by Lee Gutkind
“‘I never thought I’d meet a blind son of a bitch,’ the doctor said.
“‘I never thought I’d meet a bloody human butcher,’ Doug told him in reply.
“But all in all, I think to myself, as long as Doug is happy, then I’ll be happy. I knew what I was getting into when I married him and it’s too late for me to back down from my commitment now. As long as he’s happy in his work, then on those few months that he doesn’t work, the time we have together will be ever so memorable and sweet. Not many women can say that, you see. Many women are with their husbands every night, and have very few pleasant moments to total as the sum of their lives.
“I remember,” says Joy Harvey, “that first year we were married. During the winter Doug got a job as a security guard in San Diego for a dollar-thirty-five an hour, and we scrimped and saved so that by the end of that winter we had enough money to drive up to San Francisco for a night and a day. The first place we went was Candlestick Park. In all his years in baseball, Doug had never, up to that time, been in a major league stadium, so we went that morning and asked if we could go in and look around.”
Joy saw her husband’s eyes sparkle, his whole face beam, as they walked up higher and higher into the stands. In a few minutes they were all the way to the top and they sat there for a while, perfectly silent, listening to the wind roar through their ears, peering down at the seats below. Then Doug said it. As corny and silly as it was. He sounded just like a little boy making a totally improbable plan.
“It came right out of a grade B movie,” says Joy Harvey, shaking her head at the past, “but I knew for all he was worth, Doug meant it to come true. ‘Some day,’ he said, ‘I’m going to umpire in this stadium. I promise you that, Joy, some day I will.’
“I didn’t laugh then and I can’t laugh now. How can anyone laugh at something said with such sincerity of emotion? And now that Doug has attained it, how could I do anything but go along with that dream? How could I ruin it by complaining? How could I show dissatisfaction? How could I fail to recognize that I have married an extraordinary man? How many men in this world have fulfilled their highest dreams? I am not the happiest woman in the world, but I’m far from unhappy. How could I be unhappy and love a man who is what he has always wanted to be?”
She sighs. She stands and reaches into a basket on a table beside her redwood lounge chair and lifts out an ink stone, a slanted slab of what looks to be onyx, with a deep, wide groove pressed into it, almost like an impression made by a serving spoon in clay. The ink comes in a hard, wide stick, and she grinds the ink into the ink stone with a circular motion, like a pharmacist preparing a prescription. As she grinds the ink around and around, the sun shimmers on the pale blue water, the breeze caresses her cheeks, and she looks both tranquil and comfortable, yet involved and alert. This process of inkmaking is called “centering the universe” in the ancient Chinese religion. She repeats to herself the words of her calligraphy instructor, with whom she spends many evenings:
“The prudent man makes his own ink, the lazy man hires someone to make the ink, the worthless man will buy the ink and paint a worthless print.”
Joy Harvey grinds and grinds, pouring the ink mixed with water into tiny paint pots resembling miniature porcelain tea cups. She places the container of yellow ink high above the pool on a shelf, since the yellow ink is almost pure arsenic and Joy doesn’t want to chance spilling it. There are three cats and one dog around the house who might very well lick some of it up.
The brush is held awkwardly between the index finger, the forefinger, and the thumb, straight up and down, at all times perpendicular to the rice paper matted on felt. She dips the daggerlike point of the thick, wide brush into the paint pot, flipping her wrist slightly and quickly with each stroke. A shaft of bamboo takes form, nodule by nodule, slanting beside an already-inked orange blossom. As she paints, the golden glow of the sun becomes more intense and the shadows of the passing day fall like silhouettes over the vegetable garden and sink into the water, dancing on the floor of the pool.
