August 2022

What a month!

July was a personal emotional roller coaster.

I was born in and spent the first 18 years of my life in Highland Park, Illinois.

“Oh yeah, that’s where the shootings were,” said a new Canadian friend last week.  

We were together at an idyllic north woods/Land of Sky Blue Waters retreat in Ontario.

Since July 4, nearly everyone everywhere knows the name of our hometown.  

It’s not Breaking News anymore. Another deadly shooting happened 13 days later in Indiana. HP has become another name in a series of places where the real-life horror of mass killings by guys with multiple-shooting weapons has obliterated and maimed people and spread disaster. Each time, it blindsides tens of thousands in a split second…from close-in family members to the peripherally connected.

I felt the aftershock as a dear friend in his 80’s lost his only brother, killed in an instant by a madman on the roof at the Fourth of July parade.  So awful in so many ways.

And my daughter, son-in-law, and three grandkids were on the way to the parade, three blocks away, heard gunshots and skedaddled home. They cuddled under the covers and watched several movies. 

Highland Park?  It couldn’t happen here.

Shooters with fancy military guns, deranged brains and unthinkable actions have made indelible the names of places like the Texas Tower in Austin, Columbine High, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and Uvlade and dozens of others. 

Mother Jones collected some fascinating data: name of the event, location, number of dead, about the shooter, mental/legal backstory, and the weapon.  

By putting it all together in one spreadsheet of 100 incidences, it provides a sorely needed perspective. 

Link is here.  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/    

Yeah, banning assault weapons, prioritizing and funding mental health care, and making sensible changes could make some long-term headway.

But in the Big Picture:

1. We live in the most ridiculously murderous arms culture/country in history.

2. Weapons are the biggest business. In America. Local gun shops and people with guns is only the tip. Manufacturing, dealing and spreading military might…guns, tanks, missiles, planes, terror, war technology, etc. absolutely defines the United States of America.

Will it change during my lifetime? 

Probably not…it’s a bad bet.

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Thank God for Baseball

Minnie Miñoso

Our boyhood hero was finally inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame last Sunday (7/24), six years after he died.  We went to Cooperstown, the shrine.  

I could tell you all about it, but not nearly as well as Roger Wallenstein, my closest homie for 70 years.  He has spent most of the last 50 years making kids’ lives better.  But Roger has always been baseball… player in HS and college, coach HS and kids, sportswriter, ballpark beer vendor, and enormously talented baseball sportswriter/blogger/columnist.  It’s a wonderful thing that he was willing to be the August 1 PY-O-MY designated writer.

Cooperstown, New York

By Roger Wallenstein     

The story begins under a towering shade tree during lunchtime at day camp. Tom turned 8 that summer of 1952. My birthday is in October, so I was 7. He was as deft of hand as a blackjack dealer in Vegas as he zipped through my meager—compared to Tom’s—collection of baseball cards, palming the images of the ballplayers and flipping through them with his thumb and index finger.

“Got ‘im, got ‘im, got ‘im, don’t got ‘im…” The result was two piles of cards, the smaller one being the “don’t got ims” of which Tom had a keen interest. So the bartering ensued. We’ve been friends ever since.

Aside from our interest in swapping baseball cards, we were devoted followers of the Chicago White Sox. I became an aficionado later than Tom because our family moved from Cincinnati when I was just a pup. The choice of which team to follow was a no-brainer: the Cubs, led by the incomparable Ernie Banks, were a band of happy losers while the Sox had a consistently contending outfit.

These were the days of the “Go Go Sox,” a team built on pitching, defense, and speed which made sense since the athletes toiled in cavernous Comiskey Park where it was 352 feet down the lines and 415 to dead centerfield. Only when the despised Yankees visited were homeruns the soup du jour with guys like Mantle and Berra breaking our schoolboy hearts.

Nevertheless, our side was a valiant challenger, led by our childhood hero Orestes (Minnie) Miñoso. For the uninformed, Minnie was a very dark-skinned Cuban whose arrival in the Major Leagues was stymied until Jackie Robinson made history in 1947. At the time, Minnie was a young star in his early 20s in the Negro League playing for the New York Cubans. In 1948 Bill Veeck, owner of the Cleveland Indians, signed Miñoso.

A year later Veeck sold the ballclub, and the new owners kept Miñoso in the minor leagues in 1950. They were worried that the team already had two Black players, Larry Doby and Luke Easter. Adding a third, they reasoned, just might irritate the white public. Lucky for us, the color of Miñoso’s skin became a primary reason that Minnie was traded to the White Sox early in the 1951 season, becoming the first Black player in Chicago baseball.

Here the story is in many ways entwined with the esteemed editor of this distinguished monthly missive. If you are a regular reader, you no doubt are aware that Tom had a close relationship with Veeck after Bill bought the White Sox (for the second time) in the mid-70s. Tom became one of Bill’s investor group after joining him several evenings drinking beer at the Executive House. Bill needed cash and the Weinbergs bought a small piece of the franchise. Their friendship continued until Bill died in 1986. (see his documentary, A Man for Any Season here).  

