Tony Watson, the Pirates’ trusty relief pitcher, was only a month old when his great-uncle Tom Offenburger, a former press aide for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the stormy 1960s, died in 1986 in Atlanta after open-heart surgery at age 52.
Mr. Offenburger isn’t often counted among the central figures of the civil-rights movement, but he played a key supporting role, one his sister Beverly Watson — Mr. Watson’s grandmother — and brother Chuck Offenburger still are eager to explain. Both still live in Iowa, not far from where they grew up.