The Perfect Game
Baseball Memories
Roy B. Merritt
Published by Neponset River Press
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2010 Roy B. Merritt
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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This book is dedicated to kids everywhere who love the game.
In 1926 my home town was a friendly place, almost rural, with several small farms dotted round its wooded outskirts even though it was only a short 25 miles from New York City. Many of the quiet tree-lined old streets still boasted gingerbreaded Victorian houses, resisting with tranquil dignity the tide of “progress” toward ranch-style and pre-fab houses.
It was a lovely town to grow up in, with warm neighbors, long-time residents and happy households of closeknit families. If there was racial prejudice, I never saw it. Divorce was rare. Married couples seemed to try harder to stay together than they do in today’s more frantic social ratrace. Families worked together and played together with the result that juvenile delinquency was almost unheard of. Young people didn’t smoke, they didn’t drink, and drugs were exotic things the doctor gave to the very sick elderly folk in pain. Kids of the ’20s did not seem to need help in discovering “who we were”; grammar school kids were not despondent or suicidal. I guess we were not bright enough to know how many luxuries we lacked and that life was such an impossible burden!
Life was simpler then and slower-paced. It was still the era of the horse. Not many parents were interested in buying an automobile, especially for a teenage son or daughter, even if they could afford one. Most small businesses in town delivered their wares by horse and wagon. The fishman drove a fragrant cart through the town. His musical cry of “Feeeeeish! Feeeeeish! Fresha Feeeeeish!” drew aproned housewives out onto their front steps all up and down the shady streets. Behind his aromatic wagon padded an eager clowder of cats; occasionally the benevolent driver would drop some dainty fish scraps onto the cobble stones for his optimistic retinue. At five o’clock every morning, winter and summer, the milkman’s big gray mare clip-clopped to a stop out in front of the house, and the white-clad milkman rattled and clattered up onto the back porch with his dangling rack of bottles. His patient horse, Agnes, knew every house along her master’s route, and would stop at each home without being told to “Whoa.” She never had to be anchored out in the road by the customary heavy weight on a rope which many drivers attached to the bridle. As a matter of fact, Agnes was smarter than her driver who often forgot where he was going, and sometimes made mistakes in his arithmetic, mistakes which could have impoverished him if his brighter customers had not patiently corrected his addition.
The coal we burned in our insatiable furnace arrived in a heavy, high-sided cart hauled by two black geldings named Moran and Mack after two of the most popular comedians of the day. With much shouting and a bit of well-chosen profanity, the dusty driver would back his horses into the driveway until the wagon was just outside the cellar window. Then he slid a thick metal chute down from the wagon and through the open window. Coated with his usual film of coal dust, the stocky driver planted himself in the pile of anthracite and shoveled the shiny black lumps onto the chute. The coal thundered down the slide and roared through the window, an ebony avalanche, into the wooden bin close beside the monstrous furnace which always demanded feeding during the long cold winter months.
The junkman’s wagon was preceded by the jangling of the bells he had strung on a cord up over his seat. This seat had been resurrected from the remains of an old easy chair covered in flowered chintz. It gave him a regal look up there among his treasures, and he knew it. In his cart you could see fascinating relics he had bought or traded for: frayed lamp shades, a baby’s potty, broken china, ancient rocking chairs, a discarded frock coat, threadbare oriental rugs, a doghouse, roller skates, bottles, huge wheels of string or rubber bands . . . all marvelous collectors’ items.
You could always hear the vegetable man long before his cart ever turned into your street. His cry was a ringing tenor bellow like Caruso reaching for a high note, “Frooooota! Frooooota! Wedgable! Stromberry! fresh-a frooooota! . . .” He was a short round Italian with a huge waistline. Nobody knew his last name but all the housewives called him “Patsy.” Sometimes the kids would tease him and call him “Fatsy” which drove him into a red-faced display of volatile Italian emotion, providing us unfeeling kids with rare amusement as we watched his long black mustache quiver with justified indignation. But he was a kind man and always forgave us, often giving us a bruised pear or a handful of big black cherries. He was truly one of nature’s noblemen.
The iceman’s horse was a heavily-muscled old chestnut. He and the iceman made a great pair, both of them bulging with muscles. The iceman, who was the strongest man for miles around, was also one of the gentlest. He treated kids and dogs and cats with grave kindness and respect. When he carried a 50 pound chunk of ice through the kitchen, he always made sure that the family pets were out from underfoot. Hundred pound slabs of ice meant nothing to him; he would tote them along sidewalks, up five flights of stairs as if they weighed no more than a dozen eggs.
If the grocer or the baker or the butcher could not afford to keep a horse, he hired small boys with bicycles to deliver their orders. This provided a lot of eager kids with pocket money, as well as a terrific way to keep their legs in shape for the coming football season.
In the stores, butter and cheese were stored in huge round wheels which fitted neatly into wooden casks tilted up so you could see the yellow discs. When your mother sent you for a pound of “rat cheese,” the grocer sharpened up a knife long enough to fight a duel with, and carved a pie-shaped chunk out of the big cheese circle.
There was no such thing as a supermarket. When you wanted a roast of beef or pork, you went to the family butcher in his own small shop. My mother always called her food providers “my little butcher” or “my little milkman” or “my little scissors grinder” even though most of them towered over her. Meats were stored in large storage refrigerators which were kept cold by regular deliveries of ice, lugged in by the iceman in hundred pound blocks, not by electricity or some other exotic gadget.
