They Called Me God

by Doug Harvey

  He brought in a bucket of ice and chipped it up, and the nurses would feed me little pieces of it. It was a method that eventually was used everywhere for patients who had what I had. Many years later, the ice was changed to watermelon.

  I was in the hospital in 1935 and 1936, an age when airplanes were in the news and very popular with us kids. The nurse would take two tongue depressors and attach them together with a rubber band so the two sticks would look like an airplane, and she would give it to me to play with. I would spend hours pretending I was a pilot flying my plane around as I recovered.

  That’s how I started life: by beating death.

  After I was released by the hospital and returned home, on Sundays I would sit on our back porch and watch real airplanes fly to and from the Los Angeles National Airport. I would spend my Sundays eating fruit and watching this one airplane climb higher and higher, going around in circles, and then the plane would straighten out, and I could see a passenger jump out of the plane and parachute down.

  As soon as I saw him, I would holler, “There he is! There he is!”

  I don’t know whether he was getting paid to do that or whether he was doing it for fun, but every Sunday I would watch him, and he became part of my Sunday entertainment.

  When I got out of the hospital, I put my two feet on the floor and immediately collapsed. My legs were too weak to support my body. There was no way I could walk.

  When I got home, I was determined to walk again. I was the type of person who would set his mind to something and then do it. It took me awhile to build up the strength in my legs, but it wasn’t too long before I was walking again.

  — 3 —

  My father, Harold, was my idol. He taught me the meaning of hard work. He also taught me the importance of honesty and fairness. For eighteen years he worked for the Union Ice Company. He’d report for work at four thirty in the morning and work all day. His job was to cut up three-hundred-pound blocks of ice and put them in hundred-pound sacks. He then would deliver those hundred-pound sacks to all the bars in downtown Los Angeles.

  Dad was a strong man, and I was with him on the day that his fellow workers bet him he couldn’t carry one of those three-hundred-pound blocks of ice across Figueroa Boulevard, which was a wide, heavily trafficked major thoroughfare in L.A. It was 1937, and he bet his entire paycheck—$28—that he could do it. His coworkers made smaller bets—of $1 to $5—that he couldn’t.

  Dad weighed about 180 pounds. I watched as he hoisted the huge block of ice on his broad shoulders while his coworkers went out into the street and stopped the traffic. Somehow he carried the block of ice all the way across six lanes of traffic to win the bet.

  He then turned and began heading back the other way.

  “You can put it down now,” yelled a coworker. “Our bet was only one way.”

  Ignoring him, my dad carried the bulky block of ice back across the boulevard.

  “You damn fool,” said another coworker. “All you had to do was take it across one way. Why did you do that?”

  “Because it’s not my ice,” he said. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

  You see, my dad had integrity.

  He also had pride.

  The ice company was a family business, and the head of the company told Dad that if he died, Dad was going to take it over and run it. When the owner died in 1940, he instead left the company to a son who had never actually worked for the Union Ice Company. The son came in and insisted he was going to run it. You had to know my dad. He had one standard: Something was fair, or it was unfair.

  He taught me so much in the way of fairness, and this is what I brought with me to the game of baseball.

  After working for the ice company for eighteen years, my dad said, “The hell with you,” and he quit.

  I was ten years old.

  — 4 —

  My dad then got a job 150 miles south of Los Angeles, not far from San Diego in the Imperial Valley, working as a truck driver, hauling cantaloupes from the fields to the packing shed. I don’t know exactly how it came about, except that my dad was a truck driver, and this was another truck-driving job. It was steady work.

  Dad knew the owner of the company, and maybe he mentioned he was bringing his family down, so the guy said, “I have a house for you to live in if you take care of the property.”

  The house was on a pig ranch. The company owner needed someone to feed the pigs and milk his cows.

  I thought my dad had sold us to hell.

  I mean it.

  My father had moved there first, and so my brother Roy, who was only fourteen, drove Mom, Nolan, and me from L.A. to the small town of El Centro. We arrived there about midnight. It was 92 degrees, usual for summer in the desert of the Imperial Valley, and I was miserable. When I stepped out of the car my shoes made a crunching sound. The ground was covered with a sea of crickets. You couldn’t walk without stepping on one.

  El Centro, I soon learned, was located in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Temperatures reached as high as 125 degrees in the summer. To put it mildly, it took some getting used to.

  Dad would dump a large load of cantaloupes in our driveway, and one of my jobs when I was in grade school was to feed the cantaloupes to the pigs. We also had eight cows, and it was my brother Roy’s job to milk them.

  At first I hated that we had to leave L.A., but it turned out to be the best thing that happened to us. L.A.’s smog was bad, and when my brothers were freshmen at Garfield High School they were threatened by the pachucos, the Latino hoods who roamed the school. Around the same time the engineers who drove the L.A. streetcars went on strike, and I can remember my dad telling me of the time the strikers were rocking his streetcar and he had to punch a couple of them so the people on the car could get off before they were injured.

  Still, I can’t believe Dad moved us to El Centro. It was in the middle of nowhere, but it was agricultural country, a place where the people had a strong work ethic, so we fit right in.

