by Dan Barry
The night swells. The wind blows in from center field and whips through the stands, where fewer and fewer fans are subject to its snap. The souvenir stands along the empty concourse have been shut down, which sends one of the teenage concessionaires, Kenny Laflamme, clambering up to the press box to ask his stepfather, the scoreboard operator, for the keys to the car. He is fifteen, with shaggy blond hair and a small build, on the cusp of a growth spurt. He is also so shy that he began the season as a soda vendor—at his parents’ behest—but simply could not bring himself to say “Soda here” in such a public arena; the thought nauseates him. But the accommodating front office found a place for him at one of the souvenir stands, where he sells pennants and T-shirts and PawSox yearbooks filled with pictures and promises. He closed his stand hours ago, has watched more than his fair share of this interminable game, and now all he wants to do is stretch out somewhere and rest. The cozy solitude of his stepfather’s black 1978 Ford Pinto in the parking lot seems much more inviting than this press box, which is basically a mobile home, circa 1942, suspended in air without heat or air-conditioning, and with windows that, even when hooked shut, do not keep out the cold. A part of the stadium’s original construction, the press box is furnished with foldout chairs and tables, a refrigerator stocked with drinks and cold cuts (for some reason, the availability of olive loaf will linger in the memory of its denizens), and men in various emotional states.
For example, Kenny’s stepfather, Richard Courtens, thirty-four, is a Rhode Island social worker who earns five bucks a game, plus free admission, to man the scoreboard. But because the scoreboard allows for only 10 innings, he is busily trying to trick the small console in front of him into “turning the corner”—that is, to begin a second game, basically, while maintaining the totals of hits, runs, and errors from the “first,” which the system is inclined to erase. So there he is, fiddling with the damn thing.
He’s not the only one with problems. Before the game went into extra innings, Bill George, also thirty-four, a North Providence lawyer by day and Pawtucket’s official scorer by night, only had to remember his wife’s parting plea to stop at Dunkin’ Donuts on his way home and pick up some chocolate-covered Easter treats for their two young children. But now, with zeroes adding up like so many eggs, he has to figure out what to do if the game lasts much longer. His scorebook allows for only 12 innings—a reflection, like the scoreboard, of the game’s own expectations—so he, too, must improvise. George decides to switch from a blue pen to a red pen, and finds what room is left in the book’s diamond-shaped boxes, already crammed with his cryptic symbols of the game’s progression (that F9, for example, represents Dave Koza’s recent fly out to right fielder Drungo Hazewood). From now on, the little boxes reserved, say, for the happenings of the 3rd inning will also contain information from the 13th, with the different ink providing the necessary distinction. The plan makes the head ache, but there you have it. It might just work.
And what about poor Bill McCourt? The young accountant is the glorified gofer of the press box. He provides its creatures with the starting lineups and statistics, makes sure they have enough drink and food (More olive loaf, anyone?), and keeps an eye on the “ticker”—a gray box, about the size of a toaster, that slowly spits out a stream of inch-wide yellow paper with the latest developments from major-league games around the country, all in capital letters, AND. WITH. EVERY. WORD. SEPARATED. BY. A. PERIOD. Every so often, McCourt tears off the tape in the midst of an ellipsis and rushes the strip of baseball information to the public-address announcer, the reporters, and the two radio guys from Rochester. In addition to overseeing all this, he is also providing music to the entire stadium through a small cassette player wired into a sound system—a cassette player that the shy boy Kenny might have gotten for his fifteenth birthday. He is pushing buttons, fast-forwarding and rewinding to send forth a giddy symphony of game-appropriate sounds and songs: the national anthem to start the game; “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” for the 7th-inning stretch; frenetic music, worthy of Benny Hill, for when the grounds crew rakes the field; and maybe a half dozen songs that play over and over as the game drags on. What he wants to play is the song that resounds through McCoy after every PawSox victory: “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang, the selection of which encourages fans to file quickly out to the Pawtucket streets. What he wouldn’t mind playing at this point is the anthem from Annie that follows every loss: The sun’ll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun…. What he must play, until the game’s resolution saves him, is a never-ending loop of inoffensive treacle. Even the most ardent fan of Sammy Davis Jr. can only take so much of “The Candy Man.” Who can take a sunrise, sprinkle it with dew, cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two? The Candy Man, oh the Candy Man can…
