A WASTED SUMMER

1960

     During the summer I worked for Dad and played American Legion ball for West Anaheim. Three mornings a week I followed Dad in my Chevy to arrive at the store at 7:30, where a dozen or so shoemakers awaited him in eager anticipation of donuts, coffee and kibitzing, Dad’s mood was instant sunshine the second he arrived, no matter how worried or pissed off he was about other matters. These men were not customers of Dad, but friends whose life breath was attuned to their morning visits, which were lively and full of laughter and gossip, led by Dad, who always had new stories, jokes and “hot poop.” He made a fuss over each shoemaker, as if they were special, and it occurred to me that they were, and that he found something in everybody to appreciate or like, even his so-called “Cheap Sams” who squabbled over every cent and felt they were getting screwed; even the characters lacking any amiable traits, even the assholes.

     When Dad became nervous and flustered during hectic rushes when we wrote up orders together, I often went too fast and he occasionally lashed out and sometimes exploded at me to “slow down and stop making mistakes,” because any tiny mistake was a catastrophe of massive proportions and drove him into rages. I yelled back at him and he threatened me and I held my ground, knowing to back off from the beast was total submission, and we went chin to chin in blood-curdling, snarling-dog screaming matches, driving his beloved shoemakers outside or to the back of the store until the two of us cooled off and acted like the confrontation never took place, like a switch was turned on and off, and as the shoemakers trickled back to the big wide counter up front business resumed as usual, as if nothing so volatile had occurred, almost as if these grimy, hard-working mostly Italian American men were used to it and even understood and enjoyed the spectacle.

     When Dad asked what I wanted to be paid, I told him to give me what I deserved or the minimum wage. He insisted I was worth more than the minimum wage despite being a chronic pain in the ass because I did work hard and besides needed a little extra money—for the girls. But I had no girl friend. Most of the girls at Western High looked upon me as a clown-around-baseball player or a morose idler in class, staring at breasts and asses and fantasizing. Whenever I worked up enough courage to talk to a girl in hope of perhaps making a date, I was gruff and blurted out questions or statements, not about to be some mawkish lover-boy kissing ass, and was doubtlessly regarded as a pestilence. Oh well.

     I began boozing with Sturrock, who’d graduated and worked steel downtown days, and a Legion pitcher named Mike Shaw, who worked for his Dad who managed a drugstore. We found any number of local drunks to buy us beer and Southern Comfort and drove around with no special destination or direction in the flat drab O.C. wastelands, chowing down on burgers and talking sports and women, though both these guys were already hog-tied by girls who had planned their lives together since junior high and kept a tight wary eye on them to make sure they didn’t stray, distrusting me as a threat to their dreams.

     Our American Legion team was as big a mess as the high school crew, with a sprinkling of Junior varsity players and John Huarte, a jut-jawed All American high school football quarterback from a nearby Catholic school. A pitcher with mediocre stuff, he was a phenomenal football player headed to Notre Dame and the Heisman trophy and became our unquestioned leader who tried not to show his disgust when we flailed miserably and I continued kicking at things and flipping my bat and cursing savagely, feeling like a penitent little boy beside John, who was the epitome of excellence and character. But I couldn’t help myself, was like a tortured dog biting himself up and down

gnawing at fleas.

     Our coach, Frank Blunt, a tall bulgy man who loved baseball but had never played much and knew less, was too intimidated by my being the son of Murray Franklin to offer me advice on how to play and conduct myself. He’d enlisted an assistant coach named Bill Lentini, a small, curly-headed man with intense brown eyes who owned a tire store in Stanton. Lentini was a street guy who knew little about baseball, had never played much, but, like Blunt, was so in love with the game he donated free balls and bats and helped run practices. He was excited about all aspects of baseball and indeed possessed a visceral instinct about the guts inside a player, and a person, and stroked me with flattery every time I screwed up, almost as if he was trying to single-handedly rebuild in me what had been reduced to ashes. Bill became friends with and worked as a bird-dog for Chicago White Sox head scout Doc Bennett and reiterated to me over and over that “You have everything there is to be a great big leaguer—those wrists, those wheels, your instinct…”

     I felt he was making this up to salvage me, but much later I learned he meant it. Meanwhile, I began to consider getting away from baseball for a while and was forced to suspect I lacked some vital ingredient to succeed in this game, a mental make-up that held me back, which caused me to lose hope when things went bad, to get too down on myself and distrust the encouragement of a generous, compassionate man like Lentini. 

     But without baseball, what would I do, and what was my life, other than a passage not worth living? And how would Dad feel about his son being a quitter?

     (Next Sunday installment: Mr. Korfman plants a seed)

                              BIRDIE TEBBETTS—BENCH JOCKEY

BIG MOE

     Birdie Tebbetts was a fine catcher and a pretty fair hitter and knew the game inside out, and especially pitchers. He knew just how much gas a guy had left in his tank, when he was losing his stuff and ready to get shelled, and he could get on guys pretty good, really get under your skin. He was smart and had a piercing, twangy voice, which was why they called him “Birdie,” an obnoxious, irritating voice that carried all over the field and cut right through you, and he had a sarcastic way of saying things that always got your goat—he was a first rate needler, a sniper, an original, maybe the best in the game. He was what you call a bench jockey, a lost art these days, what with all these guys making so much money and swapping teams and having agents and fraternizing like bosom buddies, being so sensitive and all and not wanting to hurt each others feelings.

     One day in St. Louis Tebbetts was on a pitcher with the Browns named Vern Kennedy, a guy he’d caught a few years earlier with Detroit, a strapping guy from Kansas, a former track star and football player. It was very hot, sweltering, and it doesn’t get any hotter than it does in St. Louis in the summer. You can’t breathe on a day like that, the outfield grass is baked brown and the field hard as concrete, almost like the field breathes fire. Birdie was riding Kennedy. At first it was playful, because they were old team mates and all, but then Kennedy started struggling, and Birdie’s saying he ain’t got this and he ain’t got that, “you’ll be gone by the fourth inning, Kennedy, your fastball’s straight as a string, you’re dead meat…,” just sniping away, and sure enough Kennedy doesn’t have it that day, gets knocked around, and by the fourth inning he’s gone, and Birdie’s crowing and gloating, and Kennedy, he’s sopping wet, got beat up for a bunch of runs suffering in that heat, watching line drives whistle past him and bounce off the fence and guys circling the bases, and he gets an unmerciful booing when he walks to the dugout.

     Birdie’s on the bench that day, not catching, and he keeps right on crowing and gloating when Kennedy walks to the dugout. But instead of leaving for the clubhouse and taking an early shower, like all pitchers do after they get their brains beat out, Kennedy sits down in that stifling hot dugout with a towel around his neck and takes his cap off, and he sits there like that for the rest of the game, and all during that time Birdie sees him over there and stays on his ass. Well, out ball club has to get to our clubhouse through their dugout, and when the game ends and we pass through their dugout, it’s empty except for Kennedy, who’s still sitting there, towel around his neck, a very quiet and polite gentleman who minds his own business and never has anything bad to say about anybody. He stands up and asks Birdie if he has anything more to say, and before Birdie can open his mouth Kennedy decks him with one punch, knocks him down and out, hits him so hard that for a minute or so we think he might be dead.

     Kennedy picks up his glove and cap and walks out of the dugout, the towel still around his neck, and we carry Tebbetts into the clubhouse and lay him down on the training table where the doc attends to him, gives him the smelling salts. He’s pretty groggy, and the next day he’s pretty quiet, and misses the game, and everybody on the club’s on his ass, calling him “:one punch Tebbetts” and “Old Canvas back.” He took it pretty well in stride. Birdie knew the business and took it as well as he gave it out, and the next time we played the Browns and Kennedy pitched, Birdie got on him again, but he made sure to stay away from the personal stuff, and nothing came of it.

(Next Sunday installment: A Wasted Summer and a respite)

                                           TRYING TO BE THE MAN

1960

     The ball field at Western High was second rate and the school without athletic legacy, had been converted from a junior high. Our first practice coach Merk put me at shortstop. I felt quicker, faster, stronger, and watched my batting practice grounders eat infielders up. We started out the pre-league schedule winning four straight and because we had nowhere near the talent of Compton, I felt it was my responsibility to lead the team by example and production. I was an established prospect and played with swagger, knowing I made a difference. We were excited about being league contenders instead of perennial doormats. I was the “Big Dog,” perhaps to my new team mates a savior, seasoned by continuous winter league play with the Red Sox, with other prospects like Andy Etchebarren. I was almost “there.”

