Brittle Innings

1

Way I look at it, minor league ball back then was sort of like B movies. Thrills on the cheap. Cheap buses, cheap hotels, cheap stadiums, cheap seats, cheap equipment, cheap talent.

Cheap-cheap.

Sound like an Easter chick, eh? Or like the mechanical conductor on those subway trains out to Atlanta ’s airport. What do people call it, a “robot voice”? Yeah, a robot voice. Sorry. Can’t help it. At least with this gizmo up to my throat, I have a voice. Couple of long stretches in my life, I couldn’t talk. Back then, Mama would’ve reckoned this sci-fi gizmo an honest-to-God miracle. Awful as I sound, she’d’ve paid money to hear me talk with it.

Oh, yeah: B movies. What I meant was, they were second-line stuff. Not Gone With the Wind, not For Whom the Bell Tolls, none of that highbrow crap. Sometimes, though, they were fine. Made on the cheap, but not tacky. Monster flicks. Nifty musicals. Gangster shows. You got your money’s worth.

Same with an evening at the Highbridge ballpark, McKissic Field, watching the Hellbenders take on the Mudcats or the Boll Weevils. There was a war on. Half of what you wore and three-quarters of what you ate was rationed. Not movies, though, and not ball games. Folks flocked to both for about the same reason-to forget the war, especially the bad or the confusing news, and to have em a bang-up time. To get lost in something besides a muddle of depressing newsprint.

In June of ’43, I went into the CVL, the Chattahoochee Valley League, right off my high school team in Tenkiller, Oklahoma, near Tenkiller Lake, in Cherokee County. My county was part of the old Injun Territory set aside by the U. S. Congress for the Cherokees, that Beulahland in eastern Oklahoma the bluecoats herded them to in the winter of 1838 and ’39. The Trail of Tears. Anyway, I’m one-eighth or one-sixteenth or one-thirty-secondth Cherokee, some bollixed-up fraction, a kind of Injun octoroon.

Me heading to Georgia from Tenkiller was slogging the Trail of Tears backwards. In more ways than one. I was glad to get out of Oklahoma, to know I’d be pulling down real pay playing on an honest-to-God pro baseball squad down in Highbridge. It beat the stuffing out of pushing a mop in a factory. Or walking into a Jap-infested bunker on the ridge of some steamy coral atoll.

And it beat the fire out of unemployment.

For three years I played ball for the Tenkiller Red Stix, the only team I even tried out for in high school. As a sophomore, I played utility and pinch hit. As a junior, I started.

I idolized Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee shortstop. His first two years with the Yanks were my junior and senior years at Tenkiller High. My teammates called me Scooter because Yankee fans called Rizzuto that. Actually, they called me Sc-scooter because, if and when I talked, I st-st-stammered.

I could take that. Being called Sc-scooter, even if it made fun of my handicap, at least showed me the other fellas respected my talent. I hit like Scooter. I fielded like Scooter. I could flat-out play.

What I hated was, some of my non-ballplaying school-mates called me Dumbo. To keep from stammering, sometimes I’d just say nothing at all. I’d stare at whoever tried to talk to me. They figured me for a mute; in spitefuller words, a dummy. Also, even before I made the ball team, everyone in Tenkiller had been over to Muskogee or up to Tahlequah to see Dumbo, a Disney flick about a pint-sized elephant with humongous ears. Hilarious movie. A scream. And I was the perfect sap to stick a tag like Dumbo on because I couldn’t or wouldn’t talk and had me this really terrific set of ears. Ha ha. The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve sorta grown into them, but as a pimply-faced kid just barely over the puberty line, I looked like a drip.

Back then, kids called nerds drips. A drip equaled a nerd. My schoolmates saw me as the uncrowned king of the drips. The guys, even teammates, pulled gags on me-put horned toads in my locker or cracked raw eggs into my jockstrap. Girls giggled behind their painted fingernails. The one time I nerved up to ask a girl to a dance-a semipretty gal, not the holy homecoming queen-I stammered like Sylvester the Cat and turned fire-engine red.

