Land of Enchantment, Desert Beneath the Stars” — in collaboration with the Historical Society when Tellez approached him about the idea of producing a film about the 1956 Little League team.
“It just resonated with me,” Reddoch said in a phone interview, “and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna do it. I will drop everything and do that one.’”
Since 1956, Roswell has become nationally and even internationally famous for the legend that in 1947 an alien spacecraft crash-landed near the city. Officially, it was a weather balloon.
In any case, that was something that happened to Roswell — not something that Roswell did.
In 1956, Roswell, New Mexico, made headlines nationally — OK, mostly small ones — for all the right reasons.
“How many things,” Tellez said, “can we say Roswell was the best at?
“You know, it’s just such a historic event.”
More on the 1956 Roswell Little League World Series champions
*
The Jordans, father and son, were NM baseball royalty
Leave a Comment