The Last Carousel
Page 33
“That was my father, Isaac Gershman,” the younger Gershman assured me.
“Then I have a message for him,” I thought quickly, “tell him if I don’t hear from him in the next six months I’ll be forced to seek employment elsewhere.”
Well, how would you feel if you’d been Rod Serling when Ron Ziegler came along?
Different strokes for different folks.
Different clowns for different towns.
GO! GO! GO! FORTY YEARS AGO
THERE was an October forty Octobers gone, when a lamplighter on a Pathfinder bike, carrying a torch across its handlebars, came down South Park Avenue, between 71st and 72nd, every evening; and the White Sox were going to whip Cincinnati.
The cross of St. Columbanus, from its Prairie Avenue height, looked down on the prairie our windows faced. It was by the light behind that cross, as the autumn day died and the first gas-lamps came on, that I realized that the time to stop playing Run Sheepie Run had come.
The time for me to start being a major leaguer had arrived. The Sox were certain to beat Cincinnati.
Their names were Jackson and Risberg and Felsch and Cicotte. Their names were Collins and Faber and Schalk. Their names were Williams and Weaver and Gandil.
Their names were also Chick and Buck and Happy. Their names were Red and Swede. Their names were Lefty and Shoeless Joe. Joe alone could whip Cincinnati.
I was cutting close to eleven years of age and yet had no name like Lefty or Buck. Or Red or Chick or Happy. I couldn’t be Lefty because I was righty; I couldn’t be Red because I was tow-haired. I couldn’t be Shoeless because that my mother wouldn’t allow. It looked like I was never going to be anybody.
That I was already dangerously near to being nobody came to me the day I approached some kids with a dime-store rocket in my hand.
“Who wants to play throw?” I asked, flipping my ball from hand to hand.
“Girls play throw. We play catch,” they let me know, and walked away.
That setback started me out, one Sunday morning from 71st Street, walking to White Sox Park at 35th and Shields. With the dime-store rocket in my pocket. Outside Comiskey Park, mounted police were trying to keep a mob of locked-out fans from crashing the centerfield fence; which was then wooden. Inside the park, with the White Sox and the New York Yankees fighting for first place in the 1920 pennant race, Cicotte was pitching to Ruth.
The crush of the mob swept police, horses and myself onto the field and I scampered into the centerfield bleachers. The papers described the crashing of the great fence as RIOT AT WHITE SOX PARK! Overnight I became the kid who had not only survived a riot—with its connotations of the race-rioting of a couple years before—but had seen Eddie Cicotte strike out Babe Ruth.
I was made. My existence was recognized by the world of men. I had survived in the world where men play catch. The kids who’d walked away from me not only now accepted me, but permitted me to have a favorite player. I picked Swede Risberg. My name, for the next decade, was “Swede.”
Player-cards were a penny for a strip of ten. We cut them into individual cards, dipped them in wax to stiffen them; and snapped them at the cracks dividing the walks. The cry was “five up!” “ten up!” or, when the gambling fever rose, “twenty up!” This was sheer madness; but eliminated small bettors. Baseball having become a national gambling fever, as well as a national sport, we’d joined in the corruption that was turning everything into a business.
I traded my cards off for an agate and six steelies. Someone brought out dice. From the halls of state to the sidewalks, the whole country was out after the easy buck. And their names were Rothstein and Attell; Sinclair and Doheny; Insull and Ponzi. And when Comiskey hired Alfred Austrian, and Rothstein retained Wm. G. Fallon, to save Comiskey’s image as well as Rothstein’s skin, the big E sign went up on the center-field scoreboard in White Sox Park.
Shadows of helicopters fled across the outfield last Thursday. Someone flew Tony Martin from Hollywood to sing the national anthem. Before he’d finished the Sox had scored twice.
When Early Wynn doubled in the third, someone ran out to give him his jacket and a woman behind me asked someone, “Aren’t they going to play it out?” She thought that, because Wynn was dressing, he was going home.
Although I’d come to the park fearing that there might be a roped-off area for Black Sox fans paroled for the series, I finally began to enjoy the feeling of being right there in the middle of first-class citizens.