     We continued winning in league play and were to play undefeated Anaheim at La Palma Park—their home field—in a game highly publicized in the Orange County Register. Anaheim was strong, with a great tradition, led by Stephenson and a gifted shortstop, big, raw-boned Frank Peters, a kid with enormous hands and a cerebral application to the game. Frank, a power hitter, also played winter ball for Boston and alternately exchanged banter with me as we vied for playing time. He accused me of being a “punch hitter” and told me before the big game, “I got six homers to your one,” and then: “Jerry says he owns you—he knows your weakness.”

     “We’ll see about that,” I countered. “And by the way, how many stolen bases you got? I got twelve.”

      I was so pumped for Stephenson, with whom I’d been talking trash for two years, I could hardly breathe when I came up to hit, batting third. As expected, Jerry brushed me back on the first pitch with a ball that hissed by me like a freight train. I grinned and made a show of digging in. He threw me a bunch of sliders away, which I fouled off. He jammed me with a fastball, which I fouled back. Then he froze me with a perfect fastball on the low outside corner, the first pitcher to strike me out all year.

     I was furious, my brain roaring. Anaheim bombed our pitcher. Frank hit a homer into the stands, lumbered past me at short, head down. Stephenson shut us out, got me to hit two weak ground outs. Afterward, Peters paused as he headed toward their team bus as we racked up our equipment. I was smoldering. “Don’t feel bad, Franklin,” he said. “Nobody’s touched Stephenson all year, except me in intra-squad games. Someday I might give you my secret.”

     The Anaheim loss burst our bubble. We went on a losing streak. Our pitching fell to ruins. I tried to do too much, began pressing at the plate and went into a tailspin, feeling responsible for each loss. The more I pressed and fought myself, the worse I played. The stunned and disbelieving looks on my team mates faces gave me pause as to my own sanity when they watched me kick and throw things, fulminating, cursing savagely, losing control of myself and entering a mindless derangement I felt consuming me and which I was helpless to combat or escape. Coach Merk came over and told me to calm down. He seemed concerned, peering at me as if I was some new person he did not recognize. I found myself panting like a mad dog on the verge of frothing at the mouth. What the fuck was happening to me?

     I needed Loman Young to set me straight, as he always had, but now I was the “Man,” a supposed leader, and only Sturrock, whose batting helmet we shared, was furious when I kicked it so hard the bill tore off and he had to face a pitcher with a helmet looking like something a Nazi troop would wear. He let me have it, calling me a “goddam spoiled baby.” This stopped me. He also came over later as I sat seething quietly in the corner of the dugout, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “I know it means everything to you, but it’s just a game, and I’m worried you’re going to seriously hurt yourself, the way you’re thrashing around.”

     Dad, not able to catch my games very often now that he was working 20 miles away, finally sat me down one night. “You’re so goddam herky-jerky and nervous, I’ve never seen anything like it. Since when do you start throwing things around like a half-cocked busher? You can’t throw your goddam bat every time you make an out. You’re gonna make out six or seven times every ten times at bat, even at this level, because that’s just the way it is. You’re up there fighting yourself after one pitch. You’ve got to stay on an even keel if you’re gonna play this game, Dell. You can’t let the highs and lows destroy you, or you’ll never snap out of a slump. You can’t go hangdog when you’re stinking it up, and you can’t think you invented the game when you’re going good. And goddammit, the worst thing about you acting like a fucking maniac is it’s selfish, you’re only thinking about yourself, and your team mates and your coach’ll end up hating you.” He put a hand on my shoulder. He was genuinely worried. “If the game’s gonna drive you crazy, don’t play, or take a little rest. I mean it.”

     To counter-act what was happening to me—I felt like a prisoner to my moods and emotions—I found myself clowning. In practice, I ran the bases backwards; I imitated a penguin and made crazed slides into bases and had my team mates laughing, though strangely. I realized I possessed a slapstick talent that had people rolling over, holding their bellies. This act seemed to relieve the pressure somewhat and turn my game around, even as my new team mates called me “Cut-up, Flake, Clown, Mad-dog, and Psycho.”

     When we played Anaheim the last game of the year, I no longer felt like the “Man.” I had become over the course of the season some other person. Peters launched another homer and Stephenson shut us down. I made three outs, none hit hard, but didn’t strike out. Anaheim won the league, and it was announced by the public address system after the game that they would enter the state playoffs, representing our Sunset League, and that Peters and Jerry made first team all league. They posed together for the photographer from the O.C. Register. I scooted quickly to the bus, avoiding them.

(Next Sunday installment: “Birdie Tebbetts—the Sniper.”)

                            OFF THE BLOCK AND INTO THE SUBURBS

1960

     There was sudden upheaval in my life as we moved into a 3 bedroom home in the planned suburb of Rossmoor, which was on the fringe of Orange County and had no downtown, no community center, no churches or stores or gyms, no blacks, Mexicans or hooligan white trash, no crazed dogs chasing you or your car down the street, only identical freshly minted homes in a perfectly symmetrical town-size grid—a sprawling mosaic walled in and isolated from the world. All the trees were new and small. The streets seemed deserted and devoid of the hum and babble of block life, where everybody knew everybody. There was no visible dissension among the white collar families slipping in and out of electrically opening and closing garage doors in their shiny sedans and station wagons. I was exiled from all I’d ever known and sentenced to this strange and utterly vapid utopia that had me unnerved  and feeling like I’d lost all individuality and identity. Nobody waved to me, asked how I was doing in baseball, or how my parents were. I had no crew to run with.

     Worst of all, I would not be playing at Compton High, beside my pals, Paul Schaal and Loman Young, where I was established as an important entity.

     I now attended Western High in Anaheim, a cross town rival of Anaheim High, where Jerry Stephenson starred. I drove eight miles to school in my jalopy. The Orange County kids were cheerful, wholesome, directed, white, the school work harder than at Compton, where many of the black kids migrated from inferior black schools in the south. The baseball coach, Roy Merk, a compact, bald man, rose quickly when I entered his trophy laden office and shook my hand, welcomed me to his program, informed me Coach Edgmon had called and given him a glowing report on my character and baseball skills.

     “He didn’t need to,” Coach Merk said, smiling. “I saw you play in the Anaheim tournament. You’re a helluva a ball player. We’re more than pleased to have you aboard. I think you’ll like our kids and we’ll have a pretty good team.” I was already aware that their team last year had been terrible.

     While we talked, a stocky kid with coke-bottle glasses and a big friendly grin came into the office, and I was introduced to the football team starting guard and baseball catcher, Dave Sturrock, a senior. We shook hands.

     “I saw you play at LaPalma. You’re a great player. I can’t wait for baseball season to start. And hey, I grew up in LA and idolized your Dad when he played for the Stars. I’d be honored to meet him. I’ve still got his autograph from Gilmore Field.”

     It wasn’t long before Sturrock was at the house meeting Dad, who now drove 20 miles to work. By the time baseball season arrived, I’d met all the varsity players through Dave, my immediate good friend, and more than a few of them made the pilgrimage to meet Dad, who regaled them with baseball stories while they admired his silver bat. Gone from our walls were the framed baseball pictures that filled our den in Compton. Our new modernistic furniture was uncomfortable. Mother was now school nurse at Bolsa Grande high school in nearby Garden Grove. Susie took a bus to school.

     In Rossmoor, everybody seemed well dressed and well off, except me, as I still wore rags. Our neighbors prevailed in a sort of smugness, as if they had achieved a level in society higher than ordinary folks like those in Compton. I felt alienated. Something brewed inside me that I was struggling to comprehend—an attitude of denial I was part of this plasticized cornucopia, and a rancorous disdain for what so many had aspired to all their lives—the American Dream and all its luxurious trappings. I despised this place; it made me feel squeamish. I wanted no part of it. I itched to get away from it so I could breathe again. I refused to go into our pool, of which Dad, though no swimmer, was so proud.

      When I tried to explain my new feelings to Mom, she said, “You’ll adjust and make new friends and everything will work out. You’ll discover that people are essentially the same everywhere and observing them and getting to know them will enlighten you. Change can be good.”

      When Dad sensed my discontent and asked what was eating me, I shrugged, and said I couldn’t stand Rossmoor. He seemed confused. “All I ever wanted is to give you a better life, Dell, and better things than I had.”

     “I don’t want any of it, Dad—it’s bullshit.”   

     He just stared at me, as if to say, “Is this my fucking kid?”

     (Next Sunday installment: “Trying to be the Man.”) 