At one point, she steps back from the painting and watches it carefully as the sun dries it. She stands perfectly still for a long while, the brush still frozen awkwardly between her fingers. Then she goes into the kitchen and emerges with a solution of freshly brewed tea. With a clean brush, she wipes the tea in long even strokes across the rice paper. Now the yellow bamboo shaft and the orange blossoms and the rice paper acquire a pale, rather aged tinge. Finally, she lifts another brush, dips the point into black ink and signs her name. She works for half an hour on a perfect signature, a series of characters that have taken her a full year of study to master. The Chinese characters she has selected for herself have a meaning. They symbolize peaceful joy.
One hundred and fifty miles south of San Diego, in Bakersfield, California, where, just outside of town, onions, watermelons, and grapes ripen in sun-drenched, sandy fields and migrant farmers sit on stoops of trailers or in aluminum lawn chairs fronting ramshackle barracks, another woman, a broad-backed, red-haired, black woman with a seemingly ever-present smile, is also waiting, skittishly, by the telephone.
Her name is Shirley Williams and, up until the time her husband was promoted to the major leagues, she had worked her whole adult life as a registered nurse in a nearby hospital. Now she spent a goodly portion of her waking hours attempting to bridge the generation gap between her four children, the youngest son, Scotty, eleven, her oldest son Art Jr., twenty, who had recently enlisted in the Navy, and her two daughters in between. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays throughout the year, Shirley Williams was also director of the Bakersfield Family Planning Center where, in the evening, she counseled young girls on birth control and venereal disease, and helped direct those already past the need for counseling to the proper state or federal agency. It was not the most comfortable kind of work, but she earned much satisfaction from her many accomplishments at the Center.
Shirley Williams glanced nervously at her watch, then at the high-powered, AM-FM portable radio that sat on the table near the telephone in the living room of their seven-room home. She went into the kitchen and made herself two pieces of toast, buttered both slices lavishly, then returned to the living room to continue her vigil, glancing once more at the radio. She used the radio to listen to the games her husband umpired when he worked the West Coast. She picked up Los Angeles, San Diego, and sometimes even San Francisco—on clear, cool nights. Even though the radio announcer doing the play-by-play sometimes wouldn’t mention Art’s name once through the whole game, it still gave her pleasure to know that he was an integral part, an indispensable part, of the contest which she and a million or more other people up and down the California coast followed so carefully. She liked it best, of course, when Art was on television, especially when he was doing the NBC Game of the Week on national TV. After Art appeared on that, she often received letters from friends whom she hadn’t seen in ten years and long-lost relatives who wanted to congratulate Art and her on their good fortune and great success. Usually, they would also ask for free tickets, which Art provided when possible. Her life and the life of her entire family had turned out to be very rewarding, much more than she or her husband had ever imagined possible. She only wished she didn’t worry so much about Art and his progress in baseball. During the past two years, sitting home alone, listening to the games he officiated and waiting nervously by the telephone, she had gained forty pounds. She wished she could lose the weight, she knew she should lose the weight, but the pressure of having a man in such an important and responsible position, bore heavily on her. She finished her toast, wiped her hands on her apron, glanced at the telephone one more time, and sighed.
Shirley couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known Art Williams. They had grown up in the same neighborhood and had gone to elementary school and junior and senior high together. Everybody knew Art Williams, in fact, especially in senior high school, where he was a star on both the baseball and basketball teams,
but he was just a guy to her, someone to whom she wouldn’t have paid much attention except that her best friend had been his steady girl all through school.
“We were walking down the street one day,” says Shirley, “my girlfriend and Art and myself, just walking and talking pleasantly enough, then I felt someone tugging on my sweater. I looked over at Art, but he was just talking calmly and staring straight up the road. We walked some more and somebody tugged on the back of my sweater again. I looked at Art real quick this time, but Art was still talking to that girl as we walked toward home. I looked all around, but there wasn’t anybody else in sight, so I figured it had to be him, although he never once let on. Not once.
“A few days later I had to go to the hospital to get my tonsils taken out, and the first face I saw as I opened my eyes after the operation was Art Williams’s. He came over to my house every day after basketball practice while I was recuperating and he took me out every night, to a movie or just for a walk, when I got better. We were engaged even before we got out of high school and were married the day of our graduation. It was quite a courtship.”