In that strenuous third inning there was a moment, after A1 Smith’s first hit, that there appeared to be only ’one member of the Dodger infield upright. It looked like Antietam Creek. It was this spectacle, of prostrate athletes, that made me suspect Lopez may be more than just a good manager. He may also be the world’s foremost expert on making opposition look silly.
The woman who’d been afraid that Wynn was going to go home asked her husband what the score was. “11-0 in the 4th, dear,” he told her. “Does that mean it’s going to be 22-0 in the 8th?” she wanted to know.
Chuck Chum looked pretty fast. He looked almost as fast as Lou Kret-low. There was one pitch in there as fast as Van Lingle Mungo and nobody has ever thrown harder than that. Now if Chum can keep his stuff out of the grandstand he may begin getting people out.
All in all it was a good-natured crowd. I kept my Sox hat throughout, prepared, at any moment, to invoke Algren’s Invincible Evil Eye whammy; which, once turned on, cannot be turned off. Sitting only nineteen furlongs to the right of A1 Smith, I had a dead aim for the plate.
But I let it go. After all, I was forty years late. Had I had it developed when I was eleven, and Buck Weaver was playing third, I would have put it on Kenesaw Mountain Landis. And Weaver would still be out there, with a big grin under his cap, inching up on the Dodger batters one by one. And every one of them as unnerved as Cobb used to be when Weaver began inching up him.
There was no need of intimidating the Dodgers. Every one of them, from the moment he looked at Early Wynn with that chaw of tobacco in his jaw, getting ready to throw at him, looked ready to faint.
When I got inside Comiskey Park, for the second game, the field was deserted; apparently confirming the prediction, made in this column yesterday, that the Dodgers might return to Brooklyn—or whoever it was that sent them—without playing it out.
However, four members of the Fifth Army Color Guard, by marching across the field with three of them in step, inspired Brooklyn—or is it Los Angeles now?—to change their minds. They were going to try again!
The flag-raising went much better than yesterday: they got it higher than half-mast. Nat (King) Cole offered his version of the national anthem. Considering his many other obligations I thought this was considerate of him; that song has been in need of rewriting since 1812.
Watching thousands of Americans eating hot dogs, it struck me that, although I saw not one who looked like he’d lay down his life for Democracy, there were certainly multitudes who would fight to the death to see Luis Aparicio lead off with a double; which is precisely what Luis did.
A woman in blue corduroy, showing signs of early mileage in both her face and the corduroy, sat beside me with a cardboard horn, almost as big as herself, in her lap. Yet it lay there disconsolately; as if it had simply been left there by somebody else. She didn’t come to life until Junior Gilliam came up and connected so solidly that I stood up to see the end of the ball’s flight in the lower left-field grandstand—just as Ted Kluszewski, on first, began coming down from his leap for it, rolled like a wheel and came up holding the ball! Gilliam, leaning on his bat, looked like he thought his own hit had landed in the grandstand that Kluszewski must have brought a ball of his own to the park all the way from Argo, for just such an emergency.
It was the right moment for Blue Corduroy to blow her damned horn; but she missed it. She hadn’t seen anything to blow a horn about, it looked like. Or just didn’t give a damn one way or another.
It wasn’t until after C
harley Neal’s second homer dropped in by inches, and Kluszewski missed by the same margin, that I felt the fickle finger of fate swinging toward the Dodgers.
Yet I felt the Dodgers were flying in the face of the Furies, when they pulled Podres for a pinch-hitter, as he was getting stronger by the inning. Another reason I felt the Dodger management was making a big mistake was because the pinch-hitter was somebody named Aram Puntfor-macion or something: an Armenian football player who may or may not be a cousin of William Saroyan’s. He’d batted against Early Wynn, in the first game as though he must be somehow related.
Puntformacion appeared bemused, as if wrapped in reflection about those seventy thousand Assyrians that once bemused Saroyan. He lurched absent-mindedly in the direction of the first pitch; then stood as though waiting for the second pitch until somebody suggested he start running as he’d just hit a home run.
