One Fell Soup

by Roy Blount

  My mom came to the first game and they announced Hank Allen and she jumped up and yelled, “They changed his name!”

  At least Harold’s manager got his last name right. When Leo Durocher managed the Houston Astros, he called pitcher Doug Konieczy “Gomez.” Then Preston Gomez took over the club. He called Konieczy “Garcia.”

  A sadder case was that of a placekicker once listed on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ training-camp roster as Peter Jarecki. When someone called out, “Hey, Jarecki,” he always responded. Then, after the departure of another kicker (named Kambiz Behbahani), Jarecki got a chance to kick in an exhibition game. The day before that game, Peter approached Steeler publicity director Joe Gordon.

  “It’s Rajecki,” he said.

  “Huh?” said Gordon.

  “My name is really Rajecki.”

  It was too late to make the correction in the program and on the press handouts. In his first public appearance in professional competition, Rajecki was known as Jarecki.

  The case of Rabbit Wingfield was sadder than that. In 1934, after he’d spent a couple of years in the New York-Pennsylvania League, Rabbit Wingfield was invited by Connie Mack to Fort Myers, Florida, for a tryout with the Philadelphia Athletics. If Wingfield made the team, Mack told him, the Athletics would even pay his expenses.

  Wingfield was a utility infielder. So was Rabbit Warstler, who came to the Athletics from the Red Sox that same spring. Once in an exhibition game Wingfield struck out trying doggedly to hit to right field. When he returned to the dugout, Mack said, “Warstler, I want to give you some advice.”

  “Mr. Mack,” replied Wingfield, “I’m Wingfield.”

  Connie told him not to keep trying to hit behind the runner when the count reached 0 and 2.

  Later during the exhibition season, Mack sent word for Wingfield to meet him in a drugstore. “Thanks for coming, Warstler, I want to talk with you,” said Mack.

  “Mr. Mack,” said Wingfield, “I’m not Warstler, I’m Wingfield.” Mr. Mack bought him a vanilla milk shake and offered to sign him up. Wingfield accepted.

  A month into the season, the Athletics’ second baseman, Dib Williams, was hurt and had to leave a game. Connie Mack surveyed his bench, looked right at Wingfield and said, “Warstler, second base.” The real Warstler ran out and took the position and did a good enough job to stay on the team.

  Wingfield was released. His name is not listed in The Baseball Encyclopedia because he never played a regular-season inning in the big leagues.

  Some years later, Wingfield was in a hotel lobby when Connie Mack walked in. Wingfield went over, extended his hand and said, “Mr. Mack, my name is not Warstler.”

  “No, of course not,” said Connie Mack. “You’re Wingfield.” That is the kind of story that makes it a pleasure to recall what former Athletic pitching great Lefty Grove once said about Connie Mack (whose real name, of course, was Cornelius McGillicuddy): “I don’t know what he was like. I never paid any attention to him.”

  Have you ever wondered whether Jo-Jo White of the Boston Celtics could possibly for some strange reason have been named after Joyner Clifford “Jo-Jo” White of Red Oak, Georgia, who toiled for the Tigers, Athletics and Reds in the thirties and forties? In case you had, I called the Celtics’ publicity office. I was told that basketball’s Jo-Jo got his name in high school. His coach was going over a play on the blackboard, and Joseph Henry White was dozing. “Joe,” said the coach, “what do you do on this play? Joe! Joe!”

  Ah, names. When Pie Traynor was a radio announcer in Pittsburgh he always referred to Yogi Berra as “Yoga Berry.”

  Yoga Berry would be a terrific name for a ballplayer, but not as terrific as Rowland Office. Rowland Office plays the outfield, very well, for the Atlanta Braves. If by any chance Office has a fat brother, the brother might be known as Oval Office. If Rowland has a favorite exclamation that he comes out with frequently, “Nuts!” or something, then that would be the oath of Office. Rowland is too fleet afoot for someone to take over for him when he gets on base, but if that ever did happen, the pinch runner would be running for Office. If someone trying to get into a dressing room to see Rowland Office got angry enough to draw a gun and fire it at the man blocking the door, then that man could be said to have been shot by a frustrated Office seeker. Or if the would-be visitor tried to pass himself off as Rowland’s brother or uncle, he could explain when the judge asked him why he was arrested, “For impersonating an Office, sir.” If a fan got into trouble with the law for trying to act out his strange compulsion to hold Rowland Office in his lap in a rocking chair, and the judge asked the arresting officer, “What’s the problem with this defendant?” the cop could answer laconically, “Office rocker.” Of course if Rowland Office himself went out looking for Stan Musial, it would be a case not of The Man seeking Office, but of Office seeking The Man.