                                                    BEANED

1959

     Our Bellflower American Legion team played a little better than .500 ball and finished in the middle of the pack in our league. Not much was expected of us in the 80 team prestigious Anaheim tournament at La Palma Park. We didn’t have enough pitching, or a prospect at that position. Our prospects being scouted were Schaal, Milt Swift and me. At bat I had run into a brief slump and Dad had me hit an hour of pepper, just meeting the ball, running the choked up knob end of the bat through my wrists and forearms, a training exercise to induce me into keeping my right shoulder level and my top right hand following through. He told me I was being too anxious, and although it was alright to be aggressive, I didn’t need to be jumping at the ball with my quick wrists; I could wait.

     We won our first two night games and I hit several line drive singles and doubles and the scouts in the stands picked me as shortstop on the regional all star team. I stayed overnight at Jerry Stephenson’s house the night before our next game. We spent the entire day working out. I had dinner with his huge family. Then we were up all night talking baseball, baseball, baseball. I got very little sleep. We kept going on and on about our dads, this player, that player, whether they were in high school, college, the minors, majors. Both of us wanted to sign baseball contracts out of high school. Jerry was an excellent student, I just got by making B’s.

     That night we played Torrance. They had a very tall right-handed pitcher who threw hard, but he couldn’t get his curve over and my first two times up I whistled line drives past his ear into center, knocking in runs. He had a slow move to first and I stole bases on him. My third time up I didn’t pick up a fastball high and in quick enough and the ball smashed into the bottom-back of my head and helmet and sounded like an explosion going off inside my skull. Next thing I remember was sitting in the dirt trying to get up, my Dad and coach urging me to stay down, stay down…I refused and stood up when a doctor came down.

     I was not wobbly. My helmet had ended up at the screen behind home plate and was partially shattered. Dad and coach wanted me out of the game. The doc wanted to look into my eyes. We were ahead in the game. I don’t know why, but I started to go after the pitcher, who was apologetic and back-pedaled. Dad grabbed me.

     “He wasn’t throwing at you. You lost the ball in the lights. Leave that kid alone, he’s as shook up as you are.”

     I shrugged Dad off and sprinted to first base. The ump came over to ask was I okay. I told him I was fine. My ears rang and my brain buzzed, like a faraway ocean. Otherwise I was fine and stole second base. The pitcher, a prospect, was so shook up he walked three straight hitters, not coming close, always outside, and they took him out. When I came up next, I felt my ass oozing out of the box. I didn’t step out. I swung at the first pitch and blooped the ball into right for a single. But I realized I was flailing to get the hell out of the box as the public address announcer boomed out I was the son of Murray Franklin and I got a huge ovation from a packed house as I stood on first.

     After the game, Dad told me I should have taken the first pitch. Mother was irate at my staying in the game and wanted to take me to the hospital for x rays. I refused.

     “You don’t have to be like your Dad!” she scolded.

     Dad said, “He’s okay now. He knows what to do. This might never happen to him again.”

     My pals who didn’t play baseball were often in awe of my style of hugging the plate and almost daring the pitcher to come in tight on me. I tried to explain to them that hitting and all that went with it, including getting away from balls at your head and body, were just part of it, and though a huge part of it, something I was used to, and that wearing a helmet added a whole new dimension to fighting the fear every hitter felt when he watched a hard thrower warm up or stood in against a wild flame-throwing prospect where the ball literally hissed as it jumped that last foot into the catchers mitt and made that resounding pop echoing throughout the stadium.

     This was the ultimate challenge and why I played, why I could not wait to test my courage and dig in against these pricks with the “serious terrifying velocity and heat,” and who reveled in intimidating you, like Jerry Stephenson, who told me more than once that he would “dust” me if he faced me because of my aggressive, arrogant crowding of the plate. Jerry, while warming up before high school and American Legion games, always fired a wild pitch over the catchers head from the mound as the first hitter stood by, to “plant a seed” in that hitter and his team mates minds.

     Our next game I was fine. I took a pitch. I realized my initial response would be to jump at that first pitch to convince myself and whoever was watching that I was not frightened, but I was frightened, and fought it off. I pretended I was playing pepper, just tried to calm down, stay back and meet the ball, and stroked a single to left.

    But we lost the game and were eliminated from the tournament, and so I did not make the all tournament team as the only shortstop out of 80, and realized also that though I had more range and quickness than the other shortstops in contention, and had a quicker release of the ball, they all had stronger arms than me, powerful “major league ready” arms, which I did not. I had big time major league speed and range, something Dad said could not be taught or coached, but he also added you couldn’t teach or coach a stronger arm either—you either had it or you didn’t. I was determined to overcome this deficiency. At any cost.

     (Next Sunday installment: Off the Block and into the Suburbs)

                                     BEANED IN THE BIG LEAGUES

BIG MOE

     In 1942 I got beaned by Phil Marchildon of the Philadelphia Athletics, one of the hardest, wildest throwers in the game. His fast ball clipped me on the top back of my head as I ducked down and away and caromed to the screen, so I didn’t get hit flush. But I was out for a few seconds and woozier than hell and they took me out of the game, sent me to the hospital, where the doctors cleaned the cut on my head and bandaged me up with one of those things that wrap around your ears, like the guys who got head wounds in the war.

     They wanted to keep me overnight for observation, said I had a concussion. I had a pretty good headache and Rose was very upset, didn’t want me to play, but hell, I’d worked my way into some steady playing time after five years in the minors and waiting my turn behind a bunch of donkeys, I was going good, and you didn’t want to get the reputation of a guy who couldn’t play hurt or lost his courage after a beaning, because we had guys on Detroit that were waiting to take your job, you didn’t want somebody coming in and getting hot and putting you on the bench. So I talked our manager, Del Baker, who wasn’t my greatest supporter and who I didn’t care for because he never went to bat for you, was strictly a front office stooge, into playing me the next day.

     Well, in those days we didn’t wear these protective helmets, you took your life in your hands when you hit, and as I stood at the plate  I could feel my ass turning to jelly and easing out—it was like I couldn’t control my ass or my legs, they were pulling out. So I had to step out and gather myself, talk to myself, knowing everybody was watching and wondering, and force myself to keep my ass in. It was a real struggle. I took a pitch and got my bearings. Soon as you take that first pitch you’re back to being familiar with things. I literally pushed my pelvic in and sucked in my ass and moved up on the plate, and settled my legs, and worked the count, and I knocked a single between third and short.

     I was okay after that. I always knew how to get away from the ball, how to pivot on my back leg and duck, taking it on my hide. I had that confidence in my reflexes, and in all my years of playing ball that was the only time I got beaned, and I was dusted dozens of times, but I never got hit that much, even standing close to the plate.

     The guy who got hit the most, the bravest hitter I ever saw, though, was Minnie Minoso, a team mate when I played in Cuba. One of the top pitchers in the league, a very hard throwing Cuban who had a diamond in one of his front teeth, beaned Minoso on the side of the head and he went down like a sack of potatoes, and he lay there motionless. We thought he was dead. The ball park was quiet as a morgue. Minoso was a tremendous ball player and should’ve been in the big leagues years earlier, and he didn’t move. The docs gave him the smelling salts for about a minute and suddenly he jumped up and ran down to first base. He stole second and third and next time up he stood on top of the plate, like he always did, leading the league in getting hit by pitches, and drilled a double off the wall.

     Every time you start to think you’re tough, you look at a guy like Minoso, and it humbles you.

(Next Sunday installment: The Kid gets beaned)                              

                                  A NEAR RACE RIOT AT CRESSY PARK

1959, Summer

     My parents were discussing moving out of Compton to a safe all white suburb 20 miles away. They fretted over our house going down in value due to the influx of blacks in town, and they feared for Susie going to Compton High, where black girls beat up nice white girls. When they asked me about moving I went into a rage. We had a nucleus of players at Compton High that could win everything. Moving was unimaginable.

     Meanwhile, the Compton American Legion post refused to sponsor our team, which infuriated Dad, who called members “pompous cheapskates and phony patriots.”  Some of the Compton and Dominguez high players signed on with Legion teams in LA and Long Beach, while my team mate Paul Schaal (who would play a decade in the big leagues) and I signed on to play third base and shortstop for the Bellflower team, 10 miles away.

     Bellflower was all clean-cut white kids, a former farm community. Paul owned a black ’51 Ford coupe and drove us to games all over San Gabriel Valley. Right off we produced. Our coach, a father of a senior pitcher, was overjoyed to have us, left us alone. Except for a powerful but slow-moving left-handed hitting catcher named Milt Swift, who was a prospect, Paul and I were their best players. We were free agents having nothing on our agendas but baseball, talking baseball, so dedicated that the Compton Connie Mack League team, led by the great Jim Rooker, picked us up to play our positions among kids up to 19 years old. Now Paul and I played weeknight games and weekend day games, including Sunday doubleheaders.