The butcher was an old family friend who had gone to school with your father. He always knew what kind of cut of meat your mother preferred, whether beef, pork, veal or ham, so you never went home with the wrong thing. Our meat man was a skinny gent who always had a well-chewed unlit cigar stub in his mouth. He kept it at a strange and unstable angle because he had no lower teeth. He wore a white smock and a battered straw hat, both of which bore colorful spatterings of blood. It was easy to see by the deft loving treatment he gave a side of beef or a whole lamb that he enjoyed his work and had nothing but admiration for the carcasses he handled with such surgical skill. I think he admired the meat hanging in his ice box more than he would have admired the creatures if he met them running carefree in a meadow.
Some meats required care in selection and undying trust in your butcher. Government inspection was in its infancy and food poisoning was a much more common problem than it is today. My grandfather was invited to visit a hot dog plant in 1925. He was given the grand tour. He returned home a shaken man, and until the day of his death at 85 he never touched another wiener. At picnics when the frankfurters were sizzling over the fire, he would entertain the assembled clan with his grim description of the factory.
If you needed beans or peas or other dried foods, the grocer would measure them out of a burlap sack with cylindrical boxes of various sizes and weights . . . half peck, peck, bushel, etc.
Cookies, most of them, were sold loose, not in fancy boxes. They were stored in large metal containers with hinged glass tops. The boxes were tilted up so you could see the cookies. They were sold by the pound rather than by the dozen. My favorites were the ones my Mother and her “little grocer” called “Zuzus.” They were better in the old days before they acquired the dull name of ginger snaps.
There was no instant coffee, no tea bags, no dehydrated cereal, no frozen foods, no cases of beer, no butter or sugar substitutes. You had to settle for the real thing. If you wanted a waffle for breakfast, someone had to get up early and whip up the batter with flour, eggs and milk. You couldn’t pop one into the toaster and read your paper; the paper wasn’t there!
Stores did not have fresh fruit shipped to them from all over the world, especially during the winter. Most of the vegetables and fruits available on the dinner tables of 1926 were home-grown, perhaps canned or preserved. One of childhood’s greatest thrills was to wake up on Christmas morning and find a tangerine in your stocking! Simple things seemed like miracles to the unsophisticated small town kids in the ’20s.
Our town boasted a DW Griffith movie studio which added a touch of glamour to our lives. It was not so unusual to see Charlie Chaplin going into the dry goods store, or Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks driving down the main street in a brand-new Stutz Bearcat. Several famous films were shot on location in and around the community. The sight of popular silent film stars was a constant thrill for all of us in our quiet little village.
The philosophy of the U.S. Postal Service was quite different in those halcyon days. Every mailman actually believed that the mail must go through and, by golly it did! The postman delivered our letters at the door, twice a day, and he did it on foot! No jeeps or fancy mail trucks for him! Indeed, one of the inducements of his job was that it was an active outdoor kind of healthful exercise. He carried his heavy leather bag through fair weather or foul, and neither snow nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stayed this courier from the swift completion of his rounds, twice daily and on shank’s mare at that!
The mail carrier was like one of the family, always getting a shower of birthday gifts and dozens of Christmas presents: scarves, mittens, earmuffs, knit sweaters and argyle socks, as well as little things for his children. All along his route housewives and grandmothers plied him with coffee and doughnuts, or cocoa and cookies. In the hot summers, the lemonade offered him would have filled the Erie Canal! He loved his work and we loved him.
The Police force was small and friendly; most of its members were boys the townspeople had grown up with, so there was little chance that an irate citizen would confront his old schoolmate with a gun. There was no swat team, no vice squad, no riot control detail. The good folk of the town seemed to feel no irresistible urge to kill each other, and if there was any vice around, we kids never found it, and I’m sure we looked. School dances never turned into drunken orgies because kids went to dances just to shake a leg. How odd we were! Sports events did not become riots of mass hysteria or mob violence, with teenagers dying like flies on the road in high speed games of “Chicken.” How much we missed! Kids somehow survived without pot, hash, speed, horse, coke, crack, and even alcohol and nicotine. School kids in the ’20s were just too naive to appreciate all these wonders of progress in the ’80s.
Indeed, teenagers of this unenlightened age were so dumb that they actually enjoyed family activities! There was no television; radios were scratchy and inclined to fade into unpredictable bleeps of static; trips to the movies were infrequent and very special. If some boy gave up the prospect of a fast game of mumble-de-peg or two-o-cat, or of building a raft up on Gedney’s Pond, and instead headed for a movie with Clara Bow or Mary Pickford, he was considered peculiar, and shunned, at least temporarily. Tom Mix could lure us into the drafty movie house only on rainy days.
Entertainment was more primitive then. Being at home with one’s parents was often fun, not boring. Families did things together, corny things like charades, mah jongg, checkers, games of Old Maid and Hearts. A game of Hearts at the big dining room table, accompanied by cookies, homemade root beer, and Mom’s fudge, gave us more pleasure in one evening than some modern families taste in a month of Sundays!
One of our greatest joys was rooting for our local town football and baseball teams, semi-pro clubs made up of recent stars of our two high school teams, some fine ex-college standouts, and occasionally an “imported” player of outstanding skills. These were actually two very talented teams, and we backed them with great town pride and loyalty. In those days town semi-pro teams gave us thrills which we were missing by not having easy access to big time sports.
My family was a musical one. Evenings of homemade music were very big on our agenda. Uncles and aunts and cousins would arrive and gather ’round the old upright piano in the living room. Aunt Jean played well and had a soft sweet soprano; my Dad played the violin and could let go with a strong light baritone. The rest of us, maybe ten or twelve of varied talent, would cluster ’round the two music makers and tune up the old vocal cords. The songs were mostly semiclassical: selections from “Show Boat,” “The Desert Song,” “The Chocolate Soldier,” “Babes in Toyland,” “Blossom Time,” “Hit the Deck,” and other Broadway greats. We were really carried away by Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg.
