by Lee Gutkind
“Next thing I know it’s morning, or pretty close to morning, ’cause I can hear the chirping birds. I was in a bed. I knew that because I could feel the softness of the mattress against my legs and back, but you see, I was afraid to open my eyes. I figured I’d open my eyes and I’d be in the goddamn drunk tank. I didn’t want to face that possibility just yet.
“Lying there, I imagined my whole career down the drain. After all my years in the minors and all my work to make myself into a good major league umpire, now I was going to have to call up Warren Giles and ask him to bail me out of jail. I didn’t relish that thought. Christ, I don’t mind tellin’ you I was damn scared.
“I didn’t know how I could face my wife, I didn’t know what I would say to my kids, I couldn’t even imagine looking a ballplayer straight in the eye.
“Eventually I screwed up my courage and opened my eyes. I looked to my left and I looked to my right. I saw my suitcase, my traveling alarm clock, my picture of my wife. Can you imagine? Joey or Bobby or one of those guys got the Pittsburgh police to take me home in a paddy wagon, undress me, and tuck me into bed!
“That was really something. Can you imagine what the desk clerk thought when he saw the cops carrying me in? I never got drunk like that again and I never will. It’s just not worth the trouble.
“I’ve got too much good in my life to jeopardize. What I’ve earned with hard work and dedication—my family, my career—deserves to be protected. This kind of happiness is too fragile to squander.”
Women in Blue
FROM THE MOMENT THE wheels of the American Airlines 747 touched the ground and skidded across the runway at Lindbergh Field, the San Diego airport, to the moment he would have to climb aboard the PSA shuttle for the short jaunt to Los Angeles the following afternoon, Doug Harvey had a little more than a day and a half to spend with his family. And, after falling exhaustedly into his bed for almost six hours of sleep, that short, precious time had already diminished. Yet, those few hours remaining to reacquaint himself with his children and to talk with and hold his wife Joy, was worth far more than the extra expenditures, the airport inconveniences, and the hectic hustle of a chaotic schedule.
“It’s like celebrating a hundred honeymoons,” Doug Harvey said. “When I leave home after being with my family for a while I always find myself thinking, ‘It can never be any better than it was this time.’ But it always is. Each time I’m home with my wife and children through the season is more joyful than the one before it. It’s hard to explain. I don’t think I can explain it. I mean, I love them very much. Maybe I love them more because I’m away from them so often than I would if I were home. I don’t know the reason for my feelings, I only know what I feel.
“You get used to being away as often as we are, you get used to it enough so that you don’t complain, but that doesn’t mean you enjoy it. For seven months, I’m miserable inside. You talk to ballplayers and coaches, you know? They tell you, ‘Man, we’re on this ten-day road trip, and I don’t know if I can stand it another day away from home.’ Do they realize who they’re talking to? Ballplayers are the most insensitive people alive.
“When I was younger, I did plenty of things I’m not particularly proud of. An umpire has a thousand chances to fool around with women, the places we go, the kind of people we meet, but you gotta learn to resist temptation, you gotta keep trying to think about what you’ve got waiting for you at home. I don’t deny that I flirt with a waitress or a stewardess once in a while, that’s only natural. But day-to-day, I work as hard on my loyalty to my family as I do on my concentration on the ballfield. I don’t think I could bear to lose either baseball or my family life.”
“No one can deny that people in baseball cheat on their wives,” says Harry Wendelstedt. “I see it every day. And just because the players and the coaches are about a million times more guilty than umpires doesn’t mean I’m justifying my own kind. I mean, I can’t see any reason for players to cheat—they’re not away often enough to justify it, compared to us—except that most players are immature kids who still think it’s worth a gold medal to tell the guys you just kissed a girl’s fanny. You can understand more easily if an umpire gets involved in a ‘situation,’ however, with us being away for so long a time, but players? It’s hard to believe what goes on.