“You’re sweet,” she told me, “but I’ve got this algebra test to study for.” And burst out laughing.

So I wanted out of that hick town. All my problems would go fffftht!, like a blown-out match, the instant I left Cherokee County. I’d step into Arkansas or Texas and turn into Clark Gable. (Or Alan Ladd, who was more my size.)

Talk about a naive fool.

My chance to get out of Tenkiller came from playing shortstop for the Red Stix. All our teams-track, wrestling, basketball-had the nickname Red Stix. We were called after a renegade band of Indians-Creeks, not Cherokees, but the Creeks belonged to the Five Civilized Tribes too-that’d fought General Jackson’s Tennessee militiamen at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama. The batons our track team used in relays were red, and our baseball team had red bats, even though it was hard to keep them looking decent. The barrel of my bat, for instance, was always flaking paint, letting the grain of the timber show through. I got enough hits, only the handle of my bat would stay ruby-red the entire season.

In the spring of ’43, the Red Stix regularly beat up on the squads of surrounding schools, even monster schools with a lot more students. Once we took care of an uppity bunch from Fort Smith, Arkansas. That April and May, scrapping every Tuesday and Saturday afternoon, we went fifteen and three. The folks in Tenkiller loved us. We were local heroes. Nearly every working stiff in town took time off to come to our games, even if they had to make up the lost hours later.

Tenkiller is a typical eastern Oklahoma burg: a grocery, a barber shop, a beautician’s, a pharmacy, a seed-and-feed depot, a hardware store, a mechanic or nine. Back then, our chief industry was Deck Glider, Inc. Deck Glider belonged to a Tulsa-based firm called the H. C. Hawkins Company. Before the war, Tenkiller’s Deck Glider plant made heavy-duty floor waxers. My mama’d gone to work on its assembly line in the fall of ’37. Her moonlighting outside the home irked Daddy so bad, though, it goaded him to walk.

Anyway, after Daddy left, without so much as a fare-thee-well or a forwarding address, Mama had to work to keep us fed. By the time of Pearl Harbor, she’d worked her way up to a line manager’s position. Problem was, after FDR declared war on the back-stabbing Nips, the WPB-War Production Board-told us floor waxers didn’t contribute to the defense effort. Neither did toasters, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, vending machines, toothpaste tubes, and lots of other products with metal or plastic in em. So the WPB cut the supply of materials our factory needed to make the Deck Glider. In fact, it was illegal to make a floor waxer. You could even get fined for hoarding old toothpaste tubes.

Mama nearlybout panicked. How’d she support us if Deck Glider shut down? Tenkiller didn’t offer much in the way of jobs for women. It already had all the carhops, waitresses, switchboard nellies, and secretaries it needed. Besides, any of those jobs would’ve meant a step down in pay. Mama had monthly house payments to meet. There were men, heads of bigger households bigger than ours, even scareder than Mama.

Then a section chief from H. C. Hawkins headquarters in Tulsa motored down to soothe everybody’s fears. The parent company-old Mr Hawkins had brains-had arranged some war-production contracts with Uncle Sugar. Deck Glider, Inc., would close for a month to convert its equipment and its assembly lines to the boring of gear housings for antitank guns. No one would get laid off. It might even be necessary to add on to the plant and hire some line workers from out of town. Local builders would have to put up housing for these people. Commuting-even with car pooling and special gas and tire allotments for defense workers-was unpatriotic.

When Mama told me how the Hawkins Company had saved her job, she cried. “It’s gonna be Boomer Sooner around here again, Danny. The armed forces need a lot of antitank guns.”