     Dad wanted me to get a driver’s license and an old jalopy like Paul’s, so I could help him out with deliveries at his store, where I was working part time stocking, writing out orders, waiting on trade, and trying not to fight with him when he warned me to not “go so goddam fast!” I agreed to get a license and it took about a week of Dad teaching me on his stick-shift Rambler before I almost crashed the car as he yelled at me for grinding the gears. Mother taught me on her automatic transmission Pontiac, and much to Dad’s sourness, I passed the driving test, and with my savings I paid for a 1952 Chevy Powerglide coupe, a real pig, according to my cousin Bob

     So now I was making deliveries and alternating with Paul on our baseball excursions. We played our games, stopped for burgers afterwards and discussed our dreams. Paul had a rifle arm at third and a quick release, great wrists, and, like me was an instinctive player though his swing was loopier than mine and thus more powerful when he connected.

     Our Connie Mack team was superb and stocked with some tough kids, including the toughest fighter I knew, Jim Rooker, our pitcher/firstbaseman/outfielder/leader. We shared Cressy as home park with an all black team in the same league from South Central LA and Watts, and, since most of the guys on our team were racists, the rivalry was especially vicious. Many of the players on the black team were from Centennial High, including the bruiser who intimidated me at second base. We beat them our first game and in the rematch a couple weeks later Dad coached, because our regular coach went on vacation.

     The desire to beat us by the all black team had that summer turned into a rabid and savage crusade, similar to the old Hollywood Star/LA Angel rivalry at its most heated, and on this night we had trouble keeping our poise. From their dugout they blistered us with personal abuse. Dad instructed us to ignore them, but it seemed these guys, without supervision from their coach, were obsessed with erasing centuries of white man’s abuse of their race on our cocky white asses. Ron Bart was ready to do battle, however the odds, with the crowd ten to one black over white—in their territory.

     I came to bat in the bottom of the 9^th with the score 3-2 in their favor with runners on second and third and two out. Dad was coaching third and hollering down to me to “get a good pitch!” I stared at the lanky black pitcher and fouled off a pitch that was eye-high. I was a notorious “bad-ball hitter” hitter, and Dad hurried down the line to meet me at the plate.

     “Relax. Be patient. Slow down,” he advised, white spittle caking the corners of his lips. “Don’t get behind and hit HIS pitch!”

     “I hit best with two strikes, Dad. Leave me alone. I know what I’m doing.”

     He grimaced, gritted his teeth, jogged back to his coaching box. The next pitch was a snake of a hissing fastball at my knees, on the inside corner, an area that generally gave me trouble, but this time I lashed it on a rising line between the left and center fielders. I tore down the line and rounded first as the center fielder gave chase and Dad waved our runners around the bases, the ball rolling toward the fence on the dew-chilled grass. I was churning hard around second base when the left fielder blind-sided me with a vicious football block at my knees, sending me airborne, head-over-heels to land face-first on the dirt infield.

     When I looked up, Dad had the kid by the throat with his left hand and was smacking him hard in the face with his right hand as the kid back-pedaled into centerfield, his head bobbing back and forth like a speed bag in a boxing gym. Finally Dad dropped him in short centerfield, where he lay like a broken doll, and turned to hurry back into the infield, where our entire team had gathered; some wielding bats as Jim Rooker pulled me to my feet, a wild, gleeful look in his eye. My legs were fine. Jim’s older brother Wayne was with us, bat on shoulder as the black team and their fans trickled onto the field, out-numbering us five to one. They milled ominously, many in trench-coats. Then Dad was among us, gesturing us to close ranks, like a western movie where cowboys were surrounded by a whole tribe of Indians. He instructed us to drop our bats and form a circle. The massing blacks, moving toward us, were cut off by their powerfully built catcher, George Hill, an all league lineman on the Centennial football team. I’d played against him in junior high. He grabbed me by the elbow, faced my father. “Mr. Franklin,” he said. “You folks line up behind George, and he get you out of here.”

     We quickly gathered our equipment at the first base dugout and in single file followed big George through and past the growling, baleful mob, out to the parking lot adjoining the spacious park and jumped quickly into our cars and in a caravan moved out onto Rosecrans boulevard as the mob stood looking on.

     Driving slowly, Dad said, “He was just a kid, Dell, but I did what I did because nobody messes with anybody on our team, whether it’s you or anybody else. There’s no place in the game for what that kid did. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him.”

     A week later we were slated to begin the regional playoffs at Cressy, but only a few players showed up, including Rooker, Schaal, and Ron Bart, and Jim’s brother and Paul’s Dad and brother as our only fans. There was a good crowd. Our cast of five sat in the dugout while the opposing team from the Valley warmed up. A bunch of kids from the black team we’d beaten on my winning hit entered our dugout in humble posture, including the kid Dad had bopped around and nearly strangled. He walked directly to Dad, who stood, and apologized, head and eyes lowered, voice a feint rasp from Dad’s throat gouging.

     “Sorry, sir, I lost my head.”

     The black kids, one-by-one, approached Dad and apologized, caps off. None of them glanced at me or my team mates, and the kid who’d cut my knees out from under did not apologize. One of the kids asked where the rest of our team was, and when Dad said he didn’t expect them to show, he said, “We play for you, Mr. Franklin. We play for you anytime.” His team mates nodded. Dad thanked them, said he’d like to coach them, but explained it didn’t work that way.

     We forfeited the game.

    

(Next Sunday’s installment: Big Moe beaned in the big leagues.)

The Ball Player's Son

                                            BLOOD TRANSFUSION

1959

     Dad and Mom got into a savage argument that erupted at the dinner table a day after my act of cowardice. Every point he made was shoved down his throat with barbed venom. Finally he grew so exasperated and enraged that he fired a fork at her, and it made a direct hit, sticking in her tender bicep. Mother stared at him coldly and pulled it out, calmly walked out of the dining room, but not before telling him in an arctic tone of voice to “pack his bags and get out of the house.” Susie ran from the table, shrieking.

     This was a first; he’d never touched her, and she’d never booted his ass out. He packed a bag and moved into a shabby motel in Compton. The relief of tension in the house was instant. We were at last calm. Mom made a show of being happy, but I knew things couldn’t go on like this, especially when cousin Bob, Dad’s right hand man at the store, came by to inform us Dad was a mess and would probably get in a fight over a traffic altercation and end up in jail if Mom didn’t take him back. He was so irritable in the store he was driving everybody crazy, working 70 hours a week

     A week into his absence I was sitting on the porch still moping over my craven display when Dad drove up in his Rambler wagon, bounced over a curb and back down into the gutter, coming to a crooked stop. Mother was instantly on the porch, hands on hips, looking cross. The shot-gun door opened and Dad fell out onto the strip of grass separating the sidewalk and curb and, on his hands and knees, vomited profusely into the gutter. I walked over to stand near him as neighbors piled out of their homes to observe the toughest, most famous guy in town resemble a skid row drunk. It was a Saturday afternoon. I’d never seen Dad this drunk before. I’d seen him happily lit with his baseball pals, but never like this—never.

     While I stood over him, he peered up, and muttered. “Yer motha, she knows everything! Never wrong. Shit.” He spewed out bits of vomit, hiccupped several times. “Go tell yer motha I’m comin’ home. That’s my house, too. I goddam worked for it. I paid for it. I won’t be a goddam mouse in my own house!”

     He sat up, holding his head. He tried to rise but teetered and I held him up. He smelled foul. I hoisted him by the armpits and dragged him like a 6 foot heavy bag toward the front door of our house. Mother and Susie stood on the porch looking like executioners. They turned away abruptly and made sour faces as I grunted and pushed past them, hauling Dad. I got him into the house and led him to the bathroom where he puked some more in the toilet. Then he sat on the side of the tub.

     “All I do is work!” He shouted. “And I’M the goddam villain. I’m no wife beater.
I’m not Black Bart!”

     Doors slammed. I peeled off his sweat-drenched, vomit-sprayed shirt, pulled off his shoes, then his pants. He stood, wavering, and I caught him as he slipped out of his boxer shorts and led him to the shower. I got him in the shower. I turned on the cold spray full blast and savored his shuddering cries. I handed him a tooth brush with paste.

     “In case she ever kisses you again, Dad.”

     “Very funny.”

     I kept an eye on him so he didn’t collapse in the shower and cut himself to ribbons on the glass door. After more of his howling and growling, I got him out, tossed him a towel. He wrapped it around his waist and I led him toward the bedroom, where mother and Susie packed a bag and skittered past us and out of the house, headed for gramma’s. Dad collapsed face first on the bed and was immediately snoring loudly through a thrice broken nose. I was stuck with Black Bart.