“Coaches and managers are worse. When it comes to loyalty to family, wife, and home, Alvin Dark, who’s managing the Oakland A’s, is the biggest two-faced bastard in baseball.
“You meet Alvin Dark in public or listen to him talk on radio or TV,” Wendelstedt continues, “you think he’s the most religious, God-fearing, pious man in America. He’s always quoting the Bible. He loses a game, he gives you a Bible quotation. He wins, he comes up with a Bible quotation. On the outside, he looks and sounds like a happily married man. The fans probably think he’s a second Billy Graham. What they don’t know is, he’s the most foul-mouthed fucker on the field you’d ever want to meet. Not a clean word comes out of his mouth in a month.
“What really gets me, though, what really irritates me, is that between the times he was quoting the Bible and going to church with his family each Sunday, he was also having an affair with an airline stewardess twenty years younger than him. What do you think of that, Oral Roberts?
“And can you imagine—when Dark finally decided to end the affair, he announced it to the newspapers. He confesses he’s done wrong, says he’s overcome with remorse and embarrassment, and publicly asks God and his family for forgiveness. What a two-faced joke. Who does he think he is? Who does he think he’s kidding? I’ll tell ya, he may be fooling some of the people some of the time, but he ain’t for one minute fooling the Lord.”
Harvey says: “Plenty of umpires, especially in the minor leagues, have had serious marital troubles. They still do. A guy is umping in the Texas League or the Southern League, for example, and his family lives in Boston or Maine. Why, he’s lucky to see his wife and kids once during the season. They don’t make money enough to jump back and forth around the country on off days. A guy in the high minor leagues gets seven hundred dollars a month for seven months and out of that they gotta pay some of their own expenses. And when most of the umpires who are in the majors today were in the minor leagues, we got two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars a month to start. No way we could live and see our families on that. Even with the money we get now, it’s hard as hell to maintain contact and control of a family and to function as a working member. Look at Lee Weyer. He just got divorced two years ago. Terry Tata is divorced and remarried. Stan Landes (a former umpire) was divorced three times. Maybe Stello, Wendelstedt, and Sudol have the answer. They didn’t get married until they established themselves in big-time ball. They and their wives were older and more mature.”
“The idea of marriage,” says eighteen-year veteran Eddie Sudol, “never once crossed my mind. Since high school, thirty-two years ago, baseball has been my life. I wasn’t the kind of man that could have both a woman and a mistress, so I chose the latter. I worked my way up to the high minor leagues as a player and, in six or seven years, when I realized I wasn’t ever going to get to the majors, I started to umpire. I was always traveling. In the winter I worked South American ball. Puerto Rican League sometimes. I never had a home. I never had any furniture. I never had more clothes than I could stuff in a couple of suitcases. There just weren’t any women that were particularly attracted to that way of life.”
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been alone,” says thirty-seven-year-old Dick Stello. “I was in an orphanage till I was twelve and then I was sent to live with foster parents on a small farm in rural Massachusetts. Even today, I still remember how to milk cows. The people who owned the farm were very nice to me; they were French and I stayed with them for five or six years. I even bought a home for them in Florida a couple of years ago so that they could take it easy in their later years and I could see them more often.
“But still, through the years, I’ve become
quite comfortable with the idea of being alone. I guess I realized that this was my lot, the kind of life I had been born into. Very early, I became set in my ways. You know, this is the first year in all my thirteen years in baseball I haven’t worn a jacket and tie to the ballpark? It’s not easy to break old habits when you’re alone, no matter how trivial.
“There was one girl I was sort of interested in, but I swear, I could never get to first base with her. Every time I took her out, she kept wanting to talk about other umpires, Harry Wendelstedt especially. Couple of months later I introduced Harry to Cheryl and they were married within a year.”
Dick Stello’s wife is involved in an occupation that forces her to travel the country even more than the average umpire. Lillian Stello, a burlesque queen better known as Chesty Gabor, is billed as having a seventy-six inch bust. Consequently, she is most frequently in demand.