Here in the press box is the public-address announcer, Bob Guthrie, making sure to pronounce every name correctly—LOO-iss A-PON-teee—because Pawtucket’s front-office guys are sticklers for that. Here are the two radio guys from Rochester, Bob Drew and Peter Torrez, providing the New York metropolis known as both the Flour City and the Flower City with a slow-tempo baseball serenade. And here are the two newspaper reporters, neither of them quite sure what to do as this game all but yawns and curls up before them. Mike Scandura, of the Pawtucket Evening Times, is thirty-five, from upstate New York, and a devoted Yankees fan who forgot to wear enough layers of clothing. Since the Times does not publish on Sundays, he is at McCoy tonight out of love more than obligation—recording every play down to the pitch in his maroon C. S. Peterson scorebook—though he plans to make extra money by writing a freelance game story for a Rochester newspaper. Sitting beside him is Angelo Cataldi, the Providence Journal reporter, who is also a Yankees fan, but there the similarity ends. Even though he was born and raised in nearby Providence, Cataldi hates it here. He does not belong here. Get him the hell out of here.
Cataldi, thirty, has a helmet of black hair and a knack for witty negativity. When he graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, he thought his prestigious degree would open a hundred doors. It opened just one, the door to the newspaper back home, a door he did not want to enter. He has toiled at the Providence Journal in what he considers to be the minor leagues of journalism for four years now, doing everything from fielding the “Sears screwed me” complaints for the Action Line feature to covering the travails of the Boston Red Sox. But his work has lately attracted the interest of a major-league newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Moving his growing family from its home state to Pennsylvania would be an upheaval, of course, but one thing would be wonderfully certain: Angelo Cataldi would never have to cover a Pawtucket Red Sox game again.
He hates covering PawSox games. Has he mentioned how much he hates covering PawSox games? You have no idea. Especially on Saturday nights like this, when the games last beyond his first deadline, at 10:15 or so, usually because they’re so poorly played, and what can he do, he’s at a minor-league ballpark that is basically a landfill under lights, and he’s sitting in a cold, barren press box that looks as though it was tacked up at the very end of the stadium’s construction, as though the builders suddenly said Oh shit, we don’t have a press box—and there goes his deadline for the next edition. And as much as he despises being at McCoy on a Saturday night, this night is the worst, the absolute worst, because a half hour has already been lost to the earlier malfunction of the stadium lights, which means he wants to kill somebody, and his impatient editor will be calling any minute, and now the wind is blowing right into his face, blowing through the cheap windows of this lousy press box, in this hellhole of a ballpark, this Pawtucket dump.
“Like I said,” Angelo Cataldi will say years later, from Philadelphia, where he will become the famously bilious host of a morning radio sports show. “I worked from a negative perspective a lot of the time.”
So you can see why Kenny Laflamme, a teenage boy so shy it makes his stomach hurt, would prefer not to spend the
rest of the night with Angelo and the boys in a mobile home suspended in the air. His stepfather hands him the keys. He exits the stadium, climbs into the Ford Pinto, locks the doors, stretches out—and falls fast asleep.
Midnight at the ballpark. And in the midst of its baseball blur, perhaps in the 13th inning, perhaps between the fly out to left by Rochester’s Dallas Williams and the fly out to right by Pawtucket’s Marty Barrett, though no one will remember for sure, a humble wish resounds through McCoy Stadium:
On behalf of the Pawtucket Red Sox—happy Easter.
Have the Pawtucket Red Sox ballplayers really paused, in midrumination of another gob of chewing tobacco wrapped in bubble gum, to wish a happy Easter to the few hundred fans crazy or lonely enough to still be here? As they mutter among themselves about the goddamn wind and the goddamn cold, and this being a goddamn pitcher’s night, and we’re never going to get home at this rate, goddamnit, are these ballplayers really considering the joy to be found in an empty tomb?
No.
