Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

by Garrison Keillor

  It was an unfinished story.

  14

  Sportswriter

  An ordinary Wednesday in the middle of June and then a large rock fell in my pond, a phone call from Uncle Sugar: “Are you otherwise occupied today?” he said in his slow trombone voice. Rodney Starr at the Lake Wobegon Herald Star needed a sportswriter to fill in for Slim Swanson and cover Whippets games until Slim recovered from a broken hand suffered in a mishap involving a wall. Slim had gone to recuperate at his sister’s in Bemidji and wasn’t expected back for a month or so. I would take his seat in the press box for the games and file my stories by noon the following day for $3.50 a week (expenses included), use of office, typewriter, telephone, etc., not included, but Rodney would provide ten (10) sheets of standard-quality white paper per week and two (2) No. 2 pencils. It would be a temporary position, termination at employer’s absolute discretion. Not liable for injury from batted balls, thrown bats, irate readers, acts of God, or any other cause. Uncle Sugar was pleased as punch to have arranged this. “I know Rodney from Kiwanis. He’s a great fellow. I told him you have a real flair with words,” he said.

  I said, “What happened with Mr. Swanson and that wall?” I’d been reading “Slim’s Slants on Sports” since I was a little bitty guy. The thumbnail picture at the top of the column was of a youngish man in a porkpie hat, but actually Slim was a liverish old guy with a ropy neck, and the hat was to hide his bald spot.

  Sugar said, “Between you and me, he was drunk as a boiled owl and got ornery and started yelling at Rodney, who wasn’t even there at the time, and he took out his frustrations on Rodney’s office wall. It was a misunderstanding about money. Can you come over for practice after supper and I’ll introduce you to Ding Schoenecker.”

  Mother didn’t like the idea of me sportswriting and being around all the swearing and tobacco-chewing and beer-drinking that go on at a ballpark, but she could see it was my big chance to gain journalistic experience, and of course I’d be up in the press box, observing the game from a safe distance. And Uncle Sugar would be around.

  So, at 6 P.M. sharp, I reported to Wally (“Old Hard Hands”) Bunsen Memorial Ballpark, down the street from the creamery and the county gravel pile, wearing Grandpa’s old tweed snap-brim hat and carrying his battered brown briefcase with a Webster’s dictionary inside, as befitted a serious journalist.

  It was a sweet old ballpark on a summer evening, a cool breeze fluttering the flag in center field. The old green wooden grandstand was freshly painted, the chicken-wire backstop in good repair, the pigeon dung scrubbed from the façade with the gold lettering, W. (O.H.H.) B., under the pennant poles where no pennants flew. Sugar had told me about the golden era back in the Thirties, the era of the Schmidts, the Schrupps, the Battling Bauer Boys, when the team was a powerhouse feared in every town across central Minnesota, the ballpark packed with diehard fans, cheerleaders (the Whippettes) dancing on the dugout roof, chanting:WOBEGON

  We said it once, we’ll say it again.

  WHIPPET

  Just as proud as proud can be.

  Woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof

  Whippets!

  Uncle Sugar knew the cheer, complete with arm movements spelling out the letters and a low crouch for the woofing. He remembered those championship days fondly and now those days were gone and the team was a perennial cellar-dweller in the New Soo League, a bunch of stumblers famous for choking in clutch situations. The called third strike with the bases loaded, the wild pitch, the muffed throw, the missed sign. The easy pop fly to short left and our shortstop pedaling back, glove in the air, waving, calling for the ball, our third-baseman lumbering back, back, back, our left-fielder galloping in, everyone shouting, “I got it! I got it!” and then, at the last moment, all three Whippets pull up short and duck their heads and the ball drops in for a double as the home fans writhe in shame and the visiting team whoops and guffaws and the shortstop snatches up the ball in cold fury and whips it to second, though the runner is already there, safe, standing up, and the ball skips under the second-baseman’s glove and rolls all the way to the fence beyond first and the runner trots to third as the first-baseman retrieves the ball and (why does he do this? why?) heaves it home, ten feet over the catcher’s head, and the runner trots in with an unearned run as easy as a walk around the block for an ice-cream cone. And Ding hauls his big belly out to the mound to settle down the pitcher, who is kicking big holes in the turf, and the teenagers in the stands yell, “Hey, when’s the baby due?” And he marches back to the dugout and they chant, “Left, right, left, right, left, right.” Our Whippets.