  And then too if a club owner tried to trade Cirilio Cruz, of the Cruz brothers, for a veteran on another club who had the right to refuse a trade, and the veteran did refuse, then the owner who wanted to make the deal might call the veteran directly and ask, plaintively, “Won’t you let me take you for a C. Cruz?”

  The only other thing I have to say about sports names, for now (a whole subcategory awaits another column), is that my favorite sports name of all time is not that of a famous sports participant. It is that of a lady who once wrote Sports Illustrated to advance the theory that swimming went without any black stars for so long because black people used to avoid frequent immersion in water because it messed up processed hair. Her name was Mrs. Le Sans La Rue Robinson.

  WIRED INTO NOW

  Nothing surprises me anymore. Nothing.

  —Ann Landers

  WIRED INTO NOW

  Want the Real Answers? Write Wired Into Now, 33231 Sepulveda, Beverly Hills, Calif.

  Q. Isn’t it a fact that all those magazine editors who claimed God was dead a few years back have mighty red faces now? Or is it? How old is God? —Vaughn G., Salt Lake City, Utah.

  A. If anyone knew how old God was, He would not be God. It takes more than a too-hasty interment of the Deity, however, to make most editors blush.

  Q. If I knew famous people, would they like me? —C.T., Rolla, Mo.

  A. Tastes of the famous vary, but you may be sure they would like you well enough if there were something in it for them. It was the conclusion of Dr. Ray Wade Beamer of Cornell, who studied over 3,000 famous people, that they would have responded to his questionnaires if he had provided some not inconsiderable inducement.

  Q. All those people on “Love Boat” —do they actually, you know, do it? —Jana Coaple, Scale, Ark.

  A. Yes.

  Q. Is it true that Swiss chocolatiers are seeking to buy up the Ronald Reagan family? Isn’t that why an exotic Kuwaiti-Swiss operator named Ackmed Arnaud or Antonin Kif is converting his gigantic oil holdings into cocoadollars? —Jerlyn Wheat, College Station, Pa.

  A. You probably mean Habib Aucune, who heads an Iraqi-Haitian digital-terror group. No one can plumb the true motivations of such a man, when he is not dancing away the night … with exiled Princess Uami of Imau and their photographer-swain Hsiu, at La Lude.

  Q. They do? All of them? On “Love Boat”? —Riley Coaple, Scale, Ark.

  A. Yes.

  Q. Now that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II has given lover-boy Warren Beatty the air, who is he living it up with now? —Joe O., Duxbury, Mass.

  A. Beatty, 44, has been seen most often in the company of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.

  Q. Why aren’t I a supernova? —Mrs. H.I., Okla, Okla.

  A. Probably due to a combination of factors. You prefer to be identified solely by your husband’s initials, you live in Okla, Okla., and you are the kind of person who has to ask the question above. And yet, you may have a certain spark.

  Q. The Emperor Caligula. Was he what I think he was? —O.R., Bevel, Ind.

  A. Gaius Caesar Germanicus, or Caligula, emperor of Rome during so
me of its most sensational years (37–41 A.D.), delighted in torture and made his horse a consul, but he was not bisexual. That was Tyrone Power.

  Q. Tel Polymer, who burst onto the TV dramatic scene as Ramirez in “Tampa!” and founded a secret sect, has three 30-year-old sons, Ham, Juan and Uwe. Why won’t he marry their mother, songstress Ina Bord? —Lula W. Vickers, Lula, W.V.

  A. Polymer, 56, is director of FIOD (Freedom Is Our Deal), no sect but an affinity group devoted to the problems of single parents who are being traced by other single parents. In 1963, Polymer was briefly jailed for contemptibility, but charges were waived following a public spectacle by his aunt and uncle, wealthy philanthropists Nana and Trimble Leouvis, who reared him first as a Libertarian and then as a Sikh. Polymer, five foot eleven, is no newcomer to drama.

