Smith’s interview of Rosalind Wyman was telling. Whereas that key figure of the effort to capture the Dodgers for Los Angeles spoke of the importance of shared sacrifice, Smith wondered in light of the city’s failing Olympics bid if something essential had changed over the past twenty years. “On a deep level,” replied Wyman to Smith’s questioning, “there just isn’t the energy that there used to be. People basically don’t relate to the city as a whole. . . . They identify in terms of their neighborhoods, their immediate interests. We’re into the ‘Me Generation’ now, and people don’t have civic spirit when they’re totally wrapped up in a philosophy of ‘me, not us.’ And Proposition 13 really sort of says it all. The masses are too busy trying to survive to have much booster spirit beyond their own immediate surroundings.”16
Smith asked Mayor Bradley too about the seeming loss of grassroots civic pride, especially in relation to the faltering Olympics bid, only to have the mayor shrug off the question. Bradley replied:
Every survey shows that something like 80% of the people favor having the Olympics, provided that there is no cost to the taxpayer. As far as any spontaneous expression of feeling goes, I wouldn’t expect any great emotional outpouring. We’re still in the negotiations stage, and people just don’t get all fired up when they know it’s at that stage of development. We’re talking about an event that is six years in the future. It’s when we get closer to the event itself that Olympic fever will start to build. But not now. It’s too early, and people are worried about their own pocketbooks. They are concerned about their own communities, all over the city.17
Despite the seeming ambivalence and loss of civic boosterism that had once characterized Los Angeles, there were of course still plenty of people seeking the California Dream. Though no one had any way of knowing, around that same time two figures were moving to California to start their own futures and realize their dreams. A young man name Larry Ellison, who had grown up an orphaned foster child in the Bronx and Chicago, moved to California in 1977, intending to use two thousand dollars of his own money to start a fledgling computer company. The company would later become the database company Oracle, and Ellison would become one of the richest men in the world. A year later, in 1978, California native Michael Milken moved back from New York City, where he had been at the investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, to work at the firm’s branch office in Century City. In Los Angeles Milken would earn obscene amounts of money—that is, he would until he was indicted in 1989 on ninety-eight counts of racketeering and fraud—but that was in the future. In the troubled present, as the nation, and Californians increasingly, wallowed in an almost inexplicably intractable sense of self-pity, people on the make still knew that California was the place to come to make it big.
Well knowing this, Tom Fallon finally decided that he would take a big leap toward realizing his California Dream. Putting up every bit of collateral he and his partners had earned in Cucamonga Hardware, Fallon went to the bank and got approval for a mortgage. With the money he would buy the paint store, the business supply company, and much of the land on the corner block of Archibald Avenue and Foothill Boulevard. This included the Italian restaurant on the corner, a flower shop, and a bar, but there were also notable holdouts—in particular, the Yamaha store owner situated next to the building supply company, who simply didn’t see the point in selling, as well as a small insurance company. The land altogether amounted to about five acres. With this purchase, which set back the partnership about $230,000 (the equivalent of about $840,000 in 2015 dollars), Fallon could move his hardware store to the larger space where the paint store had been. Fallon also planned to turn the building supply store, as well as much of the contiguous property between the two buildings, into his dream business—a garden center.
Most of the Cucamonga Hardware partners, caught up in Tom Fallon’s enthusiasm, were excited about the move. One partner, however—Nelson Hawley, who had been in the partnership the longest—was not. Hawley was nervous enough about the overextended debt load that he asked the rest of the partners to buy him out. They did as he asked, and they wished him well in his retirement. Oddly, Hawley would fall sick and pass away less than a year later. But by then, by the time Hawley had passed away, Cucamonga Hardware would be rocked by another, altogether shocking, development—one that marked the end of an era in the Fallon family’s personal history.
26
Clinching
The difference between the old ballplayer and the new ballplayer is the jersey. The old ballplayer cared about the name on the front. The new ballplayer cares about the name on the back.