This call for a brief time-out from all the “Now batting” pronouncements and “Candy Man” nonsense, this call to say, simply, Happy Easter, take hope, hallelujah, and now back to “Now batting,” comes from the front office—which means that it comes directly from the team’s owner, Ben Mondor. The hard-nosed soft touch. The salty savior of Pawtucket. Good luck finding someone to say a bad word about him; in fact, good luck finding someone who won’t choke up while speaking of his kindness. Bob Ojeda, one of the Pawtucket pitchers huddled in the dugout, possessed of a hunger that will surely take him places, borrowed $500 from Mondor last year to pay for a cross-country flight for his father, a furniture upholsterer in California, so that he could see his son’s major-league debut in Boston. Ojeda tried to repay the loan when he got sent back down to Pawtucket, but Mondor refused. And Hood, down there in the visitors’ clubhouse, fretting over his postgame pasta turning to mush, hasn’t forgotten how, after he sprained his ankle playing junior high school basketball a few years ago, Mondor would pick him up at his home, drive him to McCoy for proper whirlpool treatment of his injury, and then give him a ride back. Hood will describe his younger self as just a knucklehead kid from the neighborhood, and here was Mondor—the owner of the Pawtucket Red Sawx!—chauffeuring him around like he was Richie Rich.
But the more you hear of Mondor’s many kindnesses—the gifts, the “loans,” the Christmas cards sent to anyone who ever played for him in Pawtucket—the more you wonder: What’s this guy doing in the cruel business that he pronounces as “bazeball”? With his fireplug build and those large tinted glasses, he looks too avuncular, too much like the friendly butcher down at the Star Market, until you notice how meticulously his gray-white mustache is trimmed. It reflects fastidiousness; an orderly mind; a dedicated focus on every detail. Every hair.
Tonight he is wearing a pea jacket over two sweaters, but his feet feel as though they are encased in ice, and he is finding little protection against the elements in his owner’s box, a flattering term for a particle-board partition that is furnished with a few chairs and covered overhead by a stretch of sections 10 and 11.
A nearby alley leads deeper into the stadium’s maze, below the grandstand, where the ball club still shares space with its landlord, the City of Pawtucket. That is why lawn mowers sit in the ticket office, infusing the air with the hint of gasoline, and why city dump trucks are sometimes parked on the third-base side, infusing the air with the hint of garbage. But amid this public-works bazaar, amid all the grass-tinted blades and street-scraped plows scattered about, Mondor has managed to carve out an office, fastidiously appointed, of course, and just a short walk from his so-called owner’s box. The bookcases in the corner were purchased with S&H Green Stamps, the couch is a hand-me-down from a ballplayer dispatched a couple of years ago to Double-A, the chair and desk were found at a secondhand store—and the occupant is a multimillionaire who is asking himself, once again, why he disrupted sweet retirement to try and save a doomed baseball team.
George Bernard Mondor never played much baseball as a boy; his career statistics would reflect one half inning during a pickup game in grammar school. He is not a man, then, who interprets life in terms of baseball, whose guiding principles are peppered with its familiar metaphors. Instead, he interprets baseball through the terms of life—his own. Through his personal victories and losses, he understands what it means to face an overpowering pitcher; to stay in the box; to hit it where they ain’t; to lay down an exquisite sacrifice bunt. He recognizes the game’s gift of escape. Born in a small Quebec outpost, about sixty miles north of Montreal, in 1925, he was the tenth and last child of a skilled carpenter and a woman who took in boarders. Two of his siblings died before he was born, including an infant named Bernard, so baby George became Bernard, or Ben, in his dead brother’s honor. A few years later, just in time for the Depression, the family left Canada in search of opportunity, but found little in Mount Vernon, New York, and even less in northern Rhode Island, in the Blackstone Valley mill city of Woonsocket, where, at the very least, many people conversed in French. The father reluctantly went on relief, and took whatever pick-and-shovel work he could find.