If we became exhausted from all that vocalizing, we would crank up our old Victrola and put on the scratchy records of the day: Rudy Vallee crooning “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover,” The Two Black Crows, Moran and Mack, and their famous routines, Harry Lauder singing “Something in the Bottle for the Mornin’,” or “Cohen on the Telephone,” calling the carpenter to come fix the shutters.
Then when it got late, maybe 9:30 or so, the homemade rhubarb pie and vanilla ice cream appeared . . . sometimes it might be warm doughnuts and cider or lemonade, and some of Grandma’s walnut fudge. Gosh, it was such fun! Today, in the technological age, family togetherness has become a bore and a drag; in the dopey old ’20s it was what we did, and I must say I miss it and look back on that period with nostalgic fondness,
and the memory of happy times with loving relatives, all long gone but never forgotten . . . and by gum, we were never bored!!
Baseball was a better game when fields were bathed in sun,
When uniforms had buttons and there was no radar gun;
When the White Sox wore white stockings and a hot dog cost a dime,
When the hurlers went nine innings or tried to ev’ry time.
When Connie Mack was on the bench, a score card in his hand,
When teams made trips by Pullman Car, no planes but overland;
When all nine men knew how to bunt,
“inside baseball” was the thing,
When there was no instant replay and the plate umpire was king!
When just the long-ball hitters drove that horsehide out of sight,
And no mascots dressed as chickens,
uniforms were not skin tight;
When on-deck hitters swung three bats, not a doughnut made of lead,
When batting gloves were still unknown and Judge Landis wasn’t dead.
When third base coaches flashed the signs in secret swift intrigue.
When baseball shoes were always black and white laces were bush league;
When small towns in New England each had teams of skill and grace.
When major leagues had just eight teams to make the pennant race;
When the pitchers really wound up and the out-drops dipped and flew,
When a kid knew ev’ry line-up, ev’ry batting average too;
There were no players’ agents, old Fred Hoey was at the mike,
When a chest-high rising fast ball was still a good called strike;
When grass was grass, by golly, clipped and trimmed with loving care,
When no beer was served at ball parks and straw hats the thing to wear;
When a fly was not a “sacrifice,” when sun glasses were unknown,
When there were no short relievers and men rubbed their bats with bone.
When guys tossed their gloves behind them as they came in off the field,
When the Gas House Gang, those roughnecks, loved to fight and wouldn’t yield.
I suppose I’m getting senile, thinking back and not ahead,
But I really miss those simple things now the “good old days” have fled.
by Roy B. Merritt
Boston Globe sports section, Summer, 1981
As a little boy of ten, I loved stories about knights in shining armor who slew evil enemies with their lances, and rescued long-haired maidens from imprisonment in craggy old castle towers. Like Robin Hood, these great heroes rode throughout the kingdom helping the poor and down-trodden, and defending the weak against tyranny and oppression. In real life, you don’t meet too many of them. . . .
My 4th grade classmate, Chuckie Bancroft, was a born knight, but born 500 years too late. Chuckie Bancroft was the very picture of knighthood, dressed in corduroy knickers and a green and blue checked sweater with a hole in the elbow.
Chuckie was tough. Oh, he was not a bully or a wise guy who liked pushing other kids around. In fact, he was the gentlest and kindest kid in the whole school. Even in the 4th grade, he was strong about fighting the dragons of prejudice and brutality.
Chuckie took home birds with broken wings and cured them; he found deserted litters of kittens and fed them warm milk with an eye-dropper; he bravely stopped older and bigger guys from throwing rocks at squirrels and stray dogs.
One day on our way to a big baseball game on Collin’s field, Chuckie and I saw some kids on the corner of Cary Street. They were all gathered round three or four others, and there was a lot of yelling and hullabaloo. Chuckie began to run toward the action, and I kind of trotted along behind.
When we reached the scene, we could see the Coogan brothers, Larry and Frank, standing over somebody lying on the ground. Pushing through the kids, we saw little Perry Phillips on his back with his nose bleeding. His shirt was torn and his books were all thrown around, and he was crying.
Perry was the smallest kid in our class, and probably the most timid one in the whole town. The Coogans were both in 6th grade. One of them—Frank—had been kept back, so they were both in the same class and both thoroughly detested by everybody, including the teachers. They stood there grinning down at tiny Perry lying there weeping. You could easily see that the ugly brothers were having a good time.
As Perry struggled to his feet, Larry went down on all fours behind him. Frank jumped forward and gave Perry a mighty shove and down he crashed, right over Larry’s back and onto the sidewalk.
With that, Chuckie grabbed me by the arm and dragged me through the yelling kids. When we broke through, Chuckie walked up to the brothers and stood in front of them, looking at them with a funny smile on his lips, his hands in his knickers pockets. The smile was a smile all right, but it didn’t seem to be a happy kind of smile; there was something about it that looked sort of dangerous.
Chuckie reached down and grabbed Perry’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “Go home, Perry. It’s all right. They won’t hurt you.” He turned to Larry. “Isn’t that right, Larry?”
“What’re you buttin’ in for?” said Larry belligerently. Frank moved up menacingly, close behind his brother and said, “Stay out of this! It ain’t none of your business!”
“C’mon, Frank, two of you big guys against the littlest kid in the 4th grade? Boy, you guys must be real tough!”
There seemed to be a murmur of agreement from the bunch of boys behind us.
“We’re tough enough,” said Larry.
