Baseball Buddies

I must admit, I don’t know beans about sports. I grew up with baseball heroes like Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Orlando Cepeda, and Stan “The Man” Musial, but I don’t know batting averages or any other stats in any other professional sports. My interest in tennis was piqued only when Arthur Ashe breezed into my Sumner High School and captivated the attention of the girls in my circle. Somehow I missed basketball as an interest, even though in 1960 Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain brought all 7’1” of himself to one of my high school gym classes. He was at Sumner to promote the idea of keeping sports in perspective. He told us teens that we should never, never allow sports to distract us from staying in school, and doing our best scholastically while we were there. That was, as I remember it, a year or so after the Philadelphia Warriors had drafted him; by then, I had already pledged never to let sports get in the way of anything in life.

I never got invested in hockey or golf, but I shelled out the big bucks to become a season-ticket holder when the Rams first came to town. I’ve written articles that tout St. Louis as having been the Jai Lai capital of the United States. And I wrote many a print article and produced many a TV piece about the 1904 Olympic Games. But that’s the extent of my sports acumen.

So I should confess to the very fine sports anchors I sat next to for all those years—as if it weren’t crystal clear to them—during your sportscasts I was doodling, scribbling poetry, composing music notes, writing an upcoming speech, or composing my grocery list. No disrespect. You were probably doing the same things when I was spewing news about a new development at City Hall or about a tractor-trailer overturn on Highway 40. Despite my sports deficiency, I was privileged to brush shoulders with some of the all-time greats of the sports world: Stan Musial, Curt Flood, Lou Brock, and Yogi Berra.

Stan the Man

“The reason I have a bad knee is that I hit too many triples and slid into third too many times during my career.”

—Stan Musial

“The Man” made the above statement to the packed house at Busch Stadium on May 18, 2008, as he was helped away from the microphone during special ceremonies honoring him. Emcee Mike Shannon referred to Stan Musial that day as “the greatest living Cardinal.” In addition to the mayoral proclamation naming the third Sunday in May as “Stan Musial Day” in St. Louis, a block of Eighth Street in Stadium Plaza was named “Stan Musial Drive.”

I had the opportunity on a couple of occasions to sit and chat with is the inimitable Stanley Francis (“Stash”) Musial. If you’re not a hardcore Cardinals fan, here’s all you need to know about the remarkable Stan “the Man” Musial:

• .331 career batting average
• .417 on base percentage
• .559 slugging percentage
• 3,630 hits
• 725 doubles
• 177 triples
• 475 homers
• 1,949 runs
• 1.951 runs batted in
• played in 895 straight games before tearing a muscle and chipping a bone
• elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot on January 21, 1969

And he hit five home runs in one day in a doubleheader against the Dodgers in 1954. That single game homerun record was not broken until a guy from my old Cole School neighborhood, Nate Colbert, took the honors in 1972.

I had run into Stan many, many times in the press box at Busch Stadium when the Channel 4 anchor team could steal away to catch a few innings and a free meal between the six and ten o’clock newscasts. I didn’t know him well, so imagine my surprise when I got a call in the newsroom one day in 1981.

“Hunter!” a staffer called out. “Stan Musial for you on line two!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I thought, wondering, “Which of my smart-ass friends this is going to be.”

It was, indeed, the legendary Stan, “The Man.” I hoped he was not able to sense my shock through the phone lines. He said in his halting, then rapid, then halting speech pattern that he had noticed on TV that I seemed to like history. He had seen, but could not name by title, the fifty-part series of one-minute bits about St. Louis history I researched, wrote and produced that peppered the daily program lineup for a long time. The morsels in “Gateway Gazette” became extremely popular around town because they featured historical facts that few if any local history buffs knew. One of the pieces, on street names, told viewers that one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Gravois, which St. Louisans anglicize in pronunciation, means “garbage dump” in French and was originally the road to the city dump.