“Both of us are mature people,” says Stello. “We have our own careers and, during the season, go our separate ways, but we both thought it would be damn nice to have somebody to be loyal to, you know? When you’re all alone it sometimes gets to be a terrible burden not having somebody to rely on. She wanted to get married first. And me? I don’t know. I did it three months ago and so far it’s working out. Before getting into baseball, I used to be a nightclub comedian, so I know a little bit about show business. In the winter I might travel with Lillian as her manager.
“The only thing I don’t like about being married is that now, every time I go into a new town, there’s always some horny sportswriter who knows about my wife’s measurements, and who wants to get a few laughs by taking a potshot at me in a column. There was a kid last month in Pittsburgh who wrote something like ‘Now that Stello’s married to a stripper, he won’t have any trouble locating the strike zone, or calling a pitch up around the letters.’
“I had to call that kid down from the press box and really give him hell. I scared him half to death. You know, the press can criticize me for my umpiring all they want. That’s their job. But I can’t understand why they got to get into a guy’s personal life. I can criticize a reporter’s writing, but what reason would I have to come down on his wife?”
Says Doug Harvey: “Most people don’t seem to realize that an umpire has a personal life. They never think of us as having a heart beneath our shirt and sex between our legs. To the fans, we’re just anonymous men in blue, necessary evils, machinelike—cold, calculating, and gruff. I only wish that all the players and all the fans would have a chance to meet my children and my Joy. They’d be pleasantly surprised.”
She sits by the pool behind her home, which is tucked like a book on a shelf into a hillside in the suburb of Mission Hills, overlooking San Diego, California. The sun coming off the water is dazzling, but the humidity is comfortable. A cool breeze strokes her cheeks and lazily lifts and flutters strands of her silver blonde hair. She stretches her legs over the lip of the pool, dangling her toes in water, wraps a few strands of hair around her forefinger, and looks up at the sky.
One of the rules of their marriage is that they savor each moment they have together. When Doug Harvey returns home for those few days during the baseball season, there will be no unsettling surprises waiting for him when he walks through the garage and in the side door. The problems of domestic life are brought to her husband’s attention on each of the three nights a week he phones. They also write long and involved letters to each other once a day into which they slip clippings on interesting subjects spotted in newspapers and magazines. Most recently, Joy Harvey had received an article on the evolution of the hot dog from her husband in Philadelphia. Before that there was a piece from San Francisco on the lack of direction and accomplishment in the grape pickers movement, headed by Cesar Chavez. On the days her husband phones, they speak for a long time, almost as much as if the family had gathered around the dinner table for an evening meal. They spend approximately two hundred dollars each month on long distance telephone calls, but Joy considers the expense more necessary than going to movies or going out to dinner or the other entertainments she and her children do without when Doug is on the road. “My husband is home, whether he’s home or not,” Joy says, smiling.
Closing her eyes to the sun, Joy mentally ticked off some of the things she wanted to tell her husband when he phoned that afternoon. She wanted him to know about eleven-year-old Todd’s recent visit to the doctor and his new high-protein diet; about the arrival of the new reclining chair for their bedroom that they had received as part of their winnings from a recent appearance on the TV game show, Hollywood Squares; about the visit of the real estate agent who had told her that the house they had purchased for $28,000 three years ago was now worth $56,000 on the open market. All the news was good, but the latter was especially pleasing since both Doug and Joy well remembered the hard times of their first five years together when Doug was umpiring minor league ball.
Joy remembered cleaning the apartments of other tenants in the building in which they lived in El Centro, California, for extra money. She remembered that first Christmas when they had agreed to buy each other only new bedroom slippers and how she had smoothed out the green wrapping paper from the slippers she had bought for her husband, cut it into the shape of a Christmas tree and pasted it on the living room wall. She remembered the jewel box Harv bought her in violation of their sworn agreement, how they laughed when she calmly tried to explain to her husband that she had no jewels. And how she had cried after they had laughed. His salary was $350 a month for seven months that year, out of which came $150 per month rent, and all of Harvey’s traveling expenses in the Class C California League. They mostly ate potatoes and macaroni for seven dollars a week. For entertainment each Saturday night, they alternated between a drive-in movie that charged a dollar a car and a miniature golf course near their apartment where they played for forty cents apiece. To prolong the fun, they played each hole twice.
And yet, despite the difficulties and the discomforts, despite the loneliness, their marriage had not only endured, but prospered. An elder in her church, she sees the importance and value of trust and faith in God. She talks about the tenets of their marriage as fluidly and reverently as if she were reciting from the New Testament. “In our house, we believe in commitment. In our house, we believe in goals. To us, promise is belief. We have taken our oath together with that understanding. When somebody puts that kind of burden on you, you must live up to it. There is no other choice.
“We’ve established ground rules for living, for raising our children, even for arguments. We don’t ‘grab-bag’—don’t bring up items from the past that’ve been bothering us; we don’t shout; we don’t bring our families into it. This may sound like an overly structured way of living, but with our kind of life, it’s what we need.
“Doug has very definite ideas about raising children. He wants our two boys, Scott, eight, and Todd, eleven, to be tough and he wants them to be self-reliant. ‘When you’re man enough to whip me,’ he tells the boys, ‘then you can do what you want. Until that time, you do what I say.’”
“I came home after one long road trip,” says Harvey, “only to discover that Todd, who was eight at the time, was getting beat up by all the older boys in the neighborhood. He’s a tough little guy, but he can’t handle kids twenty pounds heavier than he is, so I got out the gloves and gave him a few boxing lessons. By the time I returned again, he had whipped every kid on the street. A boy’s got to learn how to take care of himself. At least my boys do, I’ll tell you that.”
“When I first met Doug he was very hostile to women,” said thirty-seven-year-old Joy Harvey. “I don’t know whether many people know it or not, or can imagine a man as handsome as him losing the allegiance of a woman, but his first wife was very unfaithful, and he was scared to death of involvement for a long time. I know that for his own well-being the vows we made eleven years ago will have to stick.”
(“On the day my divorce was finalized,” says Harvey, “I went h
ome to gather up the last of my personal belongings. I like music. Old time stuff. Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller. I had a thousand records with every song and sound you can think of. I walked into the house. My wife wasn’t there, so I went into the kitchen. There, I discovered the fragments and the black dust from all those records that my wife had shattered and ground into the linoleum floor with the heel of her shoe.”)
“I don’t lead a sad or a lonely life,” says Joy Harvey, smiling broadly, a light imprint of crowsfeet tugging at the corners of her eyes. “I lead a different life than most people, that’s all. It’s hard. Some of the wives in the many neighborhoods we’ve lived—we’ve moved fifteen times in eleven years—resent me, think of me as a young divorcee, just looking, just hoping to get the opportunity to play around with one of their husbands. Some of our acquaintances even expect us to fool around, Doug and me, since we’re away from each other so often. It’s funny the logic some people use.
“I used to complain quite a bit,” she says, “but I honestly never think of Doug’s work now. I’ve learned to cope, to accept what he is and what I have to be. I play racquet ball, I play golf, I read a book a day, I involve myself in the workings of the church, I manage a house and care for the children, and I have gotten quite interested in Chinese calligraphy. I wish we had more friends and I wish we could go out socially more often. I wish we didn’t have to be so careful about the friends we can afford to have; some of the other umpires would resent it, knowing we have friends involved in baseball. We see some of the players and people who are part of the administration for the San Diego Padres socially. Some of the umpires would say that we are kowtowing to management, ingratiating ourselves, so we have to be careful. There are also some people, nice people in fact, who just don’t seem to want to understand the seriousness of the game of baseball and Doug’s absolute commitment to it. I remember one Sunday afternoon, Doug and I met a doctor and his wife out on the golf course.