Chuckie’s smile got even wider and he repeated, “Go on, Perry, go home. Nobody’s gonna hurt you again.”
He turned back to the Coogans. “Well,” he said calmly, “There’s two of us now, so if you want to beat somebody up, come ahead and do it. You’re big enough.”
Dismayed at this quiet offer to throw me into combat with the monsters, I thought seriously of hightailing it for home and mother, but some unwanted sense of pride and shame nudged me forward to stand beside Chuckie, looking as ugly and mean as I could look. “Yeah, you guys, that’s right,” I growled. “Come on.”
The two bullies stared at us with their beady little pig eyes, but we didn’t back up a step. Muttering something like, “You brats ain’t worth it,” they picked up their jackets (they never carried books), glared at us in suppressed rage and turned and headed for the break in the stone wall across the field toward home.
My God, we had won!
Instead of enjoying this moment of triumph by shouting taunts and curses after the Coogans like most 4th graders would have done, Chuckie just stood there quietly, watching them retreat. He still had a smile on his lips, but somehow it had changed; it was now a smile of satisfaction and happiness, not an expression of warning.
That day was a great day in the history of the 4th grade’s progress through elementary school. Peace reigned, and the Coogans faded away so that our lives became free of dread, and little kids didn’t wake up every morning afraid that they might meet the horrible brothers on the way to school.
I wish the great illustrator, N.C. Wyeth, could have been there with his paints and brushes to capture the vision of Chuckie Bancroft slaying the dragon on Cary Street! It was a heroic scene. . . .
Like every kid who spent most of the day all summer chasing after the old horsehide, Chuckie shared the big dream, the dream of some day standing in the spotlight of a vast stadium with thousands of baseball fans on their feet cheering and applauding some fantastic feat. Although the other kids didn’t give it much thought, the fulfillment of Chuckie’s wish was a path filled with disappointment and despair, because Chuckie had been born with severe curvature of the spine. He got around pretty well, although his left leg was a couple of inches shorter than the other; but he was never going to fly around the bases and slide thunderously into home, bowling over some burly catcher who had the plate blocked.
Even though most of the guys paid no attention to Chuckie’s slight limp, Chuckie, I think, recognized his limitations; this was the reason that he always wanted to be the catcher. He had gotten his dad to buy him an inexpensive catcher’s mask, and he was the only one in the gang who had the guts to catch right behind the plate. Most of the other catchers we pressed reluctantly into service refused to get closer to the hitter than about 30 feet. This didn’t do the pitcher’s control any good at all as they fielded all the throws on the first or second bounce. Chuckie squatted up there close, even though foul tips often beat a tattoo on his arms and chest. Because of this willingness to do or die, he was often chosen first by the captain of one squad.
Chuckie had the same bulldog tenacity as a hitter and the same indomitable courage. He would stand up at the plate against some bigger boy who was three grades ahead of us, and he’d never back out or go into the “bucket.” He could hit, too; he was the only grammar school boy I ever saw who hit a ball over the stone wall in left field on the fly.
In the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grade, Chuckie was the catcher. Somehow, though, as we went from one grade to another, Chuckie’s running became slower and slower even though he could still lay the wood to the old ball.
The next September, the whole bunch of us baseball loonies moved into the eighth grade, with visions, not of sugar plums, but fantastic high school ball dancing in our heads. We swore we’d be ready, and by golly, the old gang would show them something!
But in October, misfortune added a darker tint to our rose-colored glasses. Chuckie was taken off to the hospital. Nobody really knew why, but my mom heard from a friend of Chuckie’s mother that our old catcher had developed tuberculosis of the bone in that poor short leg. Anyway, he was gone.
Chuckie stayed in the hospital all winter. My parents took me to see him once in a while, and I noticed that each time I went, he seemed to be paler and smaller. He was always cheerful, and we did a lot of talking about the big day when he and I took the field for Old Neck High as battery mates, me out on the mound with my whistling fast ball, and Chuckie behind the plate in the “tools of ignorance.”
In March, the class found out that old Chuckie had had his left leg amputated just below the knee. Our homeroom teacher told us on a dark, blustery day just before the dismissal bell. As kids, tragedy seems to sort of roll off you, like water off a duck’s back. And in a day or two, human nature being what it is, the bad news recedes into the background, and teenage life goes on; but on that afternoon I straggled listlessly home from school, and didn’t even touch my usual peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich with an ice-cold glass of milk. When I tried to tell Mom about Chuckie, I broke down and cried like a little kid . . . It was my first experience of wondering what God was doing up there. If He was so great and saw every sparrow fall, why was He being so cruel to the best boy in the whole damn school? Was this what God’s mercy really meant? Sunday school, and praying, and going to church, and being a “good boy,” I thought, what good does all that stuff do? Chuckie did all that. Even though it scared me to think it, even to myself, I pictured God as a kind of Umpire who called all the close ones in favor of the other team. Who needs that?
Chuckie came home in late April, on crutches which he handled with the same easy skill he did everything else. I took homework to him and we talked baseball a lot more than we talked arithmetic. We decided that he could still catch if he had a small stool to sit on behind the plate, and the shop teacher and I began to make one. When he batted, he could have a runner standing beside the plate, and when Chuckie hit one, the “designated runner” could circle the bases. We discussed and planned and plotted strategy for hours, and one day in June, I brought him the catching stool. Chuckie loved it, and put it in the corner near his bed, with his mitt and his mask on top of it. Every time he looked at it, he smiled. Things were going well. We began playing catch in his small bedroom, Chuckie on the stool and me sitting on a chair in the doorway. And finally one summer day, I carried the stool out into the back yard, and Chuckie swung slowly out on his crutches. Under the huge blossoming cherry tree, we had our first official comeback catch. It was one of the great days in my young life, and I could see that it was a real thrill for Chuckie. When I left to go home for supper, his smile was as broad as a barn door, even though he was tired.