Stan loved history. And he was calling me to ask if my wife and I would like to join him and his wife, Lil, to have lunch with his good friend, James Michener, and his wife, Mari. I could have dropped the phone as quickly as my jaw dropped. When I regained my composure, I accepted the invitation as if Stan phoned me to invite me to have lunch with internationally known authors a couple times a week. But I asked myself again and again, “How in the world would Stan have come to have Michener as a friend.” The answer was simply that Stan had friends in more corners of the world than there are corners of the world. The variegation of those friendships would astound many. For example, Musial had a special friendship with President Jack Kennedy. Stan proudly wore a PT-109 pin that JFK had given him and Stan always prefaced JFK’s name with “my buddy.” Also, Stan, who was devastated by Kennedy’s assassination, struck up a relationship with Lyndon Johnson, who gave Stan a special appointment as presidential physical fitness guru for the nation.

And I would learn later that Stan and Michener more in common than you might thing … if you just looked on the surface. They shared a fantatical interest in baseball, both had grown up within a fast pitch of each other in Pennsylvania, and they were each baseball standouts in high school. And I learned that each would have been satisfied with careers in basketball, their second love in sports. Michener might have seemed like an odd duck hanging out with Stan and Red Schoendienst down in Florida at the Cardinals spring training facility, but Stan told me that was the case. “The Man” did not mention that he and Michener and the boys loved to bend the elbow a bit when they got together for vats of years at Cardinal training camps in Florida. The great author loved bourbon, and Stan’s libation of choice, of course, was the nectar that flowed from the Anheuser-Busch barrels.

The two buddies had even traveled together far, far away from Florida. Stan had journeyed to Poland with Michener when the highly productive author had gone to Stan’s ancestral hometown of Mojstava, while Michener was researching his book Poland. To this day, years after Michener’s death in 1997, Stan serves on the board of the James Michener Society. Who would have thought that a lanky kid who ended his formal education at Donora High would ever hook up with a guy who wrote some thirty-one books?

On the day of the lunch, Barbara and I nervously arrived at—where else?—Stan Musial and Biggie’s Restaurant on Oakland Avenue. That was the eatery Stan co-owned with Julius “Biggie” Garangani.

It was an interesting lunch to say the least. Michener, whose books Barb and I had read, was a literary giant to say the least. Barbara had borrowed her parents’ copy of Iberia and was reading it because we were heading to Iberia—Spain and Portugal—in just a few weeks.

During our conversation over lunch, I had lots of questions for Michener, like how in the world can one man turn out books the size of Centennial, The Covenant, Hawaii, Sayonara, and at least a dozen other robust bestsellers. Michener, who did not at all seem well at the time, mumbled a few responses and then deferred to Mari, his third wife each time one of my questions came up. He and Mari had been married for 26 years at the time we lunched; it took only a couple minutes to realize that she was the more articulate, and perhaps deep of the two. For example, I wanted to engage him in a conversation about the reign of Carlos Quinto—Charles the Fifth—and his influence on the evolution of Spain and Portugal. (This, by the way, was not my typical lunchtime conversation.) Michener immediately tossed my question to Mari. Then later, not to be a pseudo-academic, I asked him some of the details about his awesome Centennial, which I had almost used for kindling midway through the first tedious chapter. But it turned out that I eventually couldn’t put the weighty tome down.

Stan and Lil and Barbara and James were rather quiet as the two “talkers” in the sixsome jabbered on. I did take note of the fact that Michener was nuts for baseball and had once starred in the sport in high school. When I asked how he could churn out literally (or literarily) more than two dozen books the sheer size of his bestsellers, we learned from Mari, and through Michener mumbling in, that the prolific author often worked with as many as three secretaries and on as many as three different typewriters at a time. Michener, without Mari’s statistics, would acknowledge only that he had help in writing his voluminous books. He noted having researchers but emphasized that he alone ran the show on the writing projects. One could easily get the idea that Mari was a principal figure in her husband’s productivity. If he wore the literary pants in the family …Mari was the belt.