                                                   ----------------    

     Next morning, late, Dad was too hungover to eat. He stood in the kitchen drinking coffee, his face doughy and stubbly, eyes bloodshot.

     “You know your father’s no drunk,” he told me. “Your mother knows it, too. She knows she’s gotta go pretty far to me fork her.” He belched. “Anyway, thanks for taking care of your old man.” He stared at me for a long time, appraising me with those bad eyes. “Now,” he said. “Go get the bag of balls. We’re gonna hit.”

     We hauled the gear to the Roosevelt rock pile as churchgoers returned for yard work, stood with garden tools to observe us. I knew I was in for SOME thing as we warmed up, both of us humming the ball pretty good, like burn-out. He wore his grim game face. Then he grabbed a bat and said he was going to hit, because he was to play in an Old Timer’s game at Dodger Stadium before a Dodger game. Last year, down in San Diego, he hit a 385 foot homer at Westgate Park in an Old Timer’s game and his arm was still pretty strong.

     I tossed some normal BP and he pulled half a dozen ropes into leftfield. He waved the bat at me and implored me to throw harder. I did. He laced two balls that nearly took my head off. “Harder!” he shouted, a superior smirk on his mug, digging in. I wound up and fired one up and in and he tomahawked it, the ball soaring and curving over the heads of some young neighborhood kids who began shagging in the outfield. God, could he hit!

     “KNOCK ME DOWN!” he bellowed, waving his hand at himself, taunting. “Come on, bird-boy!”

     I fired a medium fastball and instead of ducking he took it on the shoulder and snarled at me. “That all you got? My my, the mosquitoes are biting early this year, aren’t they, bird-boy…? Goddam mommy’s boy!”

     I fired a ball as hard as I could before he could get set and he took it on the backside; then tossed the bat at me like a spinning propeller and I jumped over it. Then he was striding toward me. “Now you hit.” He said, eyeing me like somebody he’d like to punch.

     I took my stance, preparing for a duster. He made me wait; then lobbed a big slow curve down the middle for a strike, and when I froze and took it he jeered and then before I could get set he quick-pitched me a fastball inside which I fouled off. He loaded up and I rifled the next pitch into left field. Then he planted one in my backside, a hummer. I refused to acknowledge the bruising sting. Then he side-armed one at my ankles and I jumped over it and went down on my ass while he horse-laughed, holding the ball, flipping and catching it, in his glory.

     “Ready to hit, birdie?”

     “Fuck you! Bring it on!” I jumped up, dug in.

     He was so happy, happier than I’d seen him in some time, needling, competing, confronting, like he was playing again, and not working his ass off in his shithouse and driving all over hell and back, even if he was his own boss and making way more money than he’d ever made in baseball.

     I rifled three of his fastballs into leftfield before he dusted me. I made sure to hug the plate and took a low outside curve ball and ripped it up the middle and nailed him on the foot and he went down in a heap and sat on the mound cursing and grimacing in pain. I waved my bat at him, “Get up old man, knock me down with your weak shit. I OWN you!”

     He stood and grabbed balls from the bag and began feeding me fastballs, one after another, and his tricky off-speed curving drop, and I hammered everything. Something had busted loose in me. I wanted him to hit me. I wanted the pain. I was so relaxed, felt outside my skin looking in instead of inside looking out; an exhilaration and sureness coursed through my blood. My stroke was simple, level, compact, quick, a perfect extension of my father’s swing, the swing I’d learned and copied from him, even adopting his mannerisms of touching the plate and digging in and pumping the bat twice before laying it on my shoulder while I eye-balled the pitcher, and I realized, as I hammered out line drive after line drive with violent precision, that the demented man on the mound was part of me and I was part of him, that indeed we looked the same, smelled the same, and the same wild Russian blood ran through our veins, and that no matter what happened from here on out we were one and the same and I could not escape him, whether I liked it or not. I must deal with it.

     Finally, panting for breath, bent over at the knees, he looked up and grinned at me as balls came rolling in from the kids shagging in left field. He walked toward me, flipped me his glove. “Look, you know making the pivot at second you never let the baserunner intimidate you, I don’t give a fuck who he is, you hit the sonofabitch between the eyes with the ball when he comes in high, and I guarantee he’ll never come in high again, unless he wants a hair-lip or a new nose.”

     Dad grimaced as he talked. No doubt because of his toe. “You let these kids hit now. Pitch to ‘em.” He smacked me hard on the shoulder and set off toward the house, limping badly; neighbors, out in force, looking on. When I got home an hour later, mother was back. They were in the bedroom, Dad face down on the bed, icepacks under his toe and on his back, mother massaging his neck. An ugly purple welt was on his backside. Mother looked up at me as I stood in the doorway. She shook her head, but there was a glimmer of accepting good humor in her eyes. “You two,” was all she said.

     (Next Sunday installment: “A Near racial riot at Cressey Park”)

                              AN ACT OF BLATANT COWARDICE

1959

     We had a big game with all black Centennial High, our cross-town rival, a school Ron Bart hated, especially after they thrashed us in football. We played them at Cressey Park, a fine municipal stadium with symmetrical fences and stands wrapping around from third to first bases and lights and a press box, where Howard Handy, sports editor of the Compton Herald American newspaper, sat and reported on games. The ball park was located in the black part of town, off Central and Rosecrans boulevards. Like us, Centennial had some good prospects, including smooth switch-hitting sophomore shortstop Roy White, who would go on to have a big career with the NY Yankees, and several formidable specimens—strapping, sinewy, mercury-quick man-children with fierce us-against-them attitudes. The stands were filled with mostly black folks.

     Bowlin, already drawing scouts with his live fastball and excellent control and poise and confidence, pitched, and it was close, a tense game. A very powerful senior outfielder who played linebacker on the football team, was on first base, and he began talking to me at second base. “Comin’ down, skinny white boy, gonna cut your balls off, gonna take yo skinny ass out!”

     Loman cupped his hand to his mouth. “Don’t pay him no mind, Ragman. He’s all jive, just bluffin’.”

     “I been sharpenin’ my spikes, boy, gonna cut you up good.”

     Sure enough, the hitter slapped a ball in the hole between short and third. Loman backhanded it and in one motion that I felt took forever snapped me a perfect waist-high peg. I heard the base runner thundering down the line screaming like a kamikazi, and for the first time ever I hopped like a frightened hare across the bag too quickly to avoid his spikes-high slide. The ump called him safe in a voice that seemed to boom and echo in my ears for unendurable minutes. I never completed the throw to first, gripped the ball tightly, head down, unable to look at my team mates or anybody as the baserunner stood, smile gleaming as he brushed himself off.

     I heard the Centennial dugout’s chorus: “Buck buck buck! Chicken boy! Buck buck buck!” I heard the baserunner whisper, “Footsteps.” Finally, I faced Bowlin, who’d stepped off the mound to deliver me a look of pure loathing and disgust. “Gutless motherfucker,” he fumed.

     “Gutless yourself,” I growled back, finding my strangled voice. I gunned the ball at him so hard he staggered to catch it. Then I heard Ron Bart at first: “Guess you didn’t inherit your old man’s CAJONES, huh?”

     I couldn’t look at him. Centennial broke the game open, and when the inning ended I went to the far end of the dugout and sat. Even Edgmon left me alone. Loman finally sat beside me, stared straight ahead, patted my knee. He never said a word, and on the bus ride back to campus, after we lost, he sat beside me in the back.

     “Everybody has a day like you did,” he said softly. “Next time, you’ll get ‘em back. I know you will. That’s how you learn.”

     “Loman, sometimes I wish I were you,” I found myself telling him. “Black, with no Dad as an ex big leaguer, and folks expectin’ me to fill his shoes.”

     He gazed at me. “If you feel that way, like you wanna be me, well, my friend, you are in powerful big trouble.”

     When I got off the bus last, Edgmon waited for me, put his arm around my shoulder and walked me toward the locker room. “Son,” he said. “I’m stickin’ with you no matter what. I’m in your corner. What happened today, it’ll never happen to you again. I guarantee it. You got spooked. I been spooked. You got too much heart and character. I know you, and you got the right stuffings.”

     At the dinner table that night, I felt like it was extra quiet.Dad acted as if nothing in particular had happened, and though I didn’t see him at the stadium, I’m sure he’d heard about it. When you prove yourself a coward, you’re sure the whole world knows about it, and the mirror is no friend. Nobody is.