Next morning, carrying a new Ralph Henry Barbour sports book for Chuckie, I rang his front door bell. The door was open, but nobody answered. I called and knocked on the side of the screen door . . . Nothing. I jumped the porch railing and trotted around back. That door was open too, but Mrs. Bancroft was not in the kitchen. That was funny; all the doors open and nobody home. I sat down on the back steps.
I sat there a long time, but nothing happened. Nobody came out of the house, and nobody went in. Finally, kind of bewildered, I wandered home.
That evening, about seven o’clock, Dad and I were sitting out in the yard in the old glider swing my Grandpa had built a long time ago. We were having a cool glass of Mom’s homemade root beer. Then in the dusk, we heard footsteps, and out of the growing darkness a dim figure appeared and stood silently before us. As he leaned forward and took hold of one of the glider uprights, I saw that it was Chuckie’s father. I moved over in the seat and Mr. Bancroft climbed in and sat beside me, facing my Dad. He didn’t speak, but I think I knew what was coming.
After a few minutes as the glider moved creakingly back and forth, Mr. Bancroft spoke softly. “He’s gone, Chuckie’s gone.” He paused and I could hear him swallow. I don’t think I was breathing. What did he mean, “Gone”?
“This morning . . . this morning he woke up with terrible pains. He didn’t cry or yell, but the pain was bad. I carried him out to the car and his mother held him all the way to the hospital. When we got there, they rushed him off somewhere. They wouldn’t let us go with him.”
Mr. Bancroft coughed and wiped his face with one hand. Dad and I sat there without saying anything.
“After about a half an hour, the doctor came out to us, and said we could go in and sit with Chuckie, but he said that Chuckie was very bad . . . Said that . . . Said that . . .” He stopped and seemed to choke. “The doctor said that my boy would probably be gone in an hour.”
My stomach heaved and my whole body began to shake. My eyes burned. I didn’t dare say anything.
My father spoke softly, “God, I’m sorry, George. What a fine boy he was. If there’s anything we can do. . . .”
“No there’s nothing. I just wanted to come over and tell Roy myself. I didn’t want him to hear it from strangers. And I wanted to thank you,” and he turned to me in the dark and patted my knee, “for being such a loyal friend. Your friendship meant a great deal to Chuckie. He was always talking about you. His mother and I are grateful.”
I tried to tell him it was nothing, but there was a football stuck in my throat somewhere and I could hardly breathe, much less say anything. Mr. Bancroft got up and stepped out of the old glider. “Good night,” he said and moved off quietly in the darkness. As he disappeared, I thought I heard a muffled sob; I thought it was his, but it may have been mine.
It turned out to be a lousy summer, and in the fall my family moved to another town ten miles away, which in those days was like settling on the moon. I did see my old classmates again several times, but always as opponents on the diamond.
Although I had some fine battery mates over the years, I still find myself wishing that Chuckie and I could have teamed up. We’d have made a great combination!
And I still haven’t figured out why God had to take Chuckie. After all, He could have taken the Coogan brothers!
I remember one spring morning, ‘twas a Saturday in bloom. . . .
And the lilac-scented air of May filled the house with soft perfume.
I put on my “whistle-britches,” big league belt around my middle,
And hurried to the kitchen where Mom was heating up the griddle.
I destroyed a stack of pancakes topped with apple, sliced and peeled,
Then I grabbed my mitt and Yankee cap and raced off to Bister’s field.
I turned down Barry Avenue which was lined with flow’ring trees;
It was one long blossom tunnel all aswarm with honey bees!
On the way I met Ralph Martin (he was never ever late!)
With his mitt and rusty mask we used in our turn behind the plate.
Freddy Fajen brought the baseball, a good new one for a change,
Not an old one wrapped in black tape, looking lumpy, flat and strange.
Stevie Haines had made a home plate out of one thick slab of wood . . .
I suppose it was lopsided, but to us it sure looked good!
Donnie Hull though was the winner with not one new bat, but two,
Not them split an’ cracked old castoffs filled with nails or tape or glue.
We had an extra baseball too; it was just a ten cent rocket.
But if we lost the good one, Beecroft had it in his pocket.
First base was just a big rock, second was a patch of dirt;
Third base we had to hold down . . . (it was Gerry Lopez’ shirt!)
We played a game o’ two-o-cat till the noon fire whistle blew,
Then tore on home like wild things, had some lunch and back we flew!
That afternoon so many guys showed up we had enough
To put together two full teams with an umpire, old man Huff.
There was no Little League back then, no fields all raked and lined,
No coaches or equipment, just old stuff that we could find.
We played each day for hours, forty innings maybe more . . .
Each kid would bat two dozen times; sometimes our hands got sore.
But man, we had some practice, a lot more than kids today.
We’d go on till the moon came out an’ we couldn’t see to play.
Then we’d all race home for supper . . . mine was sometimes rather cold,
But my Mom was very patient and she’d never fuss or scold.
She knew that playing baseball was my most important dream
And that the thing I wanted most was to join that Yankee team.
I’d lie in bed at night an’ dream of the baseball Hall of Fame
And the times I’d whip the Red Sox in a no-hit, no-run game.
They would hate me just like poison up in far-off Fenway Park.
Gosh, I never lost a crucial game as I lay there in the dark.
The gang has disappeared and gone, some to Heaven, I know that . . .
They’ll gather round when I get there for a game o’ two-o-cat!