On the lighter side we learned that Michener and Musial grew up not far from each other in Pennsylvania. We also found out that the great author loved baseball and liked to hang around with Stan and Schoendienst at the Cardinals spring training camps in Florida. The two buddies chuckled over some of their Florida escapades, but a listener would also pick up that wives need not know all the details of the boys’ boozing, card-playing and cigar-smoking.

Barbara and I produced the copy of Iberia we had brought to ask for an autograph. And the Great One scribbled:

“To Julius & Barbara Hunter—

I hope you have a great visit to Spain.”

—James A Michener, 1981

 

We thanked Stan and Lil and James and Mari for a good lunch and stimulating conversation. Eight years passed before I would have another sit-down conversation with Stan. That happened on September 29, 1989—the day that the King of Beers, Gussie Busch, died.

My first interview on that day of multiple Busch eulogies was with KMOX Radio topper, Bob Hyland. Attesting to what a small world this is, Hyland’s physician father, surgeon Robert F. Hyland had treated Stan Musial during the 1947 baseball season when the senior Hyland was the team physician. Stan had suffered from an inflamed appendix and tonsillitis.

As it turned out, my second interview to get reflections on Gussie Bush’s life that day would take place at the suburban Musial home. As we were leaving Bob Hyland’s office for the Musial home, I found myself in distant thoughts about what a great guy Stan was. He was exactly the same good guy whether I ran into him at the ballpark or at a civic event, or during those wonderful sit-down sessions. I also remembered what Jackie Robinson had said about the all-star Cardinal who wore number 6 on his jersey. Robinson had said that while he was catching the nastiest worst hell of his life, with catcalls and objects being hurled onto the field in a very racist St. Louis at the time, Stan was one of only a couple of the Cardinals who stayed above it all. Robinson often noted that Stan never said a discouraging word in front of, or behind Jackie’s back. Some thought that Musial was too much of a superstar to lower himself to racial mudslinging with players or fans who had much less talent of any sort to offer the world. Stan had taken to the field in high school with black baseball players at Donora, but I had always given Stan extra props for not joining the rampant mistreatment leveled at the Black trailblazer on his first visits to the old Sportsmen’s Park in good old racist St. Louis.

When the crew and I reached the lovely Musial property, a white painted metal street barrier had to be removed before we could take the unmarked road to the house. Stan greeted us with an outstretched hand and his patented rapidly pitched triple-play “Whadyasay, whadyasay, whadaysay?” Lil, to whom Stan had been married by that time for nearly sixty years, has suffered a bad bout with arthritis and was wheelchair bound. Pleasant, always gracious, she, too, extended us a warm welcome. So that we wouldn’t have to set up lights and trudge in and out of the house, I decided that Stan and I could repair to the backyard for his thoughts on the death of his old boss and friend, Gussie Busch. “The Man” was happy to accommodate.

Stan said Gussie had been a tough businessman, but a kind bossman. He said that he liked the fact that the Old Man hated formality and liked being “just one of the boys a lot of times.” He mentioned how kind and even solicitous Mr. Busch had been to him after the brewery purchased the Cardinals in 1953. After Stan’s record-breaking performance just four years after the acquisition, the Old Man, Stan told me, rewarded him with a nice raise. In fact, the pay hike, Stan said, was much more than Stan he had expected. Stan had never even had an agent before. Stan told me, with a very sad look in his eyes, that he would really miss his boss and his pal.

After a weak 1963 season of batting only .255, Stan said he had thought it was best for all concerned for him to give up the game, ten years after the Anheuser-Busch took ownership of the team. Stan said he was happy that the Old Man let him hang around the old Sportsman’s Park, then named Busch Stadium. He was also happy to be around the team when the new Busch Stadium had its grand opening in 1966. The team’s new home made Gussie proud.

After the interview, the crew went to the microwave truck to beam the recording back to the station downtown—using the technology Channel 4 had pioneered decades earlier. That allowed me time to continue a leisurely conversation with Stan. In retrospect, I should have taped our informal chat, