Teter, Andy, 86, retired Boeing manager and well-known Wichita athlete, died Friday, Feb. 14, at the Kansas Masonic Home in Wichita. Born in Wichita on April 5, 1927, Andy (Andrew Thomas Teter) graduated in absentia from Cathedral High School in 1945. He enlisted in the United States Coast Guard prior to graduation. On Sept. 18, 1945, he married his high school sweetheart, Jeanne Herbst. Jeanne passed away in February, 2004. In his youth, Andy was seldom without a baseball glove or basketball in his hand. A standout athlete at Cathedral, he was captain of the team that won the 1945 city basketball championship and a star of the baseball team. He also played baseball and basketball for Coast Guard teams and at Friends University, where he majored in physical education. Andy played AAU basketball and was on one of the local teams who played exhibition games around the state against the Harlem Globetrotters. He also refereed high school sports in Kansas and Oklahoma. He was inducted into the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame and the National Baseball Congress Hall of Fame and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Kansas Baseball Association. It was as a baseball player that he was best known. He started playing professional baseball in the Boston Red Sox farm system while still in high school, and played for four years for minor league teams in Ohio, Delaware, Virginia and Oklahoma. Andy was center fielder for the famed Boeing Bombers, who won back-to-back NBC national championships in 1954 and 1955. The 1955 team went on to win the first of only three NBC Global World Series in Milwaukee’s County Stadium. He played on or managed various other semi-pro teams over the years including the Cessna Bobcats, the Garden Plain Indians, the Weller Indians, Instant Glass, Service Auto Glass, Bob Moore Oldsmobile and the Holyoke (Mass.) Allies. He played with or against many former and future major leaguers, and once hit a home run off Satchel Paige. He managed the Weller Indians to a state tournament title in 1960 and brought Satchel Paige back to the tournament to pitch for Weller. In 1964, while managing Bob Moore Olds in a game against the Fairbanks Alaska Goldpanners, he was a pinch-hitter and drew a walk from the young Alaska pitcher, a 19-year-old named Tom Seaver. Andy was credited with an RBI, but Seaver won the game for the Panners by hitting a grand slam. In his later years, after suffering severe memory loss, Andy still remembered that at-bat, as well as many others. Andy began working for Boeing in the B-29 era and went on to work on all the major Boeing projects through the late 1980s, including the B-47, B-52, KC-135, 707, 727, 737 and 747. He retired from Boeing in 1989. Andy and Jeanne raised four children, Mike (Dilla), of Garden Plain; Lon, (Susan) of Brooklyn, N.Y., Andrea (Harald Schweigert) of Vienna, Austria, and Brian, of Wichita. His children remember him with love as a man of impeccable integrity, generosity and a wicked sense of humor. Besides his children, his survivors are his brother, Ralph (Kathleen), of Wichita, 10 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife Jeanne, parents Harry Arthur Teter and Florence Christine McNamara Teter, and his sister, Catherine (Raymond Schecher). Rosary will be at 7:00 pm Thursday evening and funeral mass will be 11:00 am Friday all at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church at 132 S. Millwood. In lieu of flowers, a memorial has been established with the Central and Western Kansas chapter of the Alzhiemer’s Association, 1820 E. Douglas, Wichita, Ks 67214.
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