It's How We Play the Game

by Ed Stack

  * * *

  My dad was of the generation of fathers for whom the worst thing that could happen was to see a son grow up a sissy, and his approach to ensuring that I didn’t was to be a ruthless hard-ass. He expected a flawless performance in everything I did, and when I let him down he’d let me have it—most often, about halfway through that third Manhattan.

  But he was pleased by my interest in baseball. It became our common bond. He’d been a catcher when he’d played for St. John, so he set out to make me a catcher. His explanation was, and remains, good counsel. An outfielder might never field the ball in the course of a game, but a catcher was involved in every pitch. It was an exciting position, dependent on speed, arm strength, and smarts. You called the pitches and directed the infield; you led the defense. You were a key to winning or losing games.

  When Dad came home for dinner, he and I would play catch in the yard before we sat down to eat. These weren’t casual games. I’d play catcher, and he’d pitch to me—burning fastballs, each one harder than the last. Then he’d start throwing the ball in the dirt, and I’d scramble to dig it out. If I missed and had to run into the bushes to retrieve the ball, I’d turn back to find he was gone. The message: If you can’t catch it, we’re done. Don’t screw up.

  I was pretty good at fielding wild pitches by the time I was seven. My dad put me to an even greater test when I’d visit the store. He’d show me off to the staff and customers by positioning me with one of the big plate-glass windows at my back, then firing a baseball my way. They weren’t throws to me—he threw high, low, to my left and right. I never missed a catch. If I had, we’d have taken out the window.

  Such was my apprenticeship. And my fielding skills were further sharpened by a ritual we followed for years. After dinner, my dad would devote a few minutes to quizzing me about baseball. “You’re playing second base, there’s two outs and a man on third, and you have a ground ball hit to you,” he’d say. “What do you do?” Or: “There’s one out, a guy on first, and you’re playing shortstop. The ball is hit to you. What do you do?” I was expected to answer without pausing to think about it. “I’d throw the ball to second, and the second baseman would go to first base for the double play.”

  The more we played this game, the faster he expected me to be. I don’t recall ever giving a wrong answer. This wasn’t always true of my work in school, then or later, but when it came to baseball, I was an A student. My dad’s questions spurred me to study the game. From an early age, I didn’t merely watch the pros on TV, I dissected their fielding decisions. Analyzed every play. Strove to understand why they did what they did.

  So while my dad’s coaching and quizzing weren’t fun, exactly, they left their mark. Our games of catch sharpened my reflexes and my eye. His quizzes taught me that fielding should be intuitive, instantaneous, performed without thought. I grew into a much better player. That’s what makes Dick Stack such an elusive figure to pin down. He could be tough as nails at times—maybe most of the time—but I don’t doubt that his intentions were usually good. I believe he honestly wanted to help me improve my game. It’s just that his tough-love approach to parenting emphasized the “tough” part.

  His efforts heightened my passion for baseball. As much as I loved the game early on, as I got better at it, I loved it even more.

  * * *

  Whatever shortcomings my dad displayed at home, his conduct in business was farsighted, smart, and—when you consider he’d lost everything just a few years before—surprisingly bold. In January 1960, about the time he introduced me to mixology, he took out a bank loan and quietly bought two Court Street lots from a Binghamton couple, and an adjoining corner tract from a used-car dealer. Four months later, he bought another two lots on the same block from a business associate of his brother Joe’s, giving him two acres of land a half mile west of his current store, and closer to downtown.

  That July, he obtained a permit to erect a freestanding building of cinder block and brick near the block’s southwest corner, and over the summer spent $29,200—about a quarter million in today’s dollars—creating a new Dick’s at 345 Court Street. “The new store will be filled with new stock, new ideas, and fantastic bargains for all,” my dad promised in an August ad. “WATCH and SEE.” It opened that September, just before hunting season.

  It was a humble place, by modern standards—five thousand square feet, with a flat roof and floor-to-ceiling glass running the width of its face. But it was his, and he customized it to his specific needs. The vinyl-tile sales floor was parceled into departments for hunting and archery, camping, fishing tackle, and a newcomer—golf. Smaller sections were devoted to bowling balls (custom-drilled on the premises) and tennis. Lots of tables and racks displayed clothes, including a large assortment of work wear—Carhartt, Woolrich flannels, men’s underwear.

  Extra inventory hung from pipes attached to the ceiling; when a customer asked if he had a shirt in another size, all he had to do was look overhead, then snatch it down at the end of a pole. Behind the rear wall, a stockroom ran the width of the place. In the back right corner a small, low-ceilinged office occupied an enclosed balcony, with a window overlooking all.

  This is the store in which I grew up. This is where I got my start in the business.

  Once the new operation was up and running, my dad’s most pressing need was to reduce his overhead, particularly the mortgage on the building and lots. He accomplished this pretty creatively. First, he put up a wall inside the store to create a small, independent space that he leased to the Sports Mate Diner. Dick’s and the Sports Mate had a nice symbiotic relationship: we brought each other customers.

  Then he caught wind that Acme Markets, a Philadelphia-based chain of grocery stores, was looking to open a supermarket on Binghamton’s East Side. Court Street was the neighborhood’s main drag and a natural home for such a business, so he suggested the unused eastern half of his block. The chain agreed to the idea and to letting him build it, and in December 1962, he broke ground on a 13,500-square-foot supermarket there. It cost $125,000—just over a million in today’s dollars—but the combined rents of Acme and the Sports Mate Diner covered Dad’s mortgage on the land and buildings.

  That gave him a lot of breathing room, though you wouldn’t have guessed it from the way he continued to fret about going broke. He’d devised and executed a virtually fail-safe plan to finance his business, but he always saw himself as close to the cliff’s edge. And one way or another, everyone around him got to share in his discomfort.

  CHAPTER 3 “THIS IS WHAT PUTS FOOD ON THE TABLE”

  In the early years at 345 Court Street, Dick’s was a boys’ club. Everyone who worked the sales floor was male, and just about everything it sold was geared to male customers. This was before Title IX, and the public schools in the Southern Tier didn’t field many girls’ teams, as they do today; soccer and lacrosse hadn’t yet jumped the gender barrier to a significant degree, and field hockey hadn’t established a foothold. Aside from tennis, women’s sports in general were afterthoughts.

  But then, Dick’s wasn’t big on supplying a full range of equipment for men’s and boys’ team sports, either. When I started playing Little League baseball at age nine, and continuing all the way through high school, I couldn’t buy cleats at my dad’s store, because he didn’t stock them; you could buy a glove or a bat, but that was about it—and even then, the selection was narrow. For baseball shoes, I had to shop at one of Dad’s competitors, Irv’s Champion.

  Dick’s was an old-school sporting goods store, true to its origins in fishing tackle and hunting. The guys who worked there were old-school enthusiasts themselves. They had a lot in common with my dad—it was a fast, loose, foul-mouthed, rough bunch. Everyone smoked, and back then they smoked in the store, which might seem incongruous with a place devoted to sports; at the time, however, even pro athletes smoked in public. It wasn’t unusual to see my dad, who went through three packs of Pall Malls per day, with a cigarette between his fi
ngers as he roamed the floor, and the same went for everyone else.

  The sales staff was led by my dad when he was there, and otherwise by his second-in-command, a stocky, fair-haired, baby-faced former marine named Bob Aiken. He was a no-bullshit guy, gruff at times, who strove to do right, and he was the linchpin of the store’s smooth operation. Fishing was overseen by Ira Foote—tall and bony, an Ichabod Crane character who knew his stuff. He lived across the state line in Pennsylvania and drove twenty-five miles each way to the store. Ira was sweet natured and uncomplaining; he kept his head down and his mouth shut, except when he was sharing his deep knowledge with customers.