In 1926 the owner of an official major league baseball was a much sought-after and popular pal, at least temporarily.
Usually the kid who owned one kept it in untouched byhuman-hand security on his bedroom shelf, between his Buddy L army truck and his imitation leather bag of miggies. It required a super-human display of generosity to carry that glistening, unbruised horsehide out to Bister’s field and put it into the grubby clutch of ragamuffins who couldn’t wait to lay the old wood on that pristine surface. For the donor it was a kind of miserable ecstasy.
Times were hard and “jen-yoo-wine o-fish-ill” baseballs were as scarce as pigeon garters. New ones probably cost a dollar and a quarter. Earning that staggering sum by digging up Mrs. Turner’s dandelions at ten cents a bushel basketful was a long, hot and tedious process.
Supply and demand being what it has always been, a new industry sprang up like weeds in the outfield. This much needed and lucrative business was the mass production of inexpensive baseballs.
A variety of these little beauties began to appear on the shelves of local hardware stores, of all places. Of course, calling them horsehides was a boyish euphemism and a flagrant misnomer. The closest these spheroids ever got to a horse was when we whacked one of them out into the street and it rolled inevitably and invariably into a large deposit of equine manure. This fragrant hazard dotted the village streets before the Chaplinesque “white wing” meandered by with his wheeled trash barrel and broom.
If by some miscalculation on the part of fate, the ball missed the “road apples,” it sometimes dropped into a Barry Avenue sewer where it floated defiantly in the stagnant guck. Retrieving the ball involved lowering one of us, upside down, into the manhole, usually the kid with the longest arms and the lowest I.Q. Oddly enough, we never did drop anyone!
Although we never actually analyzed the inner contents of the ball, some of the more scientifically sophisticated players were convinced that each ball was stuffed with horse dung. The “horse” was hidden: hence, “horsehide.”
Prices of these sometimes-round baseballs ranged from 5 cents to 75 cents, which was a little steep for us, so we usually split the difference and settled for the ten-center. This one came in a beautiful box that was probably worth more than the ball. On the box was a whizzing comet that left in its wake in jagged print the dazzling word “R-o-c-k-e-t.” The very word inspired visions of screaming line drives, vicious grounders traveling at the speed of sound, and towering Herculean blasts soaring far over the deepest centerfield wall of beloved Bister’s field.
Rocket, indeed!
The darned thing was an inconsistently-shaped combination of cork, string, elastic, glue, sawdust and what looked to us like ground-up potato chips. All of this was held together by a series of erratic, often lumpy, stitches like the ones Grandma used to hold together her Thanksgiving turkey. These stitches were not designed to stand up under our thundering Louisville sluggers in a long game of “two-o-cat.” What the cover was made of we never did determine; of course, the cover was not often around long enough to encourage careful analysis.
From the fateful moment the spotless rocket took flight on its first pitch toward home plate, it was never the same. The first contact with the barrel of Dave Wetherby’s black bat, a Rogers Hornsby model, not only bruised the ball’s shiny surface, but left a noticeable depression in its shape as well. After 5 or 6 hard-fought innings of a big game (they were all big), the ball had become a grass-stained gray glob, completely out of round and with a kind of spongy consistency. Sometimes the thing would be almost flat in one area, making the old “out-drop” very easy to rotate but rather unpredictable in its behavior.
In the course of the afternoon, the seams would begin to split and a hard-thrown fast ball would leave behind it a wake of sawdust as it hummed toward the batter. Soon, the splits would gape, and the cover become so loose that the pitcher could grip a flap of cover in his fingers, wind up and cut loose what looked like his best fast one, hanging on to the flap. This converted the old “high hard one” into a drifting change of pace, flopping up to the plate like a crippled sparrow.
When the cover finally flew off, a conference was held at the sunken spot we called “the mound.” The kid who had wisely brought along a roll of his father’s black electrician’s tape would be called in for a consultation. The loose string would be rewound around the lumpy globe and plastered down with yards of sticky tape, until the ball was at least as big as it had been when we bought it, often a good bit fatter!
The pristine glory of the once circular horse (?) hide was now a sticky oval lump of coal black which fielders had difficulty dislodging from their gloves after hauling in a high fly or a sharp grounder.
This remodeling of the ball created one serious additional problem: the Bister’s field gang were all baseball fanatics of 8 or 10 so that we often played all day, with a brief time out for a baloney sandwich at noon. After supper, some of the more devout diamond worshippers returned to the field and played until dark.
Standing at home plate in the gathering gloom by early moon glow trying to locate that ebony ball as it hummed toward you, almost invisible, was a true test of courage, or foolhardiness. Occasionally, the ball’s outline would be seen as the black glob scattered a small gathering of fireflies en route to the plate.
Locating the ball at all was an optical adventure; hitting it was a minor miracle! And, of course, all this with no helmets, no jock straps, and no hesitation.
Sometimes, now that I am safely into my dotage, I wonder how any of us escaped being beaned. Even with my fading memory, I shudder to think of facing some “big kid” as he fired that sticky black missile out of the darkness!
We must have led charmed lives. We were baseball loonies and perhaps the guardian angel of would-be big leaguers was smiling down at us from that great green stadium in the sky.
On a Saturday in April When the grass was crisp and new, And the earth was firm but springy ’Neath spiked shoes of kangaroo, Baseball mitts would sprout like flowers From boys’ hands in massive yield, And you’d see Spring’s great migration As kids headed for the field . . . From screen doors, backyards and porches, Tossing baseballs at the sky And circling underneath them As they whirled down from on high. Uncounted million metal spikes With their crisply crunching noise Left their imprint in the turf of time In the wake of laughing boys. That Spring was filled with magic Tinged with nature’s verdant thrill, And the scent of lilac blossoms, Cherry bloom and daffodil. But of all the growth that burgeoned There was one that ever lingers: ’Twas the baseball glove that sprouted From my small ten-year-old fingers!
Choosing up sides for a big game at Fisher’s Field on a warm summer morning was a kind of tribal ritual. After some heated and often loudly blunt debate, the gang decided who was going to be captain of each team. The captains were usually the two most talented athletes; since many of us thought that we deserved that title, the decision was a serious one. It sometimes helped your cause if you happened to have brought along a good baseball. One baseball in prime condition was worth at least five votes from the congregation.
After the appointment of the two captains had been made and accepted, often grudgingly, the second crucial exercise began. This was the selection by each captain of the kids who would make up the roster of the team.
To begin this sacred ceremony, one of the captains grasped the barrel of the chewed-up bat, a black Heinie Manush model, and tossed it carefully to the opposing leader, who airily snatched the old “black Betsy” in its flight with one hand. Holding the bat firmly, the captain extended it toward his rival. The latter now grasped the bat by placing his hand around the bat just above the grip of the opponent, keeping the heel of his hand in close contact with the index finger of the other. Now with alternating hands, they worked their way up the bat handle until they reached the knob. The captain whose hand could grip the bat just below the knob, without having any skin showing above it, was the winner and had dibs on the first pick. To keep this knob business honest, we often tested the amount of skin showing by whacking the knob end of the bat with a large flat rock. Since having the flesh between your thumb and forefinger smashed flat by the rock could be very painful—and since we were all convinced that such a blow could cause “lockjaw,” honesty prevailed.
The first choice of both captains was always simple and quick. Each would pick the best pitcher or hitter, besides himself, of course, in the horseplaying crowd, and go on from there.
After the first critical contracts had been worked out, the picking became easier. It was based less upon what each kid could do to insure victory for his side than upon a careful figuring out of how much damage he was capable of causing on it. There was little tact or kind words involved. Plain talk was the idea as the player in question often had to stand and listen to a loud and sometimes profane discussion of his diamond gifts, or lack of them.
Determining who was to play with whom often took as long as an emergency meeting of the U.N. The whole mess was not too humiliating or insulting to the good athletes, but for the ever-hopeful but totally awful klutz, it was a daily source of wounded pride and carefully hidden hurt feelings . . . especially if there was an uneven number of kids to select from. After two equal squads had been chosen and one kid remained unpicked, a heated argument took place as the poor unwanted leper stood by, head down, glove dangling. Uncomplimentary phrases would fill the air:
“You guys take him!”
“We don’t want him!”
“Why should we be stuck with him?”
“He’s lousy!”
“All right, you guys . . . dammit, we’ll take him!”
And so finally the less pig-headed of the captains would give in and allow the insulted kid to join his ranks, but without noticeable enthusiasm.
This procedure gave birth, at least among our group of ragamuffins, to a brand new position which if listed among the traditional positions like ss, 2b, c, would have been called rrf. Its official title would have to be “remote right field.”
Of course, in professional baseball the right fielder is expected to be a fine hitter, a swift and sure-fisted fielder with a tremendous arm, capable of nailing a base runner going from first to third on a single into his area; however, in ten-year-old circles, the right fielder is the unwanted step-child, the fifth wheel, a sort of Count of Monte Cristo in the outer gardens.
Alfred Snodgrass was the perfect remote right fielder!
Alfred was a skinny undersized child with a mop of light brown hair that stuck up in little tufts and clumps all over his head, even after he had just combed it. His eyes were weak and owl-like behind steel rimmed glasses with great thick lenses. They kept drifting down his nose and often fell off when he bent over. These errant spectacles didn’t help him much when it came to following the flight of a high fly ball. I am convinced today, in hindsight, that the optician who made Alfred’s specs got the prescriptions mixed up and put the left lens in the right eyepiece and the right lens in the left one.
Alfred was a funny little fellow whose fly was always open, and who could not make his way from his school desk to the blackboard without tripping over something, or tipping over an inkwell, or bumping into Miss Cotter, our lovely teacher.
He was a kind and gentle boy who made a complete hash of everything he ever attempted, but whose sense of humor and acceptance of his own clumsiness made him one of us, in a kind of Harpo Marx-kind of way.
He was an enthusiastic baseball person, not exactly a player, and he loved the daily summer battles on Fisher’s field. Alfred was always picked last, but if he felt hurt or insulted, he never showed it. Like a lost puppy, he was thrilled just to mingle with the superstars of the 4th grade; when he was finally chosen, he beamed all over as if he had found the Holy Grail. In all those boyhood years Alfred never got to play any position except remote right field. When his team went out to their posts, the captain would escort Alfred out to a section of right field that Babe Ruth’s longest tape measure clouts would never have reached. To keep Alfred up on what was happening at home plate, we would have had to send him a telegram! But he loved it out there; I never heard him complain. After all, wasn’t he part of the team?
In the hazy summer heat, Alfred stood out there, smiling, pounding a skinny fist in his mitt and piping, “Attaboy! Attaway to pitch! He can’t hit! No hitter in there, baby! No hitter!”
To take up the slack created by Alfred’s distance from the center of activity, his first and second basemen both stationed themselves in short right field. When grounders went through there, or a Texas leaguer looped its lazy way over their heads, they dashed back after it, usually beating Alfred to the ball.