—Steve Garvey
While baseball story lines had been mostly negative in Los Angeles over the long, hot summer of 1978, in September the tone of the season suddenly turned positive. Helping matters, beyond the Dodgers’ suddenly sharp play, were several intriguing and somewhat uplifting stories that came to light during the last home stretch of the season.
Back in May a small item had appeared in local sports pages about the former Yankee pitcher, noted author, and erstwhile actor Jim Bouton. The story, which garnered little attention except among the most attentive baseball fans, described the pitcher’s attempts to return to the Major Leagues in 1978 at the ripe old age of thirty-nine. Though Bouton had last pitched in the Majors in 1970, for the Houston Astros, he returned to baseball in 1975 as a knuckle-balling starter for the independent Class A Portland Mavericks. For Portland Bouton recorded a 2.20 ERA and won four out of five decisions. And then, despite this success, Bouton took the 1976 season off from baseball because suddenly he found himself working on and starring in a CBS TV sitcom inspired by Ball Four.1
When the television project was canceled in November 1976, after just five of its original seven episodes were aired, Bouton returned to the mound. In the spring of 1977 he was signed by Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck to pitch in the club’s Minor League system. Bouton didn’t do well for the Sox’s Class AA team in Knoxville and was released, but rather than give up Bouton returned to the Portland Mavericks to finish the season. There, he won five of his last six decisions and kept alive the idea of making his way back to the Major Leagues.
In the winter of 1977–78 Bouton met media magnate Ted Turner, who was in New York to accept the Yachtsman of the Year Award for winning the America’s Cup. Turner had recently bought the floundering Atlanta Braves baseball franchise, and immediately Bouton broached the subject of getting a shot to play for the Braves, to which Turner supposedly replied, “Sure, what the hell, why not?”2 Which is how Jim Bouton got an invitation to pitch for the Braves during the spring exhibition season in March 1978.
Not everyone took the news about this late-life opportunity in stride. Much of the problem had to do with Bouton’s status as a pariah in baseball circles—or “deviant,” as he put it, based on some notions he had heard from a behavioral scientist. “In any human group, family, tribe, (or baseball team),” Bouton later wrote, “there are norms—shared expectations of behavior. Any member who deviates from these norms calls into question the basic values of the group. And groups don’t like to have their basic values questioned.” Whatever the reason, Bouton’s writing career had marked him as a target, a “social leper” (as sportswriter Dick Young put it), and players avoided or derided him. (Pete Rose, famously, would shout “Fuck you, Shakespeare!” from the dugout whenever Bouton was pitching.) In 1978 player discomfort about the new era would fixate in a negative way on Bouton’s comeback attempt. At Atlanta’s spring camp, though Bouton pitched well, he was unpopular with the people who counted the most—particularly the team’s farm director, Hank Aaron. “Henry hasn’t been a fan of mine,” said Bouton, “since we were on the Dick Cavett show together and he attacked my book and then admitted he hadn’t read it.”3 At the end of spring training the Braves cut Bouton, but he didn’t panic. When Aaron gave him the news he didn’t argue or complain but told him that he respected his judgment. Bouton then flew directly to Atlanta to talk
to Ted Turner in person, which is how he was given a modest shot to pitch batting practice with the Braves’ Class AAA franchise in Richmond. Here, Bouton did not waste the opportunity.