  We often went to the Imperial fairgrounds and watched the cowboys rope, ride, and steer-wrestle. When I was in high school I went over to a friend’s house, and we were looking for something to do. It was hot inside the house. There was no air-conditioning, only a fan to keep us cool. I looked out the window and saw some kind of contraption in the backyard, and I asked him what it was.

  “Let me show you,” he said, and he took a rope and lassoed a calf, and put him in the chute. He went and got his horse, put on a saddle, and hopped on.

  “Turn him loose,” he yelled, and when I pulled a rope, the calf went running out. My friend rode after him, jumped on top of the calf, and wrestled it to the ground.

  “Want to try it?” he asked.

  “No thanks,” I said. I had no desire to become a cowboy.

  We went to motorcycle races and watched the midget racers go at each other. I drove go-karts a few times, but I never raced them. Go-karts were first invented in the Imperial Valley. The first ones had engines taken from washing machines, which in the 1940s were powered by gasoline. I never had an interest in cars like some of my friends.

  — 5 —

  What I did was play sports year-round. When I got to high school I played football, and at the end of the season turned in my football gear and drew my basketball gear. Then I’d turn that in and get my baseball gear. In the summer you would try to find a job part-time, and you played softball in the evenings. On Sundays you played baseball. That was the life.

  When I entered Central Union High School (now El Centro High School) in the ninth grade I didn’t weigh a hundred pounds. I didn’t want to play football. I didn’t particularly like getting tackled, but my brothers Roy and Nolan had gone there, and they had played and done well. When the school secretary learned I was their brother, she took me to the football coach, who took me right into the gym and issued me a football uniform. I played three years of varsity football.

  As a kid, I didn’t root for any particular team or have a
favorite player. Isn’t that funny I didn’t have a team? I was always neutral, even as a kid.

  — 6 —

  It was a decent life growing up in El Centro, and if I had thought about it, I would have taken my children there to raise them. People laugh about my being out in the country, hot as it was, but I learned a lot growing up there.

  Most of all, what I learned was common sense. I learned that if you stuck your hand where it didn’t belong—say, in the motor of one of those midget racers—you could get your hand cut off. If you walked in the wrong place where a herd of cattle were grazing, you might get run over by a stampede.

  They don’t teach common sense in the city. In the city they taught you who could be the toughest. My common sense is what I brought to umpiring. It’s what gave me a leg up on other umpires.

  The year after we moved to El Centro, the war broke out when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. My dad became the civilian personnel director at the army base of Camp Lockett in Campo, east of San Diego and just north of the Mexican border. He was making good money. The base housed the last cavalry units in the U.S. Army. I’m perhaps the last person ever to have seen a cavalry charge. The men and their horses would go out into the mountains, and they’d be gone for a week. They gathered on a Saturday near where I lived, and on Sunday we would sit on our front porch. From there we’d see the horses line up at one end of a long field; we could hear the bugle sounding the charge, and here they would come in full charge, galloping across the field.

  As the war pressed on, the army replaced the cavalry with armored vehicles, tanks, and half-tracks. I was sorry not to be able to watch those cavalry charges anymore.

  — 7 —

  As civilian director of the base, my father could leave anytime he wanted. When we moved to Imperial Valley, my dad started umpiring. My dad had played third base for the Union Ice Company baseball team. Our family would go out to the ballpark every weekend, and I would sit and watch his games. Back then you could do that without worrying about a child being stolen. He had been an umpire in Los Angeles, and when he arrived in El Centro he introduced himself around and became one of the most highly respected umpires in the region. As long as things were running smoothly, the commandant let Dad go on a Friday night to umpire a high school game. Heck, the commander probably had a kid playing on the team.

  Dad was the best umpire I ever saw. He was very fair: He had four sons who played ball at El Centro High School, and yet for the twelve years we were in school the opposing coaches knew that our being on the team made no difference to my dad. They always asked, “Can Mr. Harvey call balls and strikes?” even though they knew his sons were playing on the home team. That’s how fair my father was.

  After the war Dad got a job selling tickets for the El Centro Imperials, a Class A professional team in the Sunset League. Dad also was the stand-in umpire in case one of the umpires hired by the league got sick or couldn’t make a game. Emmett Ashford, the first African American umpire in the major leagues, got his start working the Sunset League. Emmett worked with my dad, and a couple of times my dad invited him over to the house for a beer.

  When I was sixteen years old I began umpiring semipro and industrial-league softball and baseball games. I was able to do that because one day the home-plate umpire didn’t show up for an industrial-league softball game. I was supposed to play in the game, but they needed an umpire, and without one we couldn’t play. My dad was a well-respected umpire in the area, so I figured I’d give it a try.

  What the hell? I said to myself. There can’t be that much to it.

  And I volunteered.

  I took over behind the plate and fell in love with it. I didn’t have any problems. Things went smoothly. Everyone was tickled to death to have someone behind the plate who seemed to know what he was doing.

  After that, I would umpire every chance I could.