But even after Deck Glider geared up for war work, a core of old hands-native Tenkillerites-set up their hours, or traded off with new workers on other shifts, so they could attend Red Stix home games. The plant ran three shifts. It never shut down. Mama worked days, six days a week. Even so, our field had a bleachers section, behind the backstop, for Deck Glider personnel. Despite her shift, Mama never missed a home game or a single hour of paid labor. She traded off or went in early. And Mama was no crazier for the Red Stix than Mr Neal, the barber, or Tom Davenport, the owner of a wildcat oil company, or anybody else in town. The Red Stix glued that sagebrush community together. Deck Glider and our local churches didn’t even come close…

Sunday mornings, New York ’s Mayor LaGuardia read the funnies to his city’s children over the radio. A station in Muskogee picked up this feed and played it for us dumb Okies and Arkies. I heard him once. I knew LaGuardia’s kisser from Movietone newsreels. I’d seen him conducting civil defense exercises, supervising air-raid wardens and such. He’d wear a white metal helmet, wave his arms, and carry on, reminding me of Lou Costello, the short funny fella in the Abbott and Costello comedy team. Over the radio, he sounded sort of sissyish. How did a fella who looked and sounded like him get to be mayor of New York? Tenkiller’s mayor, Gil Stone, wore yoke-collared shirts, snakeskin boots, and dungarees.

Then I read in the Tulsa World that a crew of politicians wanted to halt major-league ball for the duration. LaGuardia got hot about that. He ripped into the jerks: “Our people don’t mind being rationed on sugar and shoes, but these men in Washington will have to leave our baseball alone!” Hooray for LaGuardia. A guy who stood up for baseball was defending America better than some hot airbag in Congress, maybe even better than a poor dogface on KP down in Alabama or Missisloppi.

Of course, baseball was my meat and drink. Mayor LaGuardia, even if he looked like Lou Costello, at least read the funnies to kids over the radio and gave the antibaseball nuts what-for. I never stopped to think he had three major-league clubs in his own city, that maybe greenbacks and greed had as much to do with his defense of baseball as a love of the game. Or maybe it was just LaGuardia hanging tight with the Yankees’ pinstripe Mafia: DiMaggio, Crosetti, and Rizzuto. Who knows?

Okay, okay. How’d I get from a sagebrush town like Tenkiller to a peanut-growing burg like Highbridge? From the Red Stix to the Hellbenders, a scrappy gang in the low minors? After all, the war emptied the big leagues’ farm systems. The Selective Service Acts, a.k.a. the draft, carried off so many able-bodied young guys it nigh-on to wiped out the minors.

For a couple of reasons, though, I was a candidate for a farm club, if the farm clubs survived.

First off, I played crackerjack ball. As Dizzy Dean used to say, “It aint bragging if you can back it up.” I could. In the twenty games the Red Stix played that spring-a couple were exhibitions-I made only one official fielding error. Even that boot you could’ve argued. Our scorekeeper charged it to me on a hard drive I knocked down and scooped to Toby Watersong for a force at second. Toby had to reach a bit, and he dropped the toss. The error could’ve been mine, it could’ve been his. But Toby’s uncle happened to be keeping score that day. So what? No sweat, I figured. And still do.

You hear a lot about good-field/no-hit players: whizzes at hoovering up grounders and turning double plays, but zilches at the plate. I could hit. That spring I had thirty-six bingers in seventy-five at bats, including a game against a semipro oil-company squad that didn’t count in our division standings. A.480 average, seventy points higher than Ted Williams hit when he became the first major leaguer since Rogers Hornsby to pass.400.

I didn’t lead the Red Stix in batting, though. Franklin Gooch did. Goochie pitched, played center field, and ran like a scorched jackrabbit. He outhit me by over thirty points. Day after he graduated, he enlisted in the Marines. In June of ’45, he died on Okinawa on Kunishi Ridge, shot through the eye by a Jap sniper. I still have the letter Goochie wrote me from the field a month before the sniper got him.