After a stellar performance in May against the Major League club, Bouton was finally given a contract by the Braves to pitch for their AA farm team in Savannah. People around baseball were still skeptical and dismissive, suggesting he was too old to be a real Major League prospect, but Bouton would have none of it. “You don’t pitch with your birth certificate,” he said. Bouton pitched three intense months in Savannah, recording an 11-9 record with twelve complete games and a 2.82 ERA, and he served as something of a “guru” to the team’s young squad. “I was the fountain of wisdom on everything from pitching and finances to careers and love lives,” Bouton said. “I’d sit around my room at night with guys like Roger Alexander and Stu Livingstone, we’d make some popcorn on my hotplate, and have a few beers and shoot the bull. It was a kind of closeness which had been impossible for me to achieve years ago. At age 39 I was finally one of the boys.”4
If Jim Bouton’s comeback had stopped there, it would have been a remarkable-enough story. The veteran pitcher, who had last recorded a Major League win in July 1970 with the Houston Astros, had pitched, at age thirty-nine, a one-hit complete game, a two-hitter, and even a thirteen-inning shutout. And while these accomplishments had been at the AA level, Bouton had also survived the swampy, hundred-plus degree game-time temperatures of the Southern League and all-night bus rides across the countryside. But the story did not end there. Once the Savannah Braves’ season ended in September, during the time that Major League teams expanded their rosters to call up prospects and other players they wanted to take a look at, the Atlanta Braves called Jim Bouton up to pitch. Bouton was once again a Major Leaguer. “I had made it to Emerald City,” he said.5
Tom Fallon, had he known of Bouton’s ups and downs in 1977 and ’78, would likely have identified with the iconoclastic pitcher. Against the odds Fallon’s hardware store was doing well—growing its customer base, becoming slowly more profitable since the move to the larger space and the opening of the garden center, turning a modest mom-and-pop shop into a sort of (real estate–based) business empire for the family. And the results of the recent June election in California had also given Fallon reason to hope for the future. That is, Fallon was pleased to see voters had overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13 in the June election. Limiting the seemingly ever-increasing amount of property taxes on local homes meant, Fallon knew, that wasteful state spending—on extravagant new freeway construction, bloated public employee rolls, and other unnecessary public works projects—would be curtailed, and small entrepreneurs and home owners like him and his family would find some relief. As a major real estate owner now, he was gratified that his instincts, which Nelson Hawley had feared, were correct: property was, he knew, the future in California, a ticket to security and wealth.
Among the growing coterie of customers that the newly relocated Cucamonga Hardware had attracted was an acknowledged local, and national, treasure—woodworker Sam Maloof, who lived just a few city blocks north of Tom Fallon on a five-acre lot in Alta Loma. Maloof, who was the son of Lebanese immigrants, had turned to woodworking in the 1950s without much credential other than his own hands. In time he became a leading figure in the international Crafts as Art movement of the 1970s. By 1978 Maloof had become a regular fixture at Cucamonga Hardware, often coming in to inquire about rare hand tools that the Fallons tried to find in their large store of hardware catalogs.
Still, despite the seeming outward success, there were signs that Fallon’s empire was ultimately doomed. At the heart of the problem for the store were Fallon’s sons. Though the three had been raised in the same household, and all had a certain “Fallon-ness” about them, in many ways they couldn’t have been more different. Kenneth, the oldest of the three, and Tom’s second child (after Thomas Jr.), was a deep and complicated personality, jovial at times and intense and competitive at others. In college, though Ken had a strong analytical and scientific bent, he had studied art and hoped to become an artist. However, as the family story goes, his wife, Sandra, ended those plans, telling him to study something more practical that would lead to a better future career. As a result Ken shifted his focus midway through college, graduating with a degree in mathematics. Meanwhile, James, Tom Fallon’s third child, who was just a bit more than a year younger than Kenneth, couldn’t be more different from his older brother. Though Jim was at times as focused and competitive as his brother, his personality was inward and sensitive. Though Ken and James attended college together, even rooming together in the same dorm at one point, James was uncertain what he wanted to do in life. He shifted his major numerous times, studying history at one point, then psychology, then animal science, and so on. It didn’t help that midway through college James met a girl, Pamela Barnes of San Diego, and commenced a relationship that would lead, in short order, to pregnancy, a quick marriage, a birth, a year off from school to work, and a return to college on a part-time basis. James would graduate from school in 1969, seven years after he first enrolled, still unsure what he wanted to do (thus the detour with Tom Fallon to Barstow that summer after graduating). And finally there was Patrick, Tom Fallon’s fifth of sixth children. Ever the witty comedian, Pat was liked by almost everyone who met him. Inwardly, however, he was less certain, comparing himself to his three older brothers. He had, after all, not gone to college as they had. Working at the store was a stopgap for Pat, something to do while he tried to figure out his life.