A sense of the young boy’s Woonsocket world can be found in the story of a neighbor. The Mondors lived in a double-decker on Providence Street, not far from the home of Little Rose Ferron, a bedridden young woman who was said to be a mystic and stigmatic in direct communication with Jesus and the Virgin Mary. When she died at thirty-three in 1936, thousands crowded the streets of Mondor’s neighborhood to pay their respects. Some of her followers campaigned for Little Rose’s beatification, and even managed to have her body exhumed—twice—to be examined for evidence of the supernatural; incorruption of the body, that is. The exhumations, though, suggested an entirely routine return to the clay, and church officials were never persuaded by various claims to the miraculous. The prayers for beatification went unanswered. But people still visit her grave in Woonsocket’s Precious Blood Cemetery, some convinced that they detect the distinct perfume of roses.
Though Mondor was never much of a believer in the holy story of his neighbor—a nice enough girl, but that was about it—the discipline and mysteries of French-Canadian Catholicism helped to mold the man he would become. He was taught by the Sisters of the Religious of Jesus and Mary at the Holy Family parochial school, and then by the Brothers of the Sacred Heart at Mount Saint Charles Academy, where he was accepted as a charity case because his family could not afford the tuition. He met his future wife, Madeleine Valois, in a pew at Holy Family Church. His courtship would require playing croquet with a few of the nuns who ran the all-women’s Catholic college she attended in Connecticut, and making room for one of them when he took Madeleine for a thoroughly unromantic boat ride. But these were the rules, and faith mattered to him.
Mondor joined the navy right out of high school and spent the better part of four years as a navigator aboard the USS Willmarth, a destroyer escort that found itself in various hot spots throughout the Pacific theater; for example, he and his shipmates spent Easter Sunday 1945, thirty-six years ago tonight, at the Battle of Okinawa. After the war, he returned to the States, only to be told that he had served in the military illegally because he was not an American citizen, and therefore not eligible for free college tuition or any other benefits under the G.I. Bill of Rights—an injustice he never forgot. When he was finally sworn in as a citizen several years later, the judge shook his hand and apologized for the American government’s ingratitude. By this point, though, free college was almost beside the point. Mondor was educating himself, reading Shakespeare by night and working by day in the accounting office at a Woonsocket mill, where he took note of the nepotistic, money-wasting business practices that would lead to its closing a few years later.
By the early 1960s, Mondor had developed his own plan for survival in the threatened textile industry of New England. He and two partners bought an old mill in Pawtucket and began producing women�
��s wear fabrics. His partners dropped out, but Mondor kept plugging, selling the business and reinvesting the considerable profit into bankrupt textile operations from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, always with an eye toward salvaging the company and selling it at a gain. He applied his eye for detail to each company’s books, studying the margins, assessing the risks and possibilities. He became so successful that by 1974 he could retire at the age of forty-eight. He and Madeleine did not have any children, a source of sadness for both, but they did have many nieces, nephews, and godchildren, and a lovely colonial in Lincoln, and lots and lots of money, and each other. There were rosebushes and an art collection to tend to, and a chance to see the world by more agreeable means than a navy ship.
All the while, as Mondor scrimped and hustled his way to success, through the postwar years, the 1950s, the 1960s, and into the 1970s, that concrete gem of Pawtucket, McCoy Stadium, slipped gradually into disrepair. It became a hulking symbol of the fading fortunes of a city whose essential textile mills were moving south or closing up, one by one. In some ways, the stadium was very much like a closed mill, an empty place echoing faintly of toil and striving, yearning to hum again.
After the death of Thomas P. McCoy in 1945, the ballpark named in his honor served as the home field for the Pawtucket Slaters, a minor-league affiliate of the Boston Braves. But the team and its league folded after a few years, and by the 1950s the stadium’s nearly six thousand seats were rarely occupied. Its concourse became a haven for pigeons and vandals, its field a dusty plain used for high school games and Babe Ruth games and Little League games and beer-league softball games and good old sandlot games. Park security was usually provided by an overweight watchman who would sit in a chair, beer in hand, outside the bar that would become the Lily Social Club, rising now and then whenever he sensed mischief afoot. “He’d chase the kids away,” remembers Ted Dolan, who grew up across the street from McCoy. “Of course, he couldn’t catch you.”