In the parking space there were two maroon Cadillacs of recent vintage, and a smaller car that, he said, belonged to his sixteen-year-old daughter. There was a large travel home and a pickup truck, and he led us into the house where he introduced us to his three daughters and two sons and showed us around. There were five bedrooms, two baths, a library with a baby grand piano in it, a play room, the kitchen and the living-dining area that rose two stories.
"How high is this ceiling?" Skipper Lofting said.
"Nineteen feet," he said. "My wife designed the house and we built it in 1966."
Against the long wall there was a huge fieldstone fireplace, its exposed chimney rising the full height. He said that the limestone hearth weighed three thousand pounds and the slab that formed the mantel eight hundred pounds, and over the mantel there was an oil painting, made from another old photograph, of two oxen pulling a buckboard through waist-high grass. "Cussin"' Harris was beside the oxen with a dog, and Granny Harris and five children were in the buckboard.
"That was when they were comin' out of Oklahoma," he said. "Three of their kids died there, and when they left, my granddad dug up their graves and put them in the wagon and brought them to Palestine and buried them there."
When I asked him later, he said that the house and its immediate acre would probably bring $150,000 on the current Cut and Shoot real estate market. The other thirty acres, at $5,000 an acre, would probably bring again as much.
"You all ready boys?" he said now. "Let's go."
The boys, slim, dark-haired, neat in their slacks and warm-up jackets and looking like prep-schoolers, got into the front seat of his Cadillac with him, and Skipper Lofting and I got into the back, and he backed out. We made several turns onto dark, paved, tree-lined roads and then onto another that was paved, but that I thought must be the one. Then he stopped the car, and I could see it, fifty feet ahead of us, illumined by the headlights.
"There is it," he said, even as Lou Viscusi had said it that first time. There were waist-high weeds and scrub bushes around it, and in front of it was a tree, bare of leaves now, but with a trunk about a foot across. The porch was cluttered with discarded furniture and appliances, including a couple of TV sets.
"I don't remember that tree there," I said.
"It's a walnut," he said. "I believe it was planted the year after you were here. My brother planted it."
"I'm trying to remember if you were born in this house."
"No," he said. "Tobe and I were born over there in a cabin they tore down for a well."
He turned left and drove about a hundred feet and stopped, the car lights playing through the mist now on the weathered white sideboards of the gym. Torn canvas, flapping in the wind, hung down from the eaves to the top of the chest-high sideboards, and we got out and waited, the headlights still on, while one of the boys went into the gym and turned on the two overhead naked light bulbs.
The ring was set up in the middle of the concrete floor, and there were two heavy punching bags suspended from the rafters. For fifteen minutes or so he had the boys, in their slacks and sports shirts and wearing bag-punching gloves, work out on the bags while he coached them.
"Kevin, you're puttin' no power behind it." . . . "Move fast on your feet, too, Robert." . . . "Put power in your right, Kevin." . . . "Turn your palm down on your right hand, Robert."
They put the big gloves on then, and he got into the ring first with one and then the other. With his open hands he picked off their punches, moving around and talking to them, and reminding me of Floyd Patterson who, half a continent away, was probably just finishing up with the members of the Huguenot Boxing Club in the gym in the white chicken barn outside New Paltz, New York.
"Here come the revenuers," I said to Skipper Lofting. "Let's get rid of the still."
The car lights were advancing on the gym over the uneven ground. The car pulled up, and the lights went out and two teenagers in blue jeans and carrying their gloves, came in. They stripped to the waist, and while Skipper Lofting and I walked around with our coat collars up and our hands in our pockets and our breaths hanging on the damp air, they punched the bags and then boxed each other for three rounds while Roy moved around with them and coached them.
"Where the cabin was where you were born," one of the boys in the front seat said to him as we drove away, "is that well still there?"
"No," he said. "It's dry now, too."
"Did we get money from it?"
"No," he said. "Granny was married at fourteen, and she had sixteen children and she didn't have time to learn to read or write. She didn't hold onto all the mineral rights."
"It could have been a lot of money, couldn't it?" the boy said.
"It could have come to an easy million." Roy said.
When we got back to the house his wife, Jean, was in the kitchen. She had eaten with the children before we had left for the workout, but she served us chili and then fruit cake flavored with apricot brandy.
"Do you remember this out here?" she said.
"I'll never forget the way it was," I said, "but I can hardly recognize it now."
"It's all changed now," she said. "We're just a part of Houston."
"That's right," Roy said. "They built their airport out this way, and Lake Conroe and Lake Livingston are up here and it brings a lot of recreation. We have a lot of good timber, but recreation has become the big deal here."
Yes, I was thinking, and it always was for the people who lived as they wanted to and fished and hunted and fought dogs and chickens and raced horses for side bets on the clay and dirt roads. It was sporting to attend dances to which you were invited not to corne, and there was the time your dad and Uncle Jack hung Uncle Bob head down in the 'gator well on the river bank so that he could slip a rope over one and drag it out just for the sport of it.
"It's all changing so fast now," his wife said. "We're becoming just a suburb."