Patrick didn’t let his uncertainly show around the store, choosing instead to remain jovial with his brothers and dad and other visiting family members. This was in sharp contrast to the chasm of difference that would develop between his two older brothers Jim and Ken. Jim, who was quiet and dedicated to his father and this enterprise, almost always worked well beyond what might be considered a regular schedule. This was particularly true after Nelson Hawley, who had been the accounting brains of the partnership, retired. Now that the account books were Jim’s responsibility, scarcely a night passed now that he was not working until eight or nine in the evening, much to the frustration of his wife and three young boys at home. Ken, on the other hand, seemed less dedicated to the enterprise, less prone to work overtime, despite the fact that he had bought just as much of a financial stake in the store as his brother and father.
Tom Fallon, busy as he was hatching plans and hobnobbing with customers, seemed mostly unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the tension between his sons. And with business doing well in the summer of 1978, Tom decided to do something special to break up the large and monotonous swath of asphalt that was the open yard of the garden center. It was an idea he had had after speaking with one of the store’s best customers, woodworker Sam Maloof. They had been talking about woodworking techniques in general and in particular about the underrated technique of “clinching” off nails, or bending and hammering a protruding point of a nail back into the backside of a piece of wood so it cannot be removed. Good clinching, according to the self-taught Maloof, was a true sign of a good woodworker—and it created remarkably strong pieces. And that’s when it struck Fallon: he would build a large structure that would model good woodworking, be a good conversation piece, and demonstrate what was possible to do with the tools that he sold at his store. Which is how, that summer, Tom Fallon set out to build a large wooden gazebo in the space between the hardware store and the garden center.
Back in New York City, far away from the dry-dusty stretches of suburban Southern California as the 1978 baseball season progressed, Tom Wolfe continued to struggle with his current book, The Right Stuff. Part of the problem was Wolfe was of two minds about the project. On the one hand, at moments when he felt confident and comfortable with himself, he was still convinced this was the book that put him on the map. He knew that the articles he had written on the space program for Rolling Stone in 1973 were among his best work
, and he was sure that in his full-length book he’d take that a step further. He had plenty of good material, after all, as the outline for the book had spread to more than three hundred cross-indexed pages. Some large part of him couldn’t wait to see how the book turned out. On the other hand, however, his progress on the book had slowed to a snail’s pace, which was telling, considering how normally prolific he was as a self-supporting freelance writer. Two things seemed to be troubling him about The Right Stuff. First, despite his great ambitions for the book, and his faith in the quality of the story, he was also fully aware that no one in 1978 America was really clamoring for a comprehensive story about America’s first astronauts. That was then, and this is now was a mantra of the age (and the title of a 1971 book about disillusioned middle-American youths by author S. E. Hinton, as Wolfe well knew). Further, because of the particular way he wanted to tell the early space program’s story, Wolfe was finding it nearly impossible to juggle the tricky task of actually writing the damn thing. The Right Stuff, he learned, had no one single character to drive the narrative and connect the events in the story to the history of the time, as the character of Ken Kesey did for the ’60s psychedelic era in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “With The Right Stuff,” Wolfe told an interviewer a few years later, “you had to keep filling people in on world history.”6 And tying the astronauts’ story in with the weighty history of an entire era seemed almost impossible to do in an interesting manner.
Still, by early 1978 Wolfe rededicated himself to writing the book. To give himself a further spur in the side, he called his agent, his book editor, and his editor at his publisher—Farrar, Straus, and Giroux—and scheduled meetings so he could let them know when they could expect his great masterpiece. There was no need to keep pussyfooting around, he thought. He had done the research, outlined the thing completely, and written large chunks in the form of magazine articles—now he just needed an intense six months to write the words. This meant he stopped taking calls (this was what he called his “period of stuffing telephones with cotton”) and ceased all other work. During the four-plus years he had worked on The Right Stuff thus far, Wolfe had published three books, including two magazine article anthologies (The New Journalists and Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter, and Vine) and a short and controversial volume on modern art (The Painted Word), and he had continued taking occasional other writing assignments. But no more! He would dedicate all his right stuff to The Right Stuff.
Dodgerland Page 42