Sorry to stray. But Goochie’s story ties in, sort of. The second reason I was a candidate for the minors, gangbuster stats aside, was I wouldn’t turn eighteen until after the ’43 season. My birthday’s in November. Even though I was single and a high-school grad, I wasn’t yet draft bait. Even at eighteen, I’d probably end up classified 4-F: unfit to serve.

I had a speech problem. Sometimes, I refused to talk. When I did t-t-talk, I st-stammered. Out would come broken phrases, like bursts from a half-jammed machine gun, then nothing. Sometimes the nothing, even when Coach Brandon yelled at me (maybe especially then), stretched on and on. So I sullened my way through school, eyes peeled and hackles up. Almost every other way, physically, I was normal, but my speech problem gave folks the creeps. If the Army docs didn’t find some physical reason for it-a cleft palate was out, and my bruised vocal cords should’ve healed long ago-Mama figured they’d cull me as a borderline nut case. A GI had to have a voice, if only to yell “Lookit!” when an infiltrator chunks a grenade into a buddy’s foxhole.

A third thing put me on the road to Highbridge. A couple that came to all our Red Stix home games was Colonel and Mrs Clyde Elshtain. The colonel’d retired as an Army supply officer to become a big-shot procurement specialist at Deck Glider, Inc. Mama suspected he may’ve tugged a few strings to help the Tenkiller factory get its conversion contract. The real baseball fan of the two, though, was the missus, Tulipa Elshtain. Swear to God, that was her name: Tulipa. At fifty-something, Miss Tulipa still walked and drawled like a Gone With the Wind belle. Even in Oklahoma, she remained a member of the Confederate magic circle. At Red Stix games, though, she’d shed her ladylike ways and whoop and boo like a sailor at a prize fight.

“Come on, Goochie, give us a four-ply wallop! Drop it into the Mississip!”

Miss Tulipa and the colonel took to sitting at the top of the Glide Decker bleachers, next to Mama. At the games, they tried to make Mama-the poor, hard-working, abandoned Mrs Boles-feel like their pal and rooting partner.

“I’m their pity project,” Mama said after they’d started this. “A swell game-day friend, but nobody to invite home.”

Colonel Elshtain was management, Mama was labor. Miss Tulipa would climb up into the bleachers wearing lace blouses, peg-topped skirts, and either a velvet beret or a fancy-dan straw hat with peacock feathers. Mama wore coveralls and head scarves.

“Attaway, Scooter!” Miss Tulipa would yell. “Attaway to rap it, punkin!”

Eventually, the Elshtains did ask us to their home, a two-story antebellum job with columns. It’d once been the home of a rich, uprooted Cherokee named Trenton Cass. The Cass Mansion, everybody calls it yet. Mama sported heels, bottled stockings, and her prettiest clingy polka-dot dress. I wore khaki pants, store-bought galluses, and my Sunday tie.

At that special after-church dinner-I can still see it-we had iced-down shrimp for appetizers, bleached asparagus, a rice-and-chicken dish Miss Tulipa called Country Captain, and, for dessert, orange sherbet and blueberries. I don’t know where the Elshtains got the fixings or how many ration points it set em back, but a classier meal I’d never had. I wolfed it all, even the asparagus, a la-di-la vegetable I never liked and haven’t eaten since. (Babe Ruth said asparagus made his urine stink.) They even had wine, but nobody offered me any.

“You can flat-out play,” Miss Tulipa told me over dessert. “How’d you like to help a pro team win a championship?” Her voice was like Coca-Cola: sweet and fizzy, with a sting.

Mama’d done most of the talking so far. I looked at her. From the gramophone in the library, just off the dining room, came the scratchy diddle-diddle-diddle of the colonel’s chamber music. Like Miles Standish, I tried to speak for myself.

“I wuh… I wuh…”

“Take your time, Daniel,” Miss Tulipa said.

“I want to pl-play in the m-m-majors,” I blurted.

Miss Tulipa’s smile sparkled like the cut-glass chandelier over the table. “Why, of course you do.”