  The players were on the field in gray sweatpants and T-shirts doing calisthenics in front of the blue concrete-block dugout with the red L. W. Whippets across the back and the letters TPPTTP. Thorough Preparation Produces Tip-Top Performance. Ding Schoenecker loved mottoes: “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” (Not necessarily true for older dogs, however.) Four players were taking a break from calisthenics, resting in the dugout shade, enjoying a smoke. Two of them seemed to be nursing hangovers and were avoiding any sort of sudden movement. The rest of the team was attempting push-ups on the infield grass: some players looked as if more than fifteen would be a death sentence. I recognized Milkman Boreen in his catcher pads and Ronnie Piggott and Boots Merkel, and Leonard (The Perfesser) Hoerschgen, the old second-sacker, and Mr. Schoenecker, all well-known figures in town, regulars at the Sidetrack Tap. And when I scanned the outfield, where several Whippets were warming up, arcing long lazy throws back and forth, I spotted Kate perched on the scoreboard bridge, under the VISITORS and WHIPPETS, where the scoreboard boy hangs the zeros (us) and the 2 or 3 or 4 (them). She wore short green shorts and a black cowboy hat and dark glasses and was smoking in public. An outfielder leaned against the fence, talking to her. From his gestures, it looked like he was describing how he shot a couple of guys in a fracas over a kite and it was no big deal. If Uncle Sugar noticed her, he showed no sign, he was parked in the first row of bleachers behind home plate, gassing with Mr. Schoenecker, his ample gut with a WHIP PETS jersey stretched tight over it. It appeared to have grown some since the summer before. Not the biggest in town, by any means, but it did make you think: twins.

  He bowed his head and squirted brown juice on the grass and stuck out his hairy paw and said, “Hey, sportswriter, the hell you doing here?”

  My uncle winced at the profanity. “This is my nephew Gary, who’s taking Slim’s place while his hand heals up.”

  Ding Schoenecker looked me up and down and saw that I never had been and never would be a ballplayer. “Hope we can give you something to write about, Gary.” He smiled a yellowish tobacco-stained smile. His nose was crimson and his face was the color of dry crusted mud under the gray heinie, his rheumy blue eyes squinched by the bags underneath. I knew him a little, everybody did. He liked to show kids a trick with a cigarette: light it, take it in his mouth, pinch his nose, grimace, and make smoke come out his ears. He could also, if you pulled his pinkie, let out a small but stately fart, which was pretty hilarious if you appreciate that sort of thing.

  Uncle Sugar said, “We gotta have a writer who can make this team look like the champions we all know they can be, isn’t that right, Gary?”

  “A bunch of drunks with sawdust for brains. That’s what we got here, frankly. Not to gild a silk purse or anything,” said Ding.

  “I hear you got a rookie pitcher with great stuff.”

  “Green as grass,” said Ding, and spat again. “You never can tell about pitchers. They impress you for three or four games and then suddenly they get the yips and lose their touch.”

  “I hear he’s got a good breaking pitch to go with his fastball.”

  Ding considered this for a moment and grimaced. “Meanness is what you need in a pitcher, more than anything. Never was a great pitcher or a great anybody who didn’t have a lot of pure mean
ness in him. You have to want to humiliate that batter. Throw the ball right at his head and scare the piss out of him and then a fastball at the knees and then throw him the change-up and he takes a big cut and rips his pants and hits one back to the mound, one bounce, and you hold on to the ball and make him run with his hinder hanging out before you toss the ball to first. Meanness.” Ding chuckled at the thought. “I’d trade the family jewels for a mean hombre like that, but I don’t believe we grow them around here.”

  “It sure would do a lot for this town to have a championship ballclub,” said Sugar.

  “It would do a lot for this town if a spaceship landed and little green men got out. Maybe we should clear a landing area and paint a big white X so they can see it from outer space.”

  He took a few steps onto the field, clapping his big hands, and hollered, “Gentlemen! Take your batting practice!” and hobbled back to us and leaned against the fence, as a shambling galoot with a hound-dog face and slope shoulders took the mound and started grooming it with the toe of his shoe, smoothing out little imperfections, kicking bits of stone into the grass, where they wouldn’t throw off his rhythm. “Ernie’s gonna be 47 years old in September,” he said. “Why a man that age would want to keep pitching, I couldn’t honestly tell you. Some people crave punishment, I guess.”

  He lit a cigarette. Uncle Sugar leaned back to avoid a cloud of smoke drifting by. “Guess he must love the pastime,” said Sugar.

  “Has nothing to do with baseball,” muttered Ding. “Has to do with the pastime of meeting young women under favorable circumstances. Ernie’d like to get himself a girlfriend. Don’t ask me why. He’s had two wives, one Polish, one German, you’d think that’d satisfy anybody’s curiosity. But hope dies hard. So he wants to get out on the mound, show how limber and hardy he is, and hope to get lucky. There used to be such a thing as team loyalty, but these fellows got no more loyalty to Lake Wobegon than they do to the tree in my front yard. It’s all about women. Baseball is just biology with a bat and ball.”