  My cousin Denny handled hunting. Dave Polosky ran golf and tennis. And Conrad DeLuca, a.k.a. Cootzie, a self-described ladies’ man, was a generalist who bounced among the store’s departments.

  Others worked there—a local tennis pro would drop in to string rackets, and an older guy, George Palmer, a.k.a. “Uncle George,” sat out in the warehouse repairing fishing reels—but this was the full-time, core staff. The amazing thing about them, in retrospect, is that they made working at this little independent store their careers. These were family men: all were married with kids, owned houses, drove late-model cars, and in general enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle. Ira had a cottage at Page Lake not far from ours.

  It wasn’t as if they had time to moonlight. My dad didn’t work his staff in shifts; if you had a job with him, you worked every day the store was open, morning to close. You’d get an hour for lunch and another for dinner, so a typical workday ran ten hours, spread out over twelve. Saturdays we closed at six, so everyone headed home after eight hours. The total: forty-eight hours on the clock per week. I don’t know what Dad paid his staff, but evidently it was enough, because most stayed for twenty years or more. It helped that he paid them cash bonuses at the end of the year. He made a real effort to take care of them.

  The guys who ran the various departments considered themselves more than coworkers. They were friends on and off the clock, perhaps because they didn’t have much time to broaden their social circles. Most of them golfed, including my dad, and they usually did it together; Dick’s was closed Sundays and Mondays, and for years the guys at the store would gather Monday mornings to play a local course.

  The only women at Dick’s worked in the office. One was a young bookkeeper, Donna LaBarre. Donna was petite and pretty, with dark hair trimmed short and a stylish wardrobe. She was three years out of high school. Kind. Playful. Warm.

  * * *

  My parents’ divorce, in August 1965, probably shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Afterward, my mom reportedly had second thoughts and talked about contesting the new arrangement. My dad nipped that by remarrying in December.

  At twenty-one, Donna was fifteen years younger than my dad. My dad moved out, handing over 16 Ardsley Road to my mom, who dated a little but never remarried. Every year, my mom would take all of us kids to a studio to get our picture taken, and always give us a copy to present to my dad at Christmas. Every year he got that picture, my dad would cry, despite knowing it was coming. Dad could show kindness to her, too. Each Christmas he’d tell my sister Kim to pick out something nice for Mom, to serve as a present from us kids.

  But what Mom chose to show us most often was a deep bitterness and savage animosity toward him. And most often, Dad wasn’t any nicer to her. Each of our parents would send messages to the other through their kids, which put us in the middle of their hostile back-and-forth. Early on, Kim and I were the only two old enough to grasp what had happened—I was ten, she was eight, and the others were still really little. That worked against us. We understood that the world had turned upside down. I was lucky to have baseball.

  Mom went to work as an aide in the cafeteria at our school. She got alimony and child support from my dad, but even so, she worried constantly about money, and it wore on her. She wasn’t always easy to be around, having to carry the load of caring for five kids. We always had clean clothes and plenty to eat, though. She came to all of my Little League games and school functions. When I needed what she couldn’t provide, I only had to cut through a couple of yards to see my grandfather.

  Meanwhile, my dad and Donna lived in an apartment for a while, then bought a lot on a wooded hilltop south of the Susquehanna. In the winter, when the leaves were gone, you could see across the river to 345 Court Street. On that lot he built a brick ranch, a nice place big enough to accommodate all of us kids on weekends.

  That was the setup. My mom kept us during the week. We stayed with my dad and our stepmom on weekends. As rough as the divorce was for all of us in the early going, it really turned out pretty well. We saw Dad at least as much as we had when he lived at home, because we were with him Friday evenings and all day Saturday and Sunday, plus Monday in the summer. I saw him more, because he never missed a baseball or football game.

  The other reason it worked out was Donna. I could not have written this while my mom was alive—none of us could so much as mention Donna’s name without sending her into a rage—but my stepmom made the best of a difficult situation and threw herself into her new role.

  She wasn’t the least bit moody or hotheaded; her steady warmth calmed my father, grounded him, and her gentle persistence could (at least some of the time) smooth his rough edges. She was vibrant, full of energy, and seemed to love playing with us kids. I never saw her lose her temper, and she never tried to discipline us. She told Kim years later that when she’d informed her mother she was going to marry my dad, her mother had said: “If you do this, you need to remember that he had those five kids before he had you, and they’ll always come first.” She took that to heart.

  Donna was one of eleven children raised on a farm southeast of town, and she’d take us there sometimes. It was a lot of fun crawling around on the hay bales and watching the cows. I think farm life must have given her an enormous capacity for work, because she seemed tireless. She kept a spotless house and prepared wonderful meals while continuing to keep the books at the company.

  My dad seemed much happier in his new life. He and Donna continued his ritual trips to Florida each winter, at first staying aboard a Chris-Craft cabin cruiser that he bought, the Fun Seekers, and later in a condo. He had the cottage at Page Lake, too, and we went there almost every weekend. It was there that I spent the most uninterrupted time with my younger brothers and sisters. We were far apart in age—Nancy was just two when my folks split—but with all of us crowded under the roof, along with our friends, the cottage was a busy place. My dad got a boat, and we water-skied, three of us at a time, on lines cut to different lengths, my dad keeping the lines straight as we ducked under each other. In the winter we raced around on snowmobiles. Weekends there were great fun. The only thing that would tear us away was Little League or peewee football. We always drove back into Binghamton for my games.

  * * *

  I was among thousands of kids who played in Binghamton’s Little League over the years, and for that experience I have my dad to thank. In the early sixties, the city was home to just four teams, one on each of its east, west, north, and south sides. The city’s population at the time was about seventy thousand, and the surrounding suburbs ballooned that number considerably. Binghamton’s Little League provided play for maybe sixty boys, ages nine to twelve.

  My dad thought that was disgraceful. His own athletic past had made a huge difference in his life—if he hadn’t had baseball and fishing to occupy his time and quiet his teenage mind, there’s no telling what might have happened to him. He thought it vital that other kids have a shot at the transformative experiences he’d had. Plus, he recognized that a kid engaged in baseball is too busy to get into trouble.

  So my dad talked to his friends who ran businesses in Binghamton—insurance agents, car dealers, plumbers, a local pharmacy, restaurants—and he convinced them to underwrite an expansion of the league to sixteen teams, four from each neighborhood. They also created a developmental farm league for kids who w
anted to play organized ball. In place of sixty kids, there was now room for two hundred forty to play Little League, and another two hundred to play on the farm teams.

  He made one stipulation: the teams created through his efforts couldn’t buy their uniforms or gear from Dick’s. He wanted no one thinking that he’d spearheaded the expansion just to make money. I’m sure he earned a lot of goodwill, and that surely translated into some families making a point of shopping at the store. But in terms of direct benefits to my dad and his business, there were none.

  As you’ll see later in this story, Dick’s makes a priority of fostering opportunities for young people to compete in both team and individual sports, and if you were to trace that effort back to its earliest incarnation, this is where you’d end up—in Binghamton in the early to midsixties, and my dad’s solicitation of support for the baseball expansion. That kind of community involvement is built into our corporate DNA.

  It would be interesting to find out just how many kids in my hometown have benefited from the program he started. This is certain: their lives have been changed for the better, all because my dad recognized that sports matter. I did not immediately benefit. I was a decent student in elementary school, but one semester I got a D in handwriting because I hadn’t mastered cursive script. Dad forced me to spend half of that summer—the summer I was due to start Little League—on the front porch, practicing my handwriting. I had to write letters to my grandmothers, one of whom lived three hundred yards away, and the other just across town. I wrote to my aunt Rosemary, my father’s sister, who lived in Texas. I wrote scores of letters to people all over the country, to satisfy my dad that I’d mastered cursive. He finally released me to play baseball with four weeks left of the season.