When he walked us out to the car, a light rain was falling again. Dead oak leaves, wet and flattened by the rain, covered the ground and glistened in the yellow light from the house like burnished copper, and we shook hands there and he told us how to get back to town.
"Well," I said to Skipper Lofting as we drove back through the rain, "what do you think of Roy Harris and Cut and Shoot?"
"I'm impressed by him," he said, "considering his background and that he was a fighter. He's so well-mannered, and I noticed, that, even when he was talking to just the two of us, he never uses any crude language."
"And even," I said, "when he was proposing the violent remedy of hanging people on the court house steps and putting it on TV, his voice level never rose. It was all so matter of fact."
"I noticed that, too," Skipper said.
"When I saw how well he's doing, and that he had moved up into another social stratum," I said, "I thought he might be hesitant about my delving into the old days again and writing about them, but he's proud of his beginnings."
"That's right," Skipper said. "He sort of celebrates them."
"The Harrises have never worried about what other people would think," I said. "Right or wrong, he says what he believes, and it just seems to me that the rest of us, who don't want to offend and are afraid to stir up the waters, lose a little of our integrity every day of our lives."
"I know what you mean," Skipper said.
8
The Fireman
The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the Series
because I had an edge on Burt. I had
DiMaggio and Page. Gentlemen, I give you
Joe DiMaggio . . . and Joe Page.
Bucky Harris
We drove east out of Texas and across seven states and into western Pennsylvania. It took us three days, and I called him on the phone from South Hapeville, Georgia, and then from Beckley, West Virginia, to let him know where we were and when we might be in.
"How are you tonight?" I said the last night out, and when he answered his voice was flat and tired-sounding again.
>
"Oh, so-so, Billy," he said. It was what he had said two nights before.
"Only so-so?" I said.
"Yeah, Billy," he said. "When you coming in?"
"I figure we should be there early tomorrow afternoon," I said. "Will you be there then?"
"I'm here all the time," he said, the voice the same.
The address the Yankees had given me was in care of Joe Page's Rocky Lodge, Route 30, Laughlintown, Pennsylvania. Both times that I had called he had answered the phone himself and almost immediately, and so I had pictured him perhaps in a small office or maybe picking up a phone at the end of a bar.
"We'll need a couple of rooms for a night," I said. "What is Joe Page's Rocky Lodge?"
"It's a small inn," he said, "but I don't have any rooms. You won't have any trouble getting rooms in Ligonier, though, and that's only three miles. There's a couple of good motels there."
"Don't worry about it," I said. "I'll be there tomorrow."
"Sure, Billy," he said.
"He's not well," I said to Skipper Lofting after I had hung up. "He's real down, the same as the other night. I'm sure he's in poor health, and that makes me feel like a louse. I should know."
"How would you know?" Skipper said. "How many years is it?"
"It was 1950," I said, "and I said good-by to him in the Yankee clubhouse at the Stadium. The White Sox had just knocked him out of the box. I think it was Aaron Robinson who doubled in the winning run, and he used to catch Joe in the minors and on the Yankees before they traded him to Chicago. Two days later they sent Joe down to Kansas City, which was a Yankee farm club then."
"That was twenty-six years ago," Skipper said.
"That's what's wrong with this business," I said. "We're a lot of hustlers. We latch on to someone because he's in the public eye and we need to make a living. We plumb his background and pick his brain. We search out his motivations and his aspirations, and if he's a good guy, an association, even a friendship, forms. Then we say good-by and good luck, and if his luck runs out where are we? We're long gone, and on to somebody else."
"You can't be everybody's brother," Skipper said, "and besides, I'm getting hungry. When are you figuring to eat?"
When he had it, in '47 and '49, he was one of the great relief pitchers of all time. He was a fastball left-hander who, as the expression used to go, threw aspirins. Baseball, in New York at least, was reaching its peak of post-war popularity, and for the crucial games, and for those two World Series, of course, the Stadium would be packed. I can still see it the way it was in the late innings, the Yankee pitcher faltering with men on the bases, the conference on the mound, then Bucky Harris in '47 and Casey Stengel in '49 taking the ball from the pitcher and signaling with his left hand. In the stands 70,000 heads would turn and 70,000 pairs of eyes would fasten on the bullpen beyond right field.
"Now coming in to pitch for the Yankees," the voice of the public address announcer would sound, echoing, "Joe Page!"
It was like thunder, rolling, and it made a cave of the vast Stadium. They rose as one, all their shouts and screams one great roar, and the gate of the low chain-link fence would open, and he would come out, immaculate in those pinstripes, walking with that sort of slow, shuffling gait, his warm-up jacket over his shoulder, a man on his way to work. In '47 he was in fifty-eight games, of which the Yankees won thirty-seven, including the seventh against the Dodgers in the Series. In '49 he appeared in sixty, forty-two of which the Yankees won, and in the Series he saved two, again against Brooklyn.