During this period, Tom also became friends with Miñoso, hanging out with Minnie during spring training in 1978 when Tom was creating a half-hour piece for broadcast on WTTW/11 and other PBS stations.  The scene where Tom engages Minnie in a game of shuffleboard is classic. Who would have thought that our childhood hero, an icon, a trailblazer, a seven-time American League All-Star would be competing with Weinberg on a shuffleboard court 20 years after he thrilled us on the ball diamond?

All of which brought Tom and me along with Eleanor and Judy to Cooperstown last week for Miñoso’s induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame, an honor long overdue. Tom had lobbied for Minnie’s induction partly via his superb documentary Baseball’s Been Very, Very Good to Me, which aired in 2014, a year before Miñoso died at the age of 92 or 93, depending on which year Minnie said was his birthdate.

This trip had about as much advance planning as Minnie racing around second, deciding whether to stretch a double into a triple, a category in which he led the American League three times.  Approximately two months ago, Tom says, “Perhaps we should go to Cooperstown for Minnie’s induction.” I was unclear whether this was a question or a statement, but the wheels started turning for flights—we flew into Syracuse—car rental, lodging, and tickets to the ceremony which included seven new honorees. Available rooms closest to Cooperstown turned out to be in Utica about an hour’s drive from baseball’s shrine.

We arrived on Saturday and the next morning, Induction Day, we drove to the lovely hamlet, the “Birth Place of Baseball,” awash with fans, mostly those from Boston decked out in number-34 Red Sox jerseys in honor of David (Big Papi) Ortiz, by far the most popular of the day’s inductees.

Main Street was blocked off from car traffic as we explored a place I’d never before visited. Barkers were announcing that retired players, some rather obscure like Art Shamsky, and an ironic one, Pete Rose (only $75)  were in booths ready to sign autographs. Multiple stores featured the predictable t-shirts—the best one was 6+4+3=2, signifying a double play—baseball cards, bats, balls, photos, trinkets of every description. 

We were observers, not buyers as we wended our way to the shuttle buses to carry us to the Clark Sports Center,  a vast grassy field about a mile out of town where the induction ceremony would take place. A few weeks prior to our pilgrimage, Tom suggested, “If we’re going all the way out there, we should get a reserved seat.” Turned out that meant becoming a member of the Hall for the bargain price of $500.

Membership includes a card, a couple of lapel pins, a decal for the fridge or car, a Hall of Fame Almanac, a nice sweatshirt, and, lo and behold, two seats for the ceremony.

We were told that gates to the seating area opened at noon for the 1:30 p.m. starting time, and we lined up at 10:30 a.m. You do the math. That’s right. For three hours we were more or less idle, sitting in the sun with temps in the upper 80s amid an occasional breeze. 

Our four seats were akin to sitting in the last row of the centerfield bleachers. Unfortunately the view of the only Jumbotron was blocked by the platform for the cameras of MLB-TV although the sound system worked well as the returning 48 Hall of Famers were introduced one by one. 

The Miñoso induction followed those of deceased Black pioneer Bud Fowler and pitcher Jim Kaat, very much alive at 83, who was a 20-game winner for the White Sox two consecutive seasons in the 70s.

Minnie’s widow Sharon Rice-Miñoso delivered his acceptance speech. No one would confuse her rhetorical skills with William Jennings Bryan, but few of us measure up to that echelon. Cast in this role, Ms. Rice-Miñoso’s words were heartfelt and sincere. However, by the end of her address, we were roasted, sunburnt, and pretty much in the bottom of the ninth as far as stamina was concerned.

However, since Tony Oliva, like Miñoso a Cuban, was next, we stuck around and were glad we did. Oliva, also an octogenarian, orated both in English and Spanish with the same inflections and accents so familiar to Minnie’s cadence and diction. He literally sang cha-cha-cha praise to Miñoso as a national hero in Cuba. 

In addition, Oliva also was similar to Miñoso because of the tardiness of his induction. Tony was an eight-time All-Star and a lifetime .304 hitter. What took so long?

As we filed out of the venue still filled with thousands of Big Papi fans, we looked for a shuttle back to downtown Cooperstown.

No such luck. The buses weren’t running until the ceremony ended so we hoofed it back a mile to town.

Were we glad we made the journey? Without a doubt, despite the fact that watching on TV would have afforded us an accommodating seat complete with air conditioning and a frosty beer within reach. However, we came away with the feeling of being a part, regardless of how small, of a historical moment for someone who played a not insignificant role as we were growing up. 

You might say we “got ‘im” in Cooperstown.

***

One other inductee was Gil Hodges, long-time first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  

He had a small but enthusiastic group of fans.

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So, July 2022…

…a month of extremes forcing us to consider life, death and what comes between.

Our family was devastated by the instant stroke-death in California of my co-grampa,  Kicker’s father, Alan Kliner.  RIP.

I’ll send grandkid-pix September 1, Seeya then.

tom

P.S. At the risk of including one last bummer: Just to keep it in perspective, every day last month, more than 2000 people on average died from Coronavirus-19 all over the world.  You think we had a bad month!!