  Umpiring, like so many things, is like a disease. Some people catch it. Others don’t. I’m afraid I got it. Pretty soon I was umpiring three or four games a week. I had no idea at the time that it would become my life’s work. Since I was in high school, I’d get paid under the table. After the game someone would come over and slip me a five-dollar bill. This was because of what happened to Jim Thorpe, who won all those medals in the Olympics. When the authorities found out he was paid to play semipro baseball, they came and took all his medals away. I wasn’t about to take the chance that I would lose my college eligibility because I was getting paid to umpire.

  What I found out early was that I wasn’t doing it for the money. I was doing it for the love of the game. I appreciated the money, but I really loved what I was doing. As I went through my life, I could see that many of my fellow umpires—especially those in the major leagues—really hated their jobs. Once an umpire makes it to the majors, he’s making a lot of money and isn’t about to quit. That’s the reason so many umpires drink.

  — 8 —

  It wasn’t too long before my dad and I began umpiring together. He’d take the plate and I’d umpire the bases. The first professional game I ever worked with my dad was played in Mexicali, Mexico, about twelve miles from home, just across the border. Mexicali was in the Sunset League and they were playing Riverside, California. The regular umpires had been in a car wreck. Dad was available, but the other alternate umpire, Jack Tatum, a highway patrolman, was in Sacramento attending a conference.

  “Come with me, Doug,” Dad said. “They need an umpire. You can work this.”

  We drove to the Mexican border. You always left your car on the American side of the border, because if the Mexicali fans became enraged enough, they could just as easily set fire to your car as not.

  Mexicali was leading Riverside by two full games when we went down there to umpire the final three games of the season.

  Little did I know that in Mexicali I would be working games played between professionals. Dad worked three games behind the plate and I worked the bases. Riverside won the first two games. The last game, played at night, was the decider.

  The ballpark was jammed. The Mexicali fans were drinking their beer. The score was close. In the ninth inning Mexicali was leading by a run with two on and two outs when a batter hit a ground ball to the infield. I was umpiring the bases and the throw to first was close, but I saw the Riverside runner’s shoe hit the bag before I heard the slap of the ball into the glove, and I called the runner safe.

  The crowd sounded like buzzing bees, and I wondered in all seriousness whether the Mexicali fans were going to rush out of the stands and lynch me.

  Things got even uglier when the next batter hit the ball nine miles to win the game and the pennant for visiting Riverside. When Mexicali didn’t score in the bottom of the ninth, we had a full-blown riot.

  An army truck backed up to the clubhouse door, and Dad and I got in the back of the truck, which was covered by a green tarp that was protecting us from the food and objects that were being thrown by the Mexicali fans. Soldiers lay on the floor of the truck with their rifles with bayonets sticking out the bottom of the tarp to prevent anyone from jumping onto the truck and attacking us. The driver floored it, and we sped out of there and headed for the border.

  It was exciting. I had never seen anything like it and it served me well. I had kept my cool. Looking back, if the army hadn’t been there to save us, we easily could have ended up dead. Those Mexicans were crazy—and crazy about baseball.

  I saw that I had a knack for the job. I was born to officiate.

  — 9 —

  I played on the El Centro High School basketball team, and we were one of the first run-and-gun offenses in the United States. When I was first in high school, there was no such thing as a fast break. You got the ball, passed it out, and everyone trotted to the far end of the court to set up a play while the defense set itself. You passed the ball around until you saw an opening. There was no time clock. There was no rush, so you just passed it and passed it and passed it. When you saw an
opening, you threw it to the open man, and he took a shot. A typical score was 20–17.

  My junior year we had a terrible coach. We lost a couple of practice games at the start of the season, and he walked off, packed up, and left. Coach Farrell, who was the junior-varsity football coach, volunteered for the job and took it over. Coach Farrell was the one who came up with our run-and-gun offense. He worked us to death to get us in shape so we could play it, and we went on to win the California State championship.

  At six foot two I was the team’s center. I’d take the ball off the rebound, fire it to Babe Henry on the sideline, and then I’d break to the right. Babe would throw the ball to Red Gresham across court, and I’d race down to the other end, and we’d have a three-on-two and score. Before we knew it, we were winning games 40–25.

  We played in short gyms where you had to throw your hands up to stop from hitting the wall after you scored a layup. The league would send short, round fellows to referee our games, and these fat little guys couldn’t keep up with us as we fast-breaked down the court. We all thought, These guys are terrible. I said to myself, I sure can do a better job than that. I later went on to officiate in high school, college, and two pro leagues: the American Basketball League and the American Basketball Association.

  No doubt in my mind basketball was my best sport. I played against guys who were six foot six and six foot seven, and I would outjump and outhustle them. I left their jockstraps hanging from the rafters.

  I was sure I was going to get a college scholarship in basketball. Looking back, chances are if I had gotten one, I never would have become an umpire. I was invited by the coach at the University of California to visit the campus. He said he was thinking about giving me a scholarship. He took me over to their gym, and I couldn’t believe what an old flophouse it was. You talk about a terrible gym for a college. But California was a good team. It was in the finals of the NCAA championship in 1946, and I was excited to come and work out for him.