He was six feet three, perfectly proportioned at 215 pounds, and he was handsome. He had a smooth oval face, dark hair, blue eyes and a smile that, in those days, could have sold Ipana tooth paste. Of all the Yankees only Joe DiMaggio, his buddy and roommate on the road, surpassed him in popularity. After the '47 Series, a Mr. and Mrs. Bernard MacDougall, in Inverness, Nova Scotia, named their son Joe Page MacDougall after him.
He was the oldest of seven children, and his father had been a miner in the coal fields along the Allegheny just northeast of Pittsburgh, and he himself had worked in the mines for two years. As a rookie with the Yankees in 1944, he made the All Stars, but the night of the game his father died. A sister had been killed in an automobile accident earlier that year, and his mother had passed away the year before. He was married then to Katie Carrigan, whom he had known since they were children, and now he became the main support of three sisters and two brothers, the oldest eighteen and the youngest eleven.
"I had written a piece for Cosmopolitan called 'Fighter's Wife,'" I was telling Skipper Lofting, "about Rocky Graziano's wife, Norma. The night he fought Charley Fusari, when it started to come over the radio she ran out of the house, and I walked the streets with her and then waited with her until he came home. Then I got an assignment from Life to do 'Ballplayer's Wife' with Katie and Joe. When the Yankees would come off the road for a home stand, I'd sit with her in the wives' section, waiting for Joe to come in and save the game.
"I sat there with her for four weeks in all, and it was sad. In would come Joe, and he just didn't have it any more. When a speed-ball pitcher loses just that little bit off it, those hitters who have been standing there with their bats on their shoulders just love it. They tee off, and it is brutal. Sometimes we'd go to dinner afterwards, and I'd try to console them, but it wasn't any good.
"That last game he pitched for the Yankees, after he lost it, I left Katie and went down to the clubhouse to tell him she'd be waiting in their car. He always had the dressing stall next to DiMaggio, and he was sitting there with his head down. I said, 'Joe, tough luck.' He looked up at me, and he said, 'Billy, you're jinxin' me.' "
"Well," Skipper said, "you know how superstitious ballplayers are, or used to be."
"I know," I said, "but he meant it right then. He was grasping for anything. I said, 'You may be right, Joe, and I'm dropping the story.' I told him he'd probably get it back his next time out, and I wished him luck and shook hands, and I left. End of story."
"I guess you couldn't write about losing in those days," Skipper said.
"Only in literature," I said.
Now, after we had checked into the motel in Ligonier and had lunch, we drove southeast out of town on Route 30, the mid-December sun lowering behind us, and then through Laughlintown. Where the road started to rise toward a ridge, stands of hardwood crowded it on both sides, and then on the right we saw the blue sign with the white letters: Joe Page's Rocky Lodge. Set among the trees was a three-story building of fieldstone and wood, and the only vehicle in the parking space in front was a light blue pickup.
I got out of the car, and on the gravel of the shaded driveway there were patches of frost and on some of the dry, brown leaves a light sugaring of dry powder snow. Drapes had been drawn across the first floor windows of the building, and as I reached the door under the overhang, I heard the lock turn. I could hear the sounds of a football game on a television, and I knocked on the door.
"We're closed," a voice said.
"I'm Bill Heinz," I said. "Joe Page is expecting me."
"Oh," the voice said, and then the lock turned again and the door opened, and he said, "I'm his son Joe."
"And you look like him," I said, as we shook hands. He was in his late teens and wearing glasses with narrow steel rims, but it was there in the blue eyes.
"That's what people say," he said, smiling.
"I have a friend with me," I said. "I just want to go back to the car and bring him in."
He waited at the door, and I introduced Skipper to him. The barroom, deserted, was to the right, and he led us to the left into a long, darkened room, the only illumination coming from ceiling lights in the back. To the left, against the front wall, there was a juke box, and next to it the television. On the right a log fire was going in a fieldsone fireplace, dining room chairs and small tables were stacked against the other wall, and in an armchair his father was sitting. He got up slowly and walked toward me.
"You look goo
d, Billy," he said putting out his hand. "A little heavier."
It was Joe Page, all right, but I knew it only by those eyes. That dark hair was gray now, and his mouth was shrunken. The left side of his jaw was hollow behind a gray beard of several days, his neck was thin, and that great left arm hung loosely at his side.
"How are you, Joe?" I said.
"Oh, so-so," he said.
I introduced Skipper to him, and he introduced his younger son Jon, who was seventeen, and two years younger than his brother, and Bryan Miller, a young friend of Jon's who had come in to watch on TV the Washington Redskins and the Minnesota Vikings in their National Football Conference play-off game. We found straight-back chairs, and he sat down slowly again in the armchair, as I tried to find a way to ask the question.
"Cancer of the throat," he said, while I was still groping. "It tears the hell out of you, the muscles all the way down. I can't shave. They took all my teeth, and just left me two, and I can't eat."
"When was that?" I said.
"In 1973," he said. "In August of 1970, I had the heart attack at the Old Timers Game. I walked up in the stands and started to sweat and couldn't talk. They sent me down to Lenox Hill Hospital, and then I come home and had the open heart at St. Francis in Pittsburgh."
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 27