One of Bill Veeck’s rose-bearing ushers handed Blue Corduroy a rose in celebration of the occasion. She took it and put it into her lap with a gentle gesture. Then, as if suddenly stricken by the full impact of the occasion, stood up and blew the stupid horn a blast as though Veeck had just awarded her the grandstand. Then sat down as suddenly as she’d stood up; looking abashed. What got into her? I wondered. By this time Puntformacion was rounding second.
“Two days here, it’s about time somebody give me something,” she apologized.
Then the big Chicago afternoon light came down like the light of no other city.
Puntformacion crossed the home plate at last. And I knew that the White Sox were going where Shoeless Joe had gone.
Floating Down The Old Green River On The Good Ship Rock And Rye was the song we liked best on our crank-handled Vic. Cohen On The Telephone was another favorite. America I Love You was also popular; but had a crack in it that caused the refrain to repeat, when it got to “from ocean to ocean a nation’s devotion—devotion— devotion—devotion”—
Days of the Kissell car, the Japanese bun and the daring one-inch heel; when there were people who yet remembered The Bismarck Gardens. That stood where the Marigold stands today. Who remembers when people went to Lincoln Park to see the fountain that operated electrically?
My father smoked Father & Son cigars and had once gone to Sam T. Jack’s Burlesk. I myself had seen the Eastland lying on its side in the river: my mother had taken me downtown just to see it. And all the way home she spoke the sorrowful name of the proud steamer Chicora; down with all hands in the ice off South Haven.
Yet that was my mother’s past, my father’s past, and had nothing really to do with me.
Yesterday The Dodgers put over six runs in the fourth inning. Early Wynn still looked like a twenty-game winner to me; between line drives. When Barker got on on a squibbling single I told myself, “There’s a man who knows in his heart that he just stole first base.” And the woman beside me began calling on God: “Let it rain,” she prayed, “let it rain.”
God paid no heed. So she went over his head directly to A1 Lopez: “Put in that.625 hitter, Lopez! Put in that.625 hitter you been keeping on the bench!”
I asked the lady, courteously, who she might have in mind, on the White Sox roster, that was hitting over.600.
“Honey Romano,” she assured me; looking surprised that I hadn’t heard all about it.
I was still for Wynn, I was still for Fox; I was still for Big Klu. Because Los Angeles has always impressed me as being a city wired only loosely to reality. Furthermore, I’ve never been able to take football seriously and Armenians have always seemed implausible to me.
Which was why, when Chuck Essegian, the Armenian football player from Stanford, hit his second homerun of the series as a pinch-hitter, and the band struck up California, Here I Come, it wasn’t rain I was praying for; but a 4-11 alarm that would bring the Loyalists of the Chicago Fire Department out just in time to hose Comiskey Park down South State Street.
As the music faded, a dull apprehension moved across the stands. The music, going farther and farther away, sounded to me like it was playing Lili Marlene in another country; and the year was 1943.
I remembered the way Wee Bonnie Baker had sounded, singing O Johnny O Johnny O in 1939; and the way the scrub pine and red sands of North Caroline looked when a PX juke box played Milkman Keep Those Bottles Quiet in 1942.
Long after the .625 hitter had popped out I sat looking at the rain behind the lights.
The little people of the rain were having infield practice of their own. Mistaking—as hep-ghosts often do—the arc-lights around the park for so many moons.
I’ve seen hep-ghosts playing throw before. And once, in another rain, I watched the ghosts of blue-moon hookers, old-time cruisers out of times long gone, chase each other, leaping drunk, across an all-night billboard advertising Mogen David wine.
Yesterday, after the rain had let up to no more than a light drizzle, and the infield hep-ghosts had gone back to the dugouts, I saw a tall man, his hands on his knees, in a muddied uniform, waiting in left field. As I watched. he began walking toward the dugout; his head slightly bent.
I noticed that he’d left his glove on the field: as though he knew he wouldn’t be needing it anymore.
The vendor outside the park was still shouting “Go! Go! Go! Forty years ago!”
BALLET FOR OPENING DAY
The Swede Was a Hard Guy
He had grown up believing it was talent made a man big. If you were good enough, and dedicated yourself, you could get to the top. Wasn’t that enough of a reward? But when he got there he’d found out otherwise. They all fed off him, the men who ran the show and pulled the strings that kept it working. They used him and used him, and when they’d used him up they would dump him. In the years he’d been up they’d always made him feel like a hero to the people of America. But all the time they paid him peanuts. The Newspaper men who came to watch him pitch and wrote stories about him made more money than he did. Comiskey made half a million dollars a year off his right arm.
Eliot Asinof on Eddie Cicotte
in Eight Men Out: The Black Sox
and the 1919 World Series.
Charles A. Comiskey liked being called “The Grand Old Man of Baseball.” He liked it so much that he hired a little man to see that messages unbefitting his grandeur never reached him.
This required vigilance on the little man’s part. There were people around town—some of them working on newspapers—who wanted to tell the old man that he wasn’t even grand enough to be The Grand Old Man of Horseshoe-Pitching. They thought he was too cheap to be grand.
Eastern fans, indeed, began jeering Mr. Comiskey’s players as “Black Sox” before that appellation signified anything more scandalous than neglecting to launder their uniforms. The old man was so begrudging about laundry bills that his players looked as if they’d put on their uniforms opening day in the coalyard behind Mr. Comiskey’s park; and hadn’t changed them since.
Three dollars per man per diem was the White Sox dining-room budget on the road. This inspired merriment among players who could crop a sirloin without paying for a potato out of their own pockets.
Yet the old man didn’t stint sports-writers. He loaded press-tables with liquor and food. And he had affection for children, too. So much that he would often present an autographed baseball, without charge, to the son of a public official; providing that a photographer were on hand. There is no record of the old man ever taking a baseball back from the son of any affluent official.
His little man was also handy at getting Joe Jackson to sign on the dotted line. Hap Felsch proved no problem either. Since Jackson was illiterate, and Felsch didn’t give a damn, the little man wasn’t demonstrating a highly specialized skill.
Where he ran into trouble was with Eddie Collins. Collins was a college graduate and could read fine print. He’d had sufficient foresight, when signing with Connie Mack at Philadelphia, to have his contract stipulate that, in event of his being traded, his $14,500 salary would be sustained.
Had the old man’s parsimoniousness not been dangerous it would have been comical. For no other factor contributed to the corruption of Comis-key’s players so directly as the old man’s venality. He now had a short-stop making the same plays, for $3,000, for which his second baseman was earning $14,500. There wasn’t a club in either league that wouldn’t have doubled Swede Risberg’s salary.
Nor that of any of the other White Sox regulars. Gandil was playing first base for $4,500; while Cincinnati was paying double that to an infielder whom Gandil outclassed in every department. Cincinnati’s heaviest hitter was making $11,000; Jackson, outhitting him by fifty points, was getting $5,000.
Eddie Cicotte had brought Comiskey a pennant, in 1917, by winning 29 games; yet Comiskey had refused him a raise. Instead, he’d offered the pitcher a ten-thousand-dollar bonus if he won 30 games in 1919. (1918 having been a foreshortened season.) When Cicotte had won 28 the old man benched him; upon the pious pretension that he was saving his star’s arm for the World Series.
Baseball had always been a betting game. The great American sports explosion, that followed the end of World War I, heightened stakes. When players’ salaries failed to follow the massive profits being made by the owners, gamblers began paying off certain players. The players wanted in, too.
Whenever one of these scandals broke—and they broke in both major leagues—the owners conducted “investigations” to sustain the public image of baseball as an honest game; yet were careful not to touch the thousand-dollar bettors sitting behind home plate. Their detectives collared the boys betting nickels in the bleachers instead.
Like the Pullman Company, baseball recognized no labor organization, fixed its own wage rates and working conditions. Any player attempting to negotiate a contract, other than with the one that had purchased him, was automatically expelled from organized baseball. He couldn’t even play minor league ball under his own name. If an owner’s terms left a player dissatisfied, he had one alternative: he could throw in his glove.