The one defensive play that Alfred could usually handle was charging in from outer Mongolia after a slowly hit grounder which stopped rolling by the time he got there. He sometimes fielded these cleanly in the deep grass that no other sneakers but his had ever trod. Of course, his throwing arm was not anything to write home about, and he often carried the ball all the way back to the infield so that a potential single could be held to a triple. Returning to the outfield after making the play, Alfred smiled softly to himself as happy as if he had just made a clothesline throw of 400 feet to nail a swift runner at the plate. He loved baseball, but baseball didn’t love him!
As a hitter, Alfred was a disaster, but by golly, he had guts! There were no batting helmets then, of course, so standing up there, bat in hand, with 20/800 vision was a test of anyone’s backbone. As a result Alfred was our most frequent “hit batsman” and his assortment of bruises and lumps was impressive. Being a hit batsman was an exercise in uselessness since our rules did not award first base to the unfortunate victim. The pitch was just another ball, and since we had no umpire, guys might stay at the plate for 30 or 40 pitches before they got three they were willing to swing at. We figured if you got hit by a pitch, it was your own fault; you should have got out of there!
Since poor Alfred could not get out of the way of sharp grounders at all, and a long fly ball could, and sometimes did, conk him on the noggin, his life was just one perpetual, large lump! . . . but if he ever complained, I never heard him. He never cried and he never asked for mercy. Alfred was something else, although none of us would have admitted it at the time.
Alfred was no speed merchant on the base paths either. He was the most knock-kneed human being on the face of the earth, and he ran with his feet kind of splayed outward from his pumping knees. No one was surprised by his weird baserunning style because we had watched him walk that way all our lives.
Alfred Snodgrass became a Fisher’s field legend on July 4, 1928. He was out in rrf in a big game that day, playing on my team. Bucko Clark was pitching for the other team. Bucko was a big, dumb kid, all muscle, especially in the head. There was nothing he liked better than heaving his fast one at some little kid. He was the neighborhood bully, really mean and rotten. If we could have, we’d have dropped Bucko into Gordon’s Pond in a weighted burlap sack.
With two outs and two men on, Alfred stumbled to the plate with his bat. Bucko grinned and looked as if he was going to pound on his chest like Tarzan. After ten pitches, Bucko had little Alfred in the hole, two strikes and no balls. Bucko went into his windmill windup and uncorked his best sidearm fast ball. By some unpredictable whim of the baseball gods, Alfred brought old “black Betsy” around in his usual uncoordinated short swing. The bat somehow happened to find itself in the same spot as the ball! The ball rolled into the hole between short and third and died in the outfield grass twenty feet back of the shortstop. As the two runners circled the bases, the shortstop hustled out after the ball. Both runners scored, but Alfred was still struggling uphill to reach first! If he didn’t make it before the ball, both runs would be wiped out. When Jimmy Dunn picked up the ball and fired it across the infield, knock-kneed old Alfred was just about there! A split second before the horsehide whapped into the first sacker’s mitt, Alfred’s foot hit the bag. He was safe!
But Bucko, darling Bucko, raged over to first, screaming that the kid was out, he was out, out, out! Nobody agreed with him, but it looked as if this ugly bully would get his way.
I looked at Alfred. He was standing on first base, his eyes filling with tears, and his tiny fists clenched. He looked up at Bucko, and said in a small but brave voice, “I was safe. I am safe, and I’m staying right here!”
Bucko stepped forward and growled, “Listen, runt, you’re sucking for a bruise!”
Alfred stepped right up under Bucko’s nose, and said, “Go ahead. I’m not afraid of you. You may beat me up but I was safe and you know it! I’ll fight you but don’t be surprised if my pals jump in and help!”
His pals! Would you believe it?
But you know something? All of a sudden we were his pals, and every one of us moved in behind him, staring at Bucko. It was obvious that Bucko’s teammates were in no mood to back up the worst bully in the whole school. Bucko picked up his mitt, and slowly walked off the field, wondering I’m sure what had happened.
It was that day which convinced us all that Alfred was really something, that although he would never have a special place in Cooperstown, he was a super kind of kid with the heart of a born champion.
I haven’t seen or heard of Alfred for almost 60 years; I don’t know if he is alive or dead, but if he has gone to that big diamond up above, I hope that his tombstone reads:
Alfred Snodgrass R.I.P. “Safe At Home”
I found my first real baseball mitt
In Mom’s attic yesterday.
It was tucked inside her steamer trunk
Where she’d put it safe away.
Still wrapped around a scuffed old ball
We called a “ten cent rocket,”
It lay there ’neath some roller skates,
Developing a pocket.
For fifty years it’s lain there
In a rubber band’s worn coil;
The flimsy leather still gives off
The smell of neat’s foot oil.
Boys wrapped their gloves then ’round a ball,
Oil soaked and firmly tied
So that winter’s hibernation
ould form pockets deep inside.
A million closets ev’rywhere
Held smelly gloves and dreams,
And when the Spring sun kissed the grass,
A million boys formed teams.
This oily ceremony helped
To keep your winter warm,
But mitts were just limp leather
And no pockets would they form.
Instead they just stayed thin and soft
And we took a boyish pride
In catching wasp-sting fast balls
Till our palms were hippo hide!
Today’s kids can’t make errors—
They have mitts as big as sheep,
With fifteen feet of webbing
And a pocket inches deep!
At the intersection of Gedney Avenue and Avery Street was a well-loved plot of rough terrain, once a cow pasture, known as Fisher’s Field. It was the scene of some epic baseball games, and remains in my memory a place of hallowed recollection. Best of all, thanks to the kindness of “old man Fisher,” the field was accessible to bands of diamond hopefuls, and we used it so much that it was a wonder that the whole meadow didn’t sink three feet below the surface of the land around it.