“He’s a baby,” Mama said. “He needs a honest job of work.”

The colonel’d already excused himself and wandered into the library, but Miss Tulipa nodded. “Oaks begin as acorns and major leaguers as sandlot players. What you need, Daniel, is seasoning.”

I understood that. Saying I wanted to play in the bigs didn’t mean I expected to start there. So I gawped, a drip with a speech problem. My tongue felt like a folded washrag. Mama saw my panic, the Jell-O wobble of my bottom lip.

“You think he’s good enough to go pro?”

“Laurel, Laurel dear, he’s a prospect. Denying him a chance to develop his gifts would be cruel. Suppose DiMaggio had become just another San Francisco fisherman?”

“He’d’ve been a good one, probably.”

“Of course, Laurel. But he’d’ve labored virtually unseen. The loss to our national heritage, ah, incalculable.”

“A lot of ifs and maybes,” Mama said. “Why fret it?”

Miss Tulipa shut up for a bit, then said, “Daniel should sign with the Hellbenders in my old hometown. My brother Jordan”-Tulipa said JUR-dun-“will pay him seventy-five dollars a month, twenty-five more than he’d make as a private in the Army. Jordan ’ll also provide lodging and instruction. This rotten old war has just decimated the majors. If he does well, Daniel could be wearing big-league flannels sooner than you think.”

Colonel Elshtain, wearing a honest-to-God ascot, wandered back in. “Army pay’s gone up. Daniel’d make sixty a month, even as a private. And the benefits that accrue as-”

“Please, Clyde. If you’re trying to recruit him, remember Daniel’s medical condition may preclude his induction.”

“He should have no trouble at all shooting a carbine.”

“You forget his-his handicap.”

“Send him to boot camp. To your own Camp Penticuff. The DIs there might well divest him of it.”

Miss Tulipa exploded. “How many young men do you want to ship out as cannon fodder? Do you want to be rid of them all?”

“We’ve more at stake today than a minor league pennant.” The colonel’s lips’d blanched like day-old fish bait.

“Given your patriotic fervor,” Miss Tulipa said, “why don’t you have your commission reactivated?”

The colonel lifted his chin. “Perhaps I should.” He returned to his staticky gramophone, sliding a panel door into place between the library and us. You could still hear his music bumbling up and down the scale, though, like drowsy bees.

“ Laurel, what do you think?” Miss Tulipa said, turning on the Suthren belle charm. “Would you allow Daniel to sign with Jordan if Jordan agrees he has the talent?”

“Danny’d be a high-school graduate,” Mama said. “He could do whatever he wants.”

I struggled to ask the last question I’d ever ask at the Elshtains’ table. “Which farm s-s-system?”

“Pardon me?” Miss Tulipa said. “Oh. The farm system. The Hellbenders belong to Philadelphia. Does it matter?”

Not much. So far as I knew, no other organization had even scouted the Red Stix. Even so, the name Philadelphia hit me like a concrete medicine ball. Philadelphia had two big-league clubs, the Athletics in the American League and the Phillies in the National. Both clubs reeked. The Athletics had finished last three straight years and the Phillies five. The Phillies had been the only major league club to lose over a hundred games in ’42. If any American city ranked as Loserville, it was Philadelphia.

“Oh,” Miss Tulipa said. “Which team there? The Phillies. Your opportunities with the Phils are boundless.”

Bingo. I had a better chance of ousting Gabby Stewart at short than I did Rizzuto at that spot with the Yankees or Pee Wee Reese in Brooklyn with the Dodgers. Even so, I’d’ve almost rather thrown myself into a Japanese POW camp than go to Philadelphia.

Mama and I left the Cass Mansion, and I comforted myself by remembering that in Highbridge, at least, I wouldn’t be playing for the Phillies, I’d be playing for the Hellbenders, a team supposedly on the rough-and-tumble rise.