  Q. Why does no one in my entire tri-county area ever say “divine”? —Mrs. Dom N., Glen Falls, Wis.

  A. It would seem forced.

  Q. My husband R. worries that I am involved with a man named Rod who operates the All-U-Can-Crunch Perpetual Salad Bar near our home, but I’m not, but I did go in there for lunch Thursday and, you know, they have the dollar plate and the two-dollar plate and I always try to pile two dollars’ worth on the dollar plate because we are frugal and it was raining out Thursday and I had my husband’s umbrella hooked over my arm as I went down the line, and the big serving I had of Rod’s famous grape-and-carrot congealed salad that he is known for, that nobody else can make, so you know it had to come from Rod’s, slid off into my husband’s umbrella. Have you ever tried to get congealed salad out of the inside of an umbrella? But that is not my question. I got it all out, I thought, but then Saturday it rained again and my husband used the umbrella to go check the car windows and when he opened it a big dob of Rod’s famous salad fell out on his Windbreaker. And even though nothing whatever wrong had gone on, I lied. I said I lent the umbrella to our next-door neighbor Mrs. Showalter, who nobody would dream would be involved with Rod, poor thing. I wouldn’t have brought Mrs. Showalter into it if I’d thought that if it got back to Mr. Showalter he would worry; because he has his own problems. He is our mail carrier and yesterday he came putt-putting by in his cart with another cart following right alongside him with his supervisor in it, monitoring him all day, with a clipboard. The supervisor is a black man half Mr. Showalter’s age. But anyway my husband R. believed me and we are more caught up in each other than ever. Would that be a good story for “Love Boat”? If it took place on a boat? —J.C., Scale, Ark.

  A. Well … A luxury cruise ship would not have a … Can you actually get lunch where you live for a dollar?

  Q. Do world-renowned people ever, like, smell funny or anything? You don’t have to answer. —Mrs. Julio Nugent, Overlook, Ariz.

  A. Yes. Sure. Sometimes. It doesn’t matter.

  THE IN-HOUSE EFFECT

  Twenty years ago we could have run articles on anything from toy railroads to wild boars to American politics. Now every one of these subjects has a magazine of its own.

  —Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham,

  quoted in Time

  WE HAD JUST FINISHED packaging Knock and Twinge: The Magazine for People with Psychosomatic Car Trouble, and Hepworth could have been forgiven a few moments, even a whole afternoon, of complacency. But that wasn’t Hepworth. Hepworth was looking off into space. He was glaring off into space.

  “Its out there,” he was saying. “There’s something else out there. I can feel it. I can almost read it. Fever!: The Newsletter for People Running More than 101° Temperature—no, too ephemeral. Deep End: The Depressive’s Companion. No …”

  “Hepworth! Let up!” I expostulated. “You have tested the very limits of the special-audience concept with Illiterate Quarterly. Protective Coating Annual is a hot book, as is Chain Saw Times. Not to mention The Earthworm Breeder, which thrives despite a slump in the earthworm industry itself. Why can’t you take a week or so and just lay back—”

  “Layback: A Guide to Unobsessive Living. Unh-uh, Doane, unh-uh.”

  “Hepworth!” I cried. “Listen to me just once as a friend.”

  “Feed me, Doane!” he snapped. “I don’t employ you for personal counseling, I employ you for concepts. Military wives! What was that one you had for military wives?”

  “Hepworth, I … was just jacking around with that one.”

  “What was it?”

  “All Turn Out: For Those Who’re There When Johnny Comes Marching Ho—”

  “So. ‘jacking around.’ You were jacking … around. Doane … Wait a minute. Jacking Around: The Magazine of Idle Raillery. Now at last a regular publication for the man willing to risk his very career for a few easy laughs. Hm … It won’t go.”

  Hepworth fell silent. He sifted distractedly through the Knock and Twinge dummy layouts. “Doane, we need something else. Readership does not stand still. No target audience is a sitting duck. Today the need for maximization of advertising efficiency is greater than ever. We want to produce magazines whose ads in the business section of the Times can state proudly, ‘Continuous tracking of both anticipated and actual purchases has demonstrated that the Blacktopper’s Journal reader, alone in the splendid isolation of his own consumer-mind, buys as planned.’ There are widgets out there, Doane. And people who want to sell those widgets. And people who want to read about those widgets. Out there. And we have to put them together.”

  I knew. Something hit me. “Hepworth. Widgets?”

  “It’s a term, Doane, a figure of speech. I’m just—”

  “I know, I know. But just a minute now. What are widgets?”

  “Doane, that’s not the point. I’m just … What are widgets?”

  “Right back to you.” I moved to the unabridged, flipped right to the w’s, read: “‘A usu. small device, contrivance, or mechanical part (as a fitting or attachment) … ; specif: a small cylindrical container for carrying messages … through pneumatic tubes.’”

  It was a definition, at first glance anyway, that didn’t exactly blow horns and whistles. But Hepworth seemed to be off in a pneumatic tube of his own.

  “Well …” I said. “Widgetry, the Bible of Cylindrical … Actually, I don’t think there’s much upscale there, Hepworth. Hepworth?”

  “‘Usu.’?” he mused.

  “It’s short for usually.”

  “I didn’t think … anything was short for usually.”

  I had never seen him quite like this. “Well, just in dictionaries,” I said.

  “Dictionaries! Widgets!” Hepworth suddenly erupted. “Doane! You’ve got me sidetracking! Off-targeting! I don’t have time to brainstorm about dictionaries and widgets! Nobody has that kind of time today! What people have is leisure time for focusing on how they’re going to cope with spending their money. Quality time …”

  I don’t mind admitting it, I was chastened. My mind dug in. “Time. That’s something …”

  “Doane, we can’t call a magazine Time!”

  “No. No. I know. I was just thinking, the whole digest field. How about Digestive Juice: The Essences of the Month’s Digest Magazines!”

  “No, Doane. That’s too general-audience. What kind of subculture is that? People who want a diet of boiled-down digests.”

  “Well, people on shuttle flights.”

  “But what do people on shuttle flights want to buy?”

  “A good short martini,” I said, but we both knew I was spinning wheels. We had been through the whole alcohol thing before, getting nowhere with Sloshed: The Magazine of Serious Drinking. At the bar, it had seemed like a zinger. There’d be a guest column headed “The Drunkest I’ve Been,” a regular feature written while blitzed, great drunks in history, hangover remedies, an AA column … Then we realized why nobody had done it before: nobody would run any liquor ads in it. So we changed it to Mellow: The Magazine of a Recreational Pop or Two, and boom, it went. However, the staff never seemed able to get it out on time. In the end, we had to let liquor flow back into the
mainstream.

  Past history; I couldn’t dwell on that. Hepworth was aching to have something good bounced off him. I scanned the room. Drapes: no. Awards and citations: no. My eyes came to rest on Hepworth himself.

  “How about … you, Hepworth? What are you interested in? What would you want to read a magazine of?”

  “Me?” His tone was gruff.

  “Sure. Who better? What would make you respond to a mailer? What would you find yourself picking up on the stand?”

  Hepworth all but smiled. “I …,” he said. “Demographics. Magazine packaging. I would read … a magazine of magazine packaging.”

  Hepworth rose, walked to the window, looked out at the Newsweek Building. “And what is more, I would write a one-sentence description of that magazine and sell forty points of it at five thousand dollars a point. I would pull together a year’s worth of tables of contents (with bylines), a logo, an art director, eight contributing editors, and a complete dummy including an emotional service piece, a rate-the-packagers feature, a buzz-of-the-industry items column, a personality profile, and a letter from the publisher. And I would go to direct mail on that sonofagun and it would test out at ten, twelve, fifteen percent: phenomenal. And—”

  “I’ve got a title for it!” I cried.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” said Hepworth, each word bitten off. I was brought up short. “And I’m going to tell you why,” he went on. “Because we would put that magazine out, Doane, and two hundred thousand people from coast to coast would read it and start packaging magazines. That’s right. Hundreds of thousands of magazines, Doane: teeming, piling up, renewing, scattering blow-in subscription cards, feeding on one another. Have you ever heard, Doane, of the In-House Effect?”

  I, of course, had. In a general way. An implosion, I supposed—or an explosion, or both—of the organs of communication. A chain reaction so pervasive, so metastatic, that no lane or avenue in America, business or residential, would be without a floating ad conference. And every chat, set-to, birthday or tender moment along those lanes and avenues would be photographed, laid out, angled and written up, in thumb-through-speed prose, quite specifically for all those people who wanted, and could afford, such products as might be germane to it; and all the staffs of all the publications involved would publish smaller inside publications for and about themselves. There would be no Life magazine, as we knew it or even as we know it, and yet also no form of non-magazine-related life.