     (Next Sunday installment” Big Moe Gets the Boot.”)

                                 CHARLIE GEHRINGER--SECONDBASEMAN

                                    

BIG MOE

     Next to Rogers Hornsby, Charlie Gehringer of the Detroit Tigers was considered the greatest secondbaseman of all time. He was a home-grown Michigan native who’d been holding down second base since 1926 and was going to the Hall of Fame. There was no more popular player in the history of the franchise, and that included Cobb and Greenberg. He was a darling of the front office and the fans and press. In Detroit he could do no wrong. He was a better fielder than Hornsby and a more all-around player, probably the most fundamentally sound player in the game, a guy who went about his business as a total professional, and a master of every phase of the game—running bases, sliding, bunting, hitting behind the runner, going out on pop flies, making the doubleplay, going to either hole, stealing a base, getting you a scoring sacrifice fly, anything you needed to win a game.

     He was a quiet reliable guy who, like DiMaggio, never made a mental error and could freeze you with a look if YOU made one, because you were hurting the club and taking food out of his mouth; he was the kind of leader you didn’t want to disappoint, all business, respecting the game like a religion, and if you didn’t respect it the same way, and disappointed him, you were gone.

     He hardly said boo to me when I came up, never went out of his way to help me or give me advice, and he knew who I was, knew I’d been a top infield prospect in the organization and being groomed to take over his position even if I was a shortstop, and he knew he was just about finished as a ball player, but he wasn’t about to give up his position to some interloper written about in the local paper as his replacement.

     Gehringer knew that helping me meant helping the ball club, and the ball club for years had been his life’s blood, and it was obvious he was hurting the ball club, because he could no longer hit or cover any ground. The team knew it, he knew it, everybody in the league knew it, and finally, in ’42, they kept him on the roster mostly as a pinch hitter, for the fans; and then one of the writers who got a thrill out of making somebody miserable wrote a column with headlines in the Detroit paper saying I, Murray Franklin, was taking over his position.

     He never said a word to me that day in the clubhouse. When I took batting practice there was already a crowd around the dugout booing my every swing, and during infield it was the same: boos and personal insults. And when the game started and I was announced as the secondbaseman, the entire packed house booed me, and they kept right on booing me when I ran on the filed. And when I ran off the field at the end of the first inning, a bunch of wolves near our dugout dumped garbage on me, coat hangers, corn cobs, filthy rancid stuff, and they cussed me and insulted me like I’d murdered Gehringer, telling me I’d never hold his jockstrap, and Gehringer sat in the dugout and never said a word or looked at me, and the booing and insults didn’t stop until I pulled a single into left field.

     But then it started all over again. God forbid I booted one! It felt like every eye in the stadium was on me, hoping I’d boot one, so they could run me out of town, and for a while the writers kept comparing me to Charlie, and the fans kept right on booing me, so I was relieved to go on the road and away from those Detroit fans. As for Gehringer, he sat the bench all year, never warmed up to me, never offered any advice or encouragement, and I never held it against him, because that was the nature of the dog-eat-dog times—you didn’t want anybody taking your place and you never felt secure. He was a proud man, a legend. He’d been so great, and it couldn’t have been easy to see somebody else playing a position he’d held down for 20 years.

     (Next Sunday installment: “An Act of Blatant Cowardice.”) 

                                  A SILENT, GNAWING, BRUTAL FEUD

1959

     Dad and I were not talking, nor offering apologies, because neither of us was capable of apologizing. Our feud seethed with such acrid resentment we refused to look at each other. When passing his store mornings with my crew I skittered on. Tension was taut at the dinner table. A welt from my flogging him with his jacket was scabbed over on Dad’s pate, and occasionally he glanced up at the ceiling, where a smudge of grease was left from the pork chop that flew from my grip after I was punched out, reminding me. Mother tried to break the ice by asking me how I was doing in baseball, but these overtures received only stony silence or grunts.

     In league play I was holding my own at the plate as lead-off hitter, but my fielding had begun to fall apart—specifically the accuracy of my arm, never a problem before. Coach Edgmon was easy and fatherly on his players, and especially with me, clapping his hands and urging me to shake it off when I booted one in the field or ground my teeth, barely holding my temper when I made out.

     “You can’t get a hit every time,” he told me. “Relax. Get ‘em next time. You’re hittin’ over three hundred.” But I wanted to hit .400.

     At shortstop, I was trying to compensate for my average arm by hurrying or loading up my throws instead of going with my natural rhythm, and tossing balls in the dirt. I was “thinking” too much. I knew I should talk with Dad, who always solved my problems instantly with small, subtle tips that were often just as psychological as mechanical. Several times I could not control my temper, and Bart and Bowlin were grumbling about my performance and alluding to Edgmon “coddling me.” Worst of all, I grew tight, tentative. Overnight I’d gone from cocky and confidant to fearful of muffing one.

     Edgmon finally took me off shortstop, switching me to second, replacing me with Loman.

     “You’re a little nervous out there at short,” he told me in his trophy-laden office, where I gritted my teeth and pleaded with him to let me stay at short and work things out. He shook his head. “I figure the shorter throw’ll take the pressure off you, son. Loman, he doesn’t have your range, but he’s got that strong, steady arm. I think you’re gonna be the best damned secondbaseman in the league. I’m doing this for the good of the team, and your good, too. It’s the right move.”

     Loman did not gloat, but instead encouraged me with pep-talks.

     When I got home, I didn’t tell mother about Edgmon’s decision. She was studying down in the den, about to get her teaching degree from Long Beach State to go along with her nursing degree so she could be a high school nurse. She made straight A’s. One minute Dad called her an “intellectual egghead with no common sense or understanding of the business world,” and the next he bragged to his shoemakers that she had an IQ of over 150, which she did.

     She saw I was down in the dumps and gazed at me, full of adoration, understanding and compassion, “the motha look,” as Dad described it, so sappy, and I began squirming, though Mother was my true confidante, which Dad interpreted as her protecting me. After he’d tried to teach me to drive in his stick-shift Rambler, and yelled at me and called me stupid when I ground the gears and eventually slammed into a gas station, jumped out and fled a mile home, Mom taught me on an automatic transmission and I did fine. He was jealous of her when I passed the DMV driving test.

     She sat me down. “Dell,” she said firmly, looking me straight in the eye, like she did everybody, unnerving many. “It’s up to you to be the mature one in your relationship with your father. You must make an effort to understand him and be a bigger, more tolerant person than he is. He can’t change, but you can. We both know your father is domineering, and controlling. He thinks he has to be. He can be a bully. He’s very jealous and petty, and he’s vengeful. You have no idea how he tried to dominate me early in our marriage. This was such a shock, because during our three years of engagement he was a perfect angel. Then I learned this whole other side of him. He forced me to quit the air lines as a stewardess because he didn’t want other men looking at me. He cheated me in cards for twenty years before I caught him. He tried to teach me to drive and humiliated me so I almost left him. The same with golf. You most understand that NOTHING you do in life will satisfy him. Your father, bless his heart, but he is so insecure, he is, well, a belittler, and the reason he is this way, believe it or not, is because he is frustrated and disappointed he never got as far as he should have in baseball, and if you let him drive you crazy, honey, you will be unhappy, and I can’t bear to see you this way, so miserable, hating your father who loves you more than you ca imagine. Dell, listen to me—if you take your father, and baseball too seriously, I fear it could have a very, very dangerous influence on your life.”

     She sighed, still gazing at me. “You are NOT just your father, you are also of me, and you should not be ashamed of that. You are much, much more sensitive than your father. You see and feel things he doesn’t, and you see gray, where he only sees black and white.”  Still gazing at me with the ‘motha look,’ she leaned forward and kissed my forehead, an act I’d been discouraging since becoming a teenager, and I squirmed, but she smiled, understanding my squeamishness at all things mawkish. “Please start talking to your father again. He’s always sorry when he knows he’s wrong, but he’s not going to admit it, and honey, his heart is breaking. Since the day you were born he has loved you like no other, and always put you first. You are his pride and joy, and you must put yourself in HIS shoes. That is the secret to living—putting yourself in everybody’s shoes. Be big. Remember, Dell, as my mother says—‘nobody is that wonderful, and nobody is that terrible.’ The only way I have been able to survive your father is to understand him, and forgive him. There’s no harder man to live with, but I could spend a lifetime trying to find a better man, a more decent man, a man as unique and interesting as your father, a man with his kind of character. You must be the adult in the relationship.”

     I knew she was absolutely right. I nodded. “I’ll talk to him, if he wants to talk to me, but you’ve got to tell him I don’t want him at my games, because Mom, he makes me too nervous, and I feel so much pressure that sometimes I can hardly think or breathe out there.”

     She looked deep into me, and nodded. “Okay. It’ll hurt him, but it might be the best thing to do right now—for both of you.”

     (Next Sunday installment: “Charley Gehringer—Secondbaseman”)

                                              VARSITY DEBUT

1959

     A contingent of neighborhood pals, most of whom I’d known since grammar school, were in the stands of the windswept pasture of our Compton High ball field for my debut. My father was nowhere in sight. He had a delivery route in the afternoons that included South Central LA, San Pedro, Long Beach, South Bay, San Gabriel Valley cities, Huntington Park and clear out to Pasadena and Burbank and Hollywood and downtown LA. He usually got home around 6 in the evening or later, exhausted, having been up early and opening his store at 7:30 in the morning. Instead of sending out salesmen working on a commission and making shoemakers pay shipping costs, he worked as a mostly one horse, nonstop operation, taking orders and delivering free in a day or two, cutting everybody’s throats on prices and discounts, a big fish eating the little fish as he proudly described it, allowing him to finally “get over the hump” profit-wise.

  

     I got up four times and banged out three singles, walked, stole a base, and played errorless in the field, and we won. Coach Edgmon flashed me a fatherly smile afterwards and patted my butt. Coach Armstrong pulled me aside and told me he was happy I’d made a decision to play only baseball. My friends stood after my last hit, gave me an ovation, and left. Walking home by myself, I was literally floating along the sidewalk about half a mile from home, on Alondra, when Dad pulled alongside me in his Nash Rambler station wagon. He stopped and I got in and instead of starting out he just stared at me with an expression indicating he was severely disappointed.

     “I went three for three, Dad,” I exclaimed proudly, hoping to wipe the look off his face. “I stole a base, walked, no errors, and we won.”

     “I know,” he said.

     “I didn’t see you there,” I said.

     “I was there. I saw everything. Saw you looking all over the place when you’re supposed to be paying attention to the game. I saw you visit Bowlin on the mound twice and tell him how to pitch. An infielder NEVER goes to the mound unless he’s called in to discuss strategy by the manager. Who the hell are YOU telling Bowlin how to pitch! You want your team mates telling YOU how to play? Bush! A disgrace. Just because you got a couple hits you’re telling everybody how to play the goddam game…since when does a 15 year old hotdog tell everybody where to play?” I started to answer but he cut me off. “That’s Edgmon’s job. Next thing you’ll be telling HIM how to run his goddam team.”

      My stomach churned with instant hot nausea. “Guess nothing I do satisfies you…”

      “It’s not just about playing the goddam game, it’s about conducting yourself like a ball player, not strutting around like some rooster who acts like he invented the game, craning his head all over, looking at the girls, looking at your friends, looking at the scouts…I’ve never in my life seen such horseshit behavior on a ball field.”

     He started the car and headed home in silence. I went straight to my room and slammed the door shut, lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, wanting to punch savagely

the face of the man which told me it didn’t like me, nor what I’d become, or was becoming. Oh, maybe like most fathers he loved me, but that didn’t prevent him one iota from finding me disgusting and even revolting.

     When I finally got to the dinner table, mother looked agitated and unhappy. I’d heard them arguing from my room. Mother had made pork chops and mashed potatoes and peas and I speared three pork chops off the platter and slapped them onto my dish. Dad flashed me the beady eye.

     “What have I told you before?” he growled. “Take one. You eat one, then take another. You don’t take three. Those chops aren’t going anywhere.”

     “I always end up eating three,” I protested.

     He speared two off my plate and dropped them on the platter. “You always take the three biggest chops. A pig. It’s time you learned some goddam table manners.”

     “Murray,” Mom protested. “Do you have to notice everything he does? Let the boy eat!”

     He pounded the table, rattling dishes, causing sister Susie to wince and come close to tears. “You stay out of this!” he snarled viciously at Mom. “I’m in charge here! Stop protecting him! His manners are a disgrace and if it’s the last thing I do, if I have to starve the wise-ass, I’m gonna teach him some goddam table manners!”

     As I poised my fork to spear my chops back, the identical murderous look was on dad’s face as when I was beating him in hand-slapping.

      “Don’t do it, I’m warning you…”

      My fork was barely in the chop when the lights went out. Next thing I was all the way into the living room, on my back, shaking out the cobwebs, feeling at my jaw. Mother hovered over me, and Susie was crying and had out her baton, ready to do battle in defending me from Dad, who sat in his dinner chair, a gloating grin on his face.

     “That was just my Betsy Ann shot,” he called. “A love-tap, bird boy, not my Susie Q.” He doubled up his left-hook fist.

     I stood and began screaming at him. He rose and came toward me and I picked up his windbreaker as he came over and whipped it across his face and ripped a small chunk out of his bald head. He grabbed his head and his eyes flashed with murder and I took off out the front door with the old man on my ass. Of, course, he couldn’t catch me. I stood out on the sidewalk while he threatened to “break me into a thousand pieces” when he caught up with me. I gave him the finger while he reached up to halt the flow of blood from his head. Evidently I’d gotten him with the zipper-end.

     I turned and began trotting. I wandered over in the darkness to Roosevelt Junior high and ended up walking down Long Beach Boulevard and then Atlantic, just walking, boiling, thinking about taking out my savings and allowing Susie to break open her piggy bank and give me what she had and hitch-hiking off into the sunset, and the only reason I wouldn’t was because of baseball. I was exhausted and starving and thought of visiting my grandparents on my mother’s side a block from us, but knew my dad would be looking for me there. I knew also that after he cooled off he’d calm down, though this was the first time I’d ever struck back at him. He’d had me on the ground a couple times over the years and Susie always clobbered him with the baton while mother screamed and beat on him.

     Later, much later, on the verge of collapse, I reasoned Dad was in bed because he had to mind the store so early, and knocked on the back door of my grandparent’s house. Grampa was up—a night owl who went to sleep in the wee, wee hours, slept late, ate eggs and only eggs; then, in his white short-sleeve shirt, black baggy pants, Dobbs Fifth Avenue hat and black shoes, walked all over Compton and clear into Long Beach and sometimes into South Central LA where he was known as “the walking man.” He smoked a pipe and cigars. He studied religion and hated them all and cornered door-to-door preachers and corrected them on their spiels. He read the Russian authors, the German philosophers, listened to classical music, had played the oboe and flute in small town bands back in Wisconsin and was a tailor all his life who had no patience with customers and terrified all my cousins in his house and wouldn’t let them make any noise or touch anything but favored and spoiled me because he’d been my surrogate father for two years while Dad was away in the war.

     Mother always said, “Grampa loves you and knows you better than anybody.”

     He was the only non-Russian Jew in the family, a French-Belgian born outside if Liege, who came to America as a child and had no accent.

   . He let me in, smelling of pipe smoke. He was completely bald and because he seldom wore his false teeth, his chin nearly touched his nose. Dad claimed he looked like the cartoon character, Snuffy Smith. He knew why I was here. Gramma got up and made me bacon and eggs and poured as much milk as I could drink. Dad had come looking for me earlier. He was angry but they calmed him down. Gramma went to bed and grampa put me up on a couch in the den, which had a piano. He liked to sit in his den alone and read and listen to Rachmaninoff or Beethoven or DeBussy or Amos and Andy on the radio and smoke his pipe. Tonight we sat and talked.

     “Your father, he’s a good man,” he explained, “but this baseball stuff, it’s crazy. It’s just a game, Dell. You don’t know it now, but you’re a scholar, and an artist.” He grinned at me, false teeth out, puffing his pipe. “Like your mother.”      

     (Next Sunday installment: “A Silent, Gnawing, Brutal Feud.”)

                                        AN ESSENTIAL ARROGANCE

1959

     Loman and I were locker partners in the smelly, dilapidated Compton high locker room, where the shower floors were coated with piss from athletes and gym kids peeing for decades. Loman and I were practically panting with excitement for varsity tryouts. We walked onto the field together, warmed up and played pepper together, bantering about our shortcomings the whole time. He owned a rifle of a natural throwing arm from the hole between third and short, and labeled me a rag arm. But I covered much more ground in a low crouch and called him “turtle.” I was a line drive hitter, but he had more power, and called me a “punch” hitter. I called him Mr. Whiff. Two Mexican kids, a senior and junior who started the year before, also tried out for short, and they treated me with the scorn I had coming as the privileged son of an ex big leaguer. My attitude was one of essential arrogance implying they didn’t belong on the same field with me.

     I realized I did not have a strong arm, especially from the overhand release. I threw three-quarter arm and at times side arm if I was moving toward my target, and I had perfected from hours of practice a quick release of the groundball from the low fielding crouch that compensated for the lack of velocity in my peg. I seldom straightened to throw, but completed the entire process of catching and throwing out a base runner in one single motion, a no-brainer; an automation that enabled me to seldom think too much and commit an error. I didn’t even have to look at my target, knowing the ball would get there.

     After a couple of days, coach Edgmon moved the two Mexican kids off shortstop and began a competition between Loman and me. In an intra-squad game, a big Mexican pitcher named Castillo sized me up and planted a fastball in my back. I knew it was retaliation for his two pals being demoted and took it. I refused to rub. As I trotted to first, he eyed me and I ignored him. When I was on first, he still eyed me, and I took a good lead. He turned to get the sign, got into his stretch, and I took a huge lead. He threw over. I got back easily. I took another huge lead. Ron Bart, a senior, about 200 plus pounds, slapped another tag on me as Castillo came over again. Bart wouldn’t talk to me. He had marked his territory as a racist and had brawled with blacks trying to put a foot in Senior Square on the main quad, a place no black student had dared enter over the years. There had been near riots when a black girl had won out over four white girls for homecoming queen. Ken Bowlin had followed Bart’s lead, drove around with him in Bart’s car and had made varsity as a starting pitcher. If possible, he was more full of himself than me.

     I stole second easily, popped up, stared at Castillo, who stared back, and took another ridiculous lead. He threw over twice and then I stole third and popped up and smacked the dust off my pants and took another lead and yelled out at Cruz.

     “You can’t hurt me with your shit! Hit me again! It’s an automatic triple. I own you!”

      I sensed his hatred of me. I didn’t give a shit. The game was mine. He was an interloper. Nothing could stop me. Next time up he threw me a fastball tight, which I took, then ripped one down the line for a double and coach took him out. I was all about the game. Nothing else mattered, or interfered. Nothing.

                                                              -----

     I made varsity shortstop. Even with his strong arm, coach moved Loman to second. There was no gloating. We still picked on each other, but also spent hours after practice working on the doubleplay until we were slick. We talked baseball. Loman was calm and cool while I was fidgety and intense. When I made a suggestion on how he should hit, he just stared at me. I felt everybody should hit as I’d been taught by my Dad.

     The early morning of our first varsity game, I walked down Alondra boulevard with a few of my old neighborhood pals, cork-offs, clowns, card players, pussy talkers, virgins, all of us. We always passed Dad’s store, which was between a liquor store and insurance office and across the street from the Richfield gas station on the corner of Santa Fe and Alondra, a busy hive.

     Beyond the wide front window, behind a long waist-high counter, Dad conducted business with a crowd of shoemakers eating his donuts, drinking his coffee, buying his merchandise while he held court. Summers I’d worked for him as a stock boy and knew most of these customers and no matter how busy he was he always noticed us kids lollygagging by, and if he didn’t I’d pound on the window and double up my fist and shake a menacing fist and challenge the old man to a mock-fight. Right off he’d get the killer look and rush to the doorway and start taunting me.

     “Hey bird-boy, who’ve you whipped lately? You can’t whip nobody.”

     My friends, all of whom were terrified of Dad, the most notorious bad ass in town, watched me shadow box. “You’re old and slow, Dad. I’m Sugar Ray.”

     This morning I did the same. He stood outside the door in his boxer’s stance. “When you’re twenty, and I’m fifty, I’ll still whip you, bird-boy, and when you’re thirty, and I’m sixty, I’ll still whip your ass. And when I’m seventy, God willing, and you’re forty, I’ll STILL whip your ass!”

     “I’m too quick for you, Daddy-o. I got the quicker hands.” I threw a flurry of punches.

     He strode toward me in his menacing crouch, my friends backing away, kids ambling along behind us pausing to observe, kids on the other side of the boulevard pausing to watch as we squared off in a game of “hand-slap.” I held out my two hands locked together and he swung and missed and I gloated and when he put out his hands I whacked him three times and then missed and then he got me twice. It went back and forth. I connected more, but my knuckles were cut and raw while his were fine as he addressed the crowd and his shoemakers who came out to observe the contest.

     “You got no punch, bird-boy. You’re a slapper, a tissy-prissle.”

      I still frisked around, but clearly the crowd felt Dad had won, and he was in his glory, but I still talked trash, and he grinned, told his shoemakers, “that’s my boy, he’s crazy like his mother,” and as I walked off, he cupped his hands at his mouth and hollered. “Play it right, Dell, and rip that pea, boy!”

      He was still at the door grinning as we crossed the street in our mile trek to school.

     (Next Sunday installment: Varsity Debut)

The Ball Player's Son

                                          FACING LEFTY GROVE

BIG MOE

     It was common knowledge Lefty Grove was the meanest man in baseball. Grove’s own team mates feared him, because if you booted one and cost him a game, or a shutout, he’d give you a look that would kill, and there were those who said Grove hated to lose even more than he liked to win. He was the best pitcher in baseball for nearly ten years, winning 30 games one year and leading the league in strikeouts and everything else year in and year out, a “stopper” who ended up winning 300 games and was an easy Hall of Famer.

     Though Grove was known for threatening team mates when they cost him a game or even a run, if you made a big play for him or got a big hit in a tight game, he’d give you a nod of approval, and that little nod meant more than all this hugging and kissing you see with these modern ball players. And if you were his team mate and somebody on the other team took liberties with your health, Grove was the first to retaliate, and word was—“nobody messed with Grove.”

     The first time I faced him as a rookie in an exhibition game, Grove was an old man, around 40. He had snow-white hair, had put on weight. The Red Sox were using him mostly as a spot starter and reliever. He no longer threw hard enough to scare people, but still, he had that aura, a big vulture, and he awed you. He acted like he owned the field, owned the game, and you were some interloper, and everything he did on the mound was effortless grace, like Williams hitting. A legend.

     My team mate, Schoolboy Rowe, a pitcher, told me Grove’d been washed up for years and couldn’t get off the mound any more. “Get yourself a hit,” he told me. “Drag a bunt.”

     Jim Tabor was at third, and he was slow as an ice wagon, and Jimmy Foxx was at first, looking ragged from another hangover. So I stepped in there. Lefty glared in, looking bigger than I imagined. He threw me a fastball and I dragged it down the third base line and ran like a bat out of hell down the line. As I crossed first base, Foxx never made a move toward the bag. He stood there, watching me fly past. When I got back to the bag there was a hush on the field and in the stadium. Our first base coach wouldn’t look at me. Foxx sidled up, arms folded, stinking like a distillery, with those big arms, biggest in baseball. He talked to me out of the side of his mouth.

     “Jesus, kid, what the hell you doing?”

     Over at third, Tabor stood near the bag, the ball sitting untouched between home and the bag, a perfect bunt. He was staring at me, too. “Nobody bunts Grove, kid,” Foxx told me. “It ain’t done.”

     Now I had to look at Grove. He was halfway between the mound and first, scowling right through me. He growled and turned around and took the ball from Tabor, who looked at me and shook his head, as if to say, “Boy is that stupid ass in for it.” All the guys in our dugout were having a big time falling all over each other, and the guys in the Boston dugout were quiet and grim, like they were waiting for somebody to stick my head in the chopping block.

     “You’re hitting a thousand against Grove, Franklin,” Dizzy Trout yelled from our dugout. He and Rowe jostled each other.

     I kep my head down, took a small lead, while Foxx toed the bag and smacked his glove. “Lefty don’t forget,” he said. “Better hope he’s gone next time you’re up, kid.”

     Sure enough they left him in there and I came up again. Lefty’s glaring at me when I stepped into the box. I played it meek, knowing I was going to get knocked down and deserved it for being dumb and listening to guys like Rowe and Trout, goddam pitchers. So I braced myself to take one on the backside and Grove floated a slow curve down the middle. Strike one. Well, he’ll get me now, I thought, he’s setting me up

     “Hey bush!” somebody yelled from the Boston dugout. “Drag another bunt!”

     I got ready to duck again and he floated I another slow curve down the middle. Strike two. I got out of the box, stared out at Grove. To hell with him, I thought. I don’t give a damn what he does, I’m hitting. Next pitch he comes in tight with a fastball and I whack it off the fence in left and pull into second with a double. I stand there, proud as a peacock, and Lefty’s got the ball back. He steps off the mound and gives me a tiny nod, no smile.

     “Thattaway to swing that bat, kid,” he growled. “You don’t ned to bunt.”

     (Next Sunday installment: “An essential arrogance.”)