  Ernie kept grooming the mound, raking it with his foot, filling in hollows, as if the slightest irregularity would undermine him, then dug fresh grooves in the dirt to assist the delicate calculations by which he navigated. Meanwhile, the batter, Boots Merkel, did similar preparation of the dirt around home plate.

  “Boots is Fred Merkel’s brother. I went to school with Fred,” said Sugar.

  “He got the nickname ‘Boots’ from a little idiosyncrasy of his. He’d sometimes field a ground ball using his foot.”

  I could see the saliva turning in Ernie’s mouth as he got set to throw. He bent to tie a shoelace, he juggled the resin bag, then turned his back to the plate and parked a large gob of spit on the ball. It was a mouthful. It glittered like the Hope diamond. “Don’t bean him with it, he might drown!” yelled somebody. Ernie turned and threw the pitch with hardly a windup, and the spray flew up as the ball came fluttering in letter-high and Boots swung and missed by a mile and the ball slapped in Milkman’s mitt like a wet towel on a bathroom floor. There was great merriment in the on-deck circle. “By God, the old man’s still got the touch!” “Lucky for us he doesn’t have a cold—that phlegm ball of his can turn you inside out.”

  Ernie threw ten pitches to Boots and ten to Orville Tollefson and ten to a fattycakes who Ding said was a friend of somebody’s and was trying out for the team. Ernie was feeling his oats. He fished in his back pocket and got a white thumbtack and stuck it in the stitching and threw a big looby-loo curve, and the fat man waved the bat at it and laughed.

  A tall man with a ducktail cupped his hands and yelled, “Hey, Milkman, yer crack is showin!” Milkman reached back to check, and the guy yelled, “Hey, lookit that! Milkman knows where his butt is!” It was Ronnie the center-fielder. He strode to the plate and stood twitching the bat like a cat’s tail. Ernie threw and Ronnie drove the pitches into deep left and center, and two over the fence. The players whooped it up. “Take her downtown! Send that dog home! Lookin good, Mr. P.! Hooo-eeee! Give her a ride!” An amiable bunch. You’d never know they’d been dead last in the standings all these years.

  Ding pointed to a lanky youth in the dugout, lacing up his spikes. “That’s the pitcher you were asking about. Roger Guppy. Had a footrace with Ronnie and got himself a little knee-strain, so he sat out most of last week and the week before, and I believe I’ll start him on Sunday.” He shifted his wad to the other cheek. “Not what you call a snake stomper, but he’s got a decent fastball and a nice curve and a pretty sneaky change-up. Nineteen years old. Hope he can do something for us. Other than him, there ain’t much to choose from.”

  Uncle Sugar’s gaze was locked on to Roger as if he were some specimen of animal never seen before in these parts, a one-horned gazelle or three-legged wombat.

  “What sort of person is Roger?” said Sugar. “I’ve been reading some about his family in the papers. The Guppy family. I take it he’s one of those Guppys—” Ding nodded. Yep. Roger was one of those Guppys. There might be Guppys somewhere who were climbing the upper slopes of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, bound for the summit, but Roger wasn’t one of them, he was one of the Millet Guppys.

  “You know if he drinks?” asked Sugar.

  “No more than necessary, I’m sure.” Ding winked at me with his big gray bags, but Sugar was on the case.

  “He’s living with his folks, then?”

  “I believe so. They’re over in Millet. His dad is Alvin Guppy. Quite a fellow. Played ball in the Forties.”

  “But this is the family with the kid who sings rock and roll and the other stole the car and lit out for Montana.”

  Ding said, “I don’t see to their personal lives. I just hope they make it to the ballpark by game time and remember to bring a glove.” He winked at me again and yelled over to the dugout, “Hey, kid! Get up and throw! Let’s see what you got.”

  Roger Guppy unwound himself from the bench and loped out to the mound and Ernie slapped the ball into Roger’s mitt. His long dirty-blond hair poked out from under his cap. His shoes looked to be about size fifteens. He turned his back to home plate and blew his nose, one nostril at a time, onto the grass, two toots of snot, and wiped his hand on the ball. It was not the sort of thing a man should do in front of his girlfriend’s father who is studying him as closely as Sugar was. “Oh, for pity sake,” murmured Sugar, and he clucked and shook his head. I felt sorry for Roger. There he was with a noseful and he cleared his nostrils the best way he knew how and how could he know he was being judged for it? At the same time, I couldn’t imagine Kate being in love with someone who did that. It was almost as bad as seeing an old drunk piss in the alley behind the Sidetrack. On the other hand, it interested me. I thought maybe it was something I should try when I got home.

  “The kid has got a notion he’s going to the big leagues in a couple years,” said Ding. “I got my doubts but then I always did.”

  Out on the scoreboard, Kate leaned forward with her arms crossed, watching Roger on the mound. The Perfesser came up to take his cuts, a runty, dog-faced man who stood at the plate with his wrists up above his head and the bat cocked way back, like a man waiting to pound a rat. Roger gripped the ball, lifted his right knee almost up to his chin, kicked, and fell to his left as his arm snaked around, and the ball hummed into the glove hard. “Hey!” said the Perfesser. “It’s only batting practice, rook!”

  Roger laughed. The next pitch came in low and slow and Milkman stuck his glove down and the ball hit him in the chest. “That’s his breaking pitch,” said Ding. “It’s got a nice hop to it.” The Perfesser stepped out of the box and looked over Ding’s way. “What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I thought this was practice.”

  “Try to hit the damn thing,” said Ding. “With the bat.”

  Roger threw a slow change-up. The Perfesser swung and missed. Topped the next pitch and sent a slow roller to the mound. He called time and asked someone nearby if he was dropping his back shoulder or not. The Perfesser
was a great student of the science of hitting, Ding said. “The guy’s got a whole system of planes and angles of force figured out. It’s too bad he’s such a lousy hitter and doesn’t get to use most of what he knows.” The Perfesser swung at the ball like he was waving a wet towel and lofted a fly ball that almost made it out of the infield. He stepped out of the box and adjusted his crotch as if the problem might be down there and did six practice swings to realign himself and stepped back and Roger grooved a fat one down the middle and the Perfesser slapped a little grandma grounder back to the mound. Roger picked it up with his bare hand and flipped the ball over his shoulder and caught it behind his back. In disgust the Perfesser tossed his bat aside and hoisted up his belly and trotted out to second base, scowling at Roger on the way. “Showboat,” he said.

  Milkman Boreen was next up and Roger served him up five strikes in a row and the Milkman hit five high flies, dead center, Ronnie picking them off—one, two, three, four, five—almost without moving his feet. And then Roger threw his fastball and Milkman swung a full second late and the ball whacked into the catcher’s mitt like a black-snake whip.

  “Nice,” said Ding. “Gimme nine innings of that and we almost got us a ballclub.”

  I heard a faint fluttering sound and looked out to center and Kate was applauding. Uncle Sugar sat back in the seat beside me. He said, “What’s she doing here? I thought she was with her friends swimming.”

  I said that it was too hot to sit on the beach, you’d get all sunburned.

  “I read about the Guppy boy in the paper, too,” said Ding, “and I felt bad for his daddy. He was a natural ballplayer, Alvin. Prettiest swing you ever saw. Quick wrists, everything in synch. Went to Iowa when he was 17, batted .450 for the Davenport Romeos and discovered girls and his batting average dropped to .185—he was holding his head wrong, thinking about who might be in the stands watching him—but he got himself a girlfriend and that helped settle him down. Had a respectable season and then lost his temper the last game and said something to the ump about his mother and the ump stomped on Alvin’s instep and broke his big toe and he had to hitchhike home and it was a rainy fall and nobody cares to pick up a wet hitchhiker, so he had to walk two hundred miles and the broken toe swoll up like a balloon and Alvin stopped in St. Paul and somebody bet him he couldn’t throw a baseball across the Mississippi and like a fool he tried to do it and he strained his arm. Got home, limping, with a crippled wing, and got in a bar fight over some dumb thing and twisted his back. That winter he found out he’d become a father without being aware of it at the time, so he married the girlfriend and settled down and she had that baby and then three more of them nine months and ten minutes apart, all boys. Alvin was farming, which he hated, and when Pearl Harbor came along and we got in the war, it was like a dream come true. He joined the Navy, thinking he could play ball on a Navy team, and they assigned him to the USS Lexington as a gunnery mate and he was in the Battle of Midway with Jap Zeros coming out of the clouds like cars out of a parking lot and machine guns rattling and he managed to get a shell in his gun and was about to fire when a kamikaze hit the Lexington amidships and the next thing he knows he’s in the drink and trying to teach himself to swim. Came home a hero in August 1945 and celebrated for three months, thought about becoming the town drunk, but there already was one and he didn’t want to go into partnership, and one night he threw a gin bottle at Alvin, hit him in the back of the head, the part of the brain where your hand-eye coordination is, and the next summer Alvin hit .400 for us. This is a true story. There is such a thing as a good concussion. Bob Bauer was on that team, and Fred and Frank Schrupp, and Alvin was the star. Last championship we had in this town—1946. Whatever good that gin bottle did was temporary, though. The next year he dropped to .200 and he never got above .200 the next four years, and when he hit .150 he quit. I read about his boy Ricky and I thought, Yeah, that’s Alvin’s boy, headstrong, like the dad. Seems like each of his boys had some of their old man’s qualities—he could sing, he liked to get in fights, he liked girls, and he could play baseball.”