THE BALL PLAYER’S SON

1951

     My mother felt I was becoming too “one-dimensional” and in an effort to see if I might be interested in things other than baseball, attempted to interest me in a musical instrument. After two lessons I was kicked out of accordion school. I suffered through the Cub Scouts, wanting no part of going to the mountains where there was no baseball. Next was Hebrew school, where I was again kicked out by an outraged rabbi who informed my parents I behaved like an anti-Semite when I pummeled studious fellow Jewish kids; they decided to put off Hebrew school indefinitely.

     Mother was also alarmed at my profanity, my swaggering about, my teasing her when dad was gone on the road’; once chasing her around with a dead mouse. She slapped me for the first time and cried when I used the word ‘nigger;’ she washed my mouth out with soap, explained to me the ugly sin of using that word, and made me promise to never use it again. She related the history of our country treating black people as slaves, of humiliating them, stealing their pride and spirit.

     Mother worried that I wouldn’t be well-rounded. Already a teacher had recommended I see a child psychiatrist because I disrupted class and craved attention. I was too aggressively competitive. She took me to a lady shrink who had me draw whatever came into my mind. So I drew two baseball players, one a giant of a man, the other a small child.

     My mother and father quarreled over his influence on me. She tried to convince him to keep me out of the clubhouse and away from the crude ball players. But dad insisted I was just like him when he was a kid and he’d turned out okay, and besides, dad insisted, taking me away from the ballpark would break my heart.

     I got my way. I’d sort of become the Hollywood Stars mascot. Over the winter dad hired Handley, a carpenter, Maltzburger, an electrician, and Sandlock, a roofer, to build a den connecting the garage to the master bedroom of our house in Compton. All three of those men had their individual trades but could do anything when it came to building a home and, since dad was starting a small shoe findings supply business in the garage, they were all occupied, though dad was not allowed to help build the den because he was so inept they referred to him as ‘Six Fingers McFiddick’ and sent him on runs to the hardware store and lumber yard with a prepared list so he wouldn’t come back with the wrong supplies.

     Dad claimed no team he’d ever played for was as close as the Stars. They held team parties. (Though most of the players had kids, I seemed to be the only one obsessed with baseball and adapted to the clubhouse.) Big John Lindell had the biggest, best parties. And the one dad had in the newly built den during spring training was a rousing success, with me swirling about like a fondly petted dog..

     Lindell was the size of a coke machine and as irresistibly engaging as he was big. “Hey, Little Meat, come on over here and say hello to Big John.” It was almost as if I’d hurt his feelings if I didn’t come over. He scooped me up in hands you could sit in, held me eye level and chucked my chin. His clutch hitting and .500 average in the 1947 World Series for the Yankees was a feat nobody on the club had come close to achieving. Still, dad reminded me that Lindell had his best years during the war “while the best players were away fighting for their country.” Lindell walked, talked and carried himself with a swagger. A similar swagger illuminated all professional baseball players as special beings placed on pedestals to be admired and paid homage to, like famous generals and statesmen. Yet among them was an undeclared pecking order, and since Lindell was such a big man with a huge outgoing personality and he’d had those big years with the gloried Yankees and was a World Series hero among that exalted realm, he was on a loftier level, like a war hero. A magnificent athlete, Lindell was in the process of working his way back into the big leagues as a pitcher after falling on hard times as an offensive weapon with the Yanks. He was hoping to catch on with the Pittsburg Pirates, possibly the worst team in all of the big leagues, a team so bad that dad said “they’d be lucky to finish in the middle of the pack in the Pacific Coast League. They got a bunch of raw bonus kids and war time players still hanging on after stinking up the field.”

     Lindell thrived in the Hollywood atmosphere, doing commercials, winning a lot of games and becoming a draw. The Stars and Angels were the biggest draws in town, bigger than the LA Rams football team. Gilmore Field games were attended by show business names like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and starlets like Kim Novak and Anne Bancroft, all of them sitting in box seats above the Stars dugout

     So if the team had a star it was John Lindell. Big John was so well known that his son, a few years older than me and, like his dad, a gifted athlete, became the target of mean-spirited antagonists at Little League games. His mother, who sat with my mother at games, told mom that kids and their parents jeered Lindell’s son, forever comparing him  to his father in a demeaning way. They were jealous when he dominated games, and gloated when he screwed up. Finally, at thirteen, Lindell’s son quit playing schoolboy baseball because he no longer wished to endure the abuse, and his mom warned my mom I would soon face the same treatment. Worse than the kids were the parents, whose behavior toward young Lindell was so cruel and vicious that he could not force himself to step onto a ball field. Mother said Lindell, like my dad, wanted his son to experience the game that had been his life and his love; and his son being deprived of a game Lindell loved so much that he hung on in the minor leagues after his talent as a big leaguer had deteriorated, had to be a crushing blow. Big John seemed to love every aspect of the game: playing, batting practice betting and kidding, clubhouse camaraderie, road trips, signing autographs, giving interviews to writers, the adulation and perks—and now his immensely talented son was so disillusioned that the great national pastime had turned sour in his mouth.

     If Lindell, a thoroughly positive and resilient presence who had withstood the highs and hard knocks of the game was a “big fish in a small pond”, my dad was an even smaller fish. Dad sometimes had his picture in the paper, his name in the headlines of the sports page. For a pittance he did a newspaper ad for vitamins. He was accorded a long feature article in the Long Beach Telegram hailing his career exploits. There were pictures of dad in his Detroit uniform and of our family sitting on the davenport while dad stood above us wielding his silver bat—the caption below stating dad wad giving me “pointers on hitting.”

     Everybody in our neighborhood and beyond knew about the article, and already several kids had told me in nasty terms that I would never be as good a ball player as my dad, and was a bum. Mother was already leery of my playing Little League.

     “I don’t want our son ending up like John Lindell’s son, Murray.”

     “Every kid’s different, Rose. Dell’s not Lindell’s kid. Maybe John’s kid doesn’t love baseball like Dell does. I loved the game so much nothing could keep me off the field. He’s the same way. He lives, eats and breathes baseball. He goes to bed with his glove. He’s already playing with kids bigger and older and holding his own. He wants to test himself. He’s a competitor. He’s not like your family. He’s like me. He’s gonna play ball whether you like it or not.”

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