They had both been born into large families; there were eleven in Art’s and twelve in Shirley’s. So when Art was drafted by the Detroit Tigers as a pitcher and sent to Idaho Falls, they left Bakersfield with nothing more than a suitcase full of clothes and hearts full of hope. “We had nothing,” said Shirley Williams, shaking her head. “We didn’t have sheets or pillowcases, no furniture, towels, or even cooking utensils. We went into that town empty-handed.
“But the business manager of the Idaho Falls team was waiting for us at the bus station to help. I remember the blue and red credit card he kept in his hand as he took us from store to store buying things for us to set up housekeeping. It was a very exciting day. We came with nothing, you see. From that day forward, no matter what Art might say, I’ve always reminded him that baseball has given us a lot.
“We caused quite a stir in that town, however. Far as I know, we were the first black people ever to live in Idaho Falls. Could very well be the last. That was 1953 and Art was the first black athlete to be signed by the Detroit organization. I remember walking to the ballpark early in the evening or strolling downtown to buy a few things at the grocery store and having the little children in town running along behind me, yelling ‘Here comes a chocolate drop. There she is.’
“But baseball has given us a lot,” says Shirley Williams, nodding and glancing once more toward the white, push-button princess phone on the table near the alcove leading to the kitchen. “I won’t have nobody say no different. It has lifted us out of economic difficulties and offered my family a brand new exciting life.”
Tom Gorman sits contentedly in a chair in his home in Closter, New Jersey, his bare, calloused feet propped on a highly polished walnut table. With a ruddy face and white hair falling on the green pillow behind his head, Gorman looks like Santa Claus, except bigger and quite a bit meaner. One couldn’t imagine a man as big and heavy-jowled as Tom Gorman cheerfully carrying a red sack, brimful of presents, and sliding down a chimney with a light thump. When you look at Tom Gorman, you see a man larger and more magnetic than many people can relate to, you see a man at the twilight of a fine career; his face is lined with age and worry, but seems chiseled for posterity in steel-gray granite.
Gorman has a voice like a deep bass drum. Even when he speaks softly, the large living room echoes.
“I remember the way Marge Faye looked when we were young, I remember it as clearly as my own name. She had the raven black hair, the pale, butter-soft complexion of the finest of the Irish lassies,” says Gorman. “She had blue eyes as clear as the water. I used to walk with her from school each afternoon and carry her books. She used to come to the football and baseball games on Friday night and cheer for me. I remember it all so very well,” Gorman smiles as he rocks. “It was a wonderful romance.
“After high school I pitched for a couple of years in the minor leagues in Toronto and when I was brought up to the majors by the Giants in 1939, Marge and I married. I did pretty well for the Giants in thirty-nine and all through forty, then my manager, Bill Perry, suggested that I enlist in the Army and get my military obligation over with before the trouble started. It was my bad luck that war broke out a few months after I went in and I was stuck in Tunis and Tripoli for four and a half years. So you see, Marge got used to being alone.
“Because I hadn’t used my arm while in the service, I developed large calcium deposits on my throwing elbow. Recognizing this, the Giants peddled me immediately to the Boston Braves. In those days a guy pitched from the beginning until the game ended—whether he won or lost, gave up one run or ten runs, he was in for the duration most of the time. They used to shoot up my arm with novocaine, then push me out and make me pitch until I felt my arm was going to drop. I was finished. Marge knew it better than me and she told me so. But baseball was my life and I wanted to find some way of hanging on. I was even offered a $25,000 a year contract by the Mexicans at a time when they were buying many American ballplayers in an attempt to build up their own league. I was going to take it, but when the National League established a five year embargo on any player jumping to Mexico, I changed my mind. I wouldn’t have done very good in Mexico anyway. I had had it; I was through.
“We decided that if I wanted to stay in baseball—and there was nothing else I would have even considered—I should go into umpiring. Back then you could be the worst umpire in the history of the game and still get a job as long as you satisfied the single most important requirement: if you had your own car, you’d be hired. I was assigned to the New England League, Class B baseball, and Marge and I moved up to Brockton, Massachusetts. Can you imagine? In 1946 I was making twenty thousand dollars a year as a major league pitcher. In 1947 I was earning one hundred eighty dollars a month for seven months as a minor league umpire. Despite this, and me on the road all the time, Marge took care of the kids and went to work to supplement our income. She never complained or shirked her responsibilies. Not once.”
Gorman paused to unwrap three sticks of chewing gum and cram them into his mouth. The paper wrappers disappeared in his big fist as he continued.
“One of the people I remember most clearly during our stay in Brockton was a butcher,” said Gorman. “This kid worked in one of those old-fashioned shops, with the meat hanging on hooks and dripping blood all over the place. He was a good kid, very skillful with the knife, and every time I’d come into the shop with Marge, he’d stop whatever he’d be doing to talk baseball. Wouldn’t let me leave sometimes. I always had to tell him I was starving and that I wanted to go home and eat dinner, before he’d let me go. Christ, one time he offered to make me a steak right there, as long as I stayed and talked. This guy played in a sandlot baseball league in Brockton, and his dream was to become a major leaguer. That’s all he ever wanted to do. I didn’t hear from him for a few years after that, then suddenly his name starts turning up in the paper. This was Rocky Graziano, who eventually went on to become the middleweight boxing champion of the world.
“I stayed in the New England League two years, then moved up into the AAA International League. In 1951, when the major leagues went from three to four man umpiring crews, I was brought up. It didn’t take me too long in the minors, but Marge woulda stuck with me three times longer, as long as it took, in fact. That’s the kind of woman she was. Don’t get the impression we had it easy in the majors, however. My first year, I only made five thousand dollars.
“My wife was a fiercely proud woman and a baseball nut. When we moved back to New York a few years later, she’d sit in the stands for every game I umped in that city and root for me. Probably the only person at Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds that would ever cheer for an umpire. That was Marge. Whenever anyone in the stands would boo me, or in some way criticize my work on the field, she’d jump all over them, holler and scream and threaten all kinds of legal action until they’d apologize. I can just picture her, the way
her eyes got all fiery when she was angry. A stranger could pretty well figure there was no percentage in disagreeing with this girl. She’d murder them.
“I remember once a newspaper reporter—Charlie Russo—wrote something about me, talking about how sloppy I was. ’Course, I never thought I was sloppy, I just never wore my clothes too well, but Russo, who wrote for a New Jersey newspaper, says, ‘No matter what Tom Gorman wears, he’d look like an unmade bed.’
“Marge was furious. She called the guy every hour for three days running until he could muster up enough courage to call back. I remember hearing Marge yell at him over the phone, ‘I want a retraction! I want a retraction! My husband is a good dresser. He buys fancy clothes!’”
Gorman smiled broadly, shook his head, tossed the gum wrappers into an ashtray on the opposite end of the table, then continued.
“When Leo Durocher was managing the Giants his wife Laraine (actress Laraine Day) would sit in the box seats along the third base line and, when I was in town, Marge would always join her. Now I’ve had my disagreements with Durocher in the past. He was a lying, despicable, cheating bastard on the field. He’d do anything to win. And I’m pretty sure he didn’t have much use for me, either. I threw him out of many a ballgame, but Laraine and Marge, they always got along fine.
“One time, with Laraine and Marge watching, I’m umpiring third base and Leo, he’s coaching third. We get to about the fifth inning, the Giants are up with the bases loaded and one out. Now the guy at bat hits a bloop—a Texas Leaguer—out to the outfield. Thinking initially it’s going to fall in for a base hit, the guy on third streaks for home, then about halfway down the line, he changes his mind and streaks back. In the meantime, the man who was on second is thinking base hit all the way, and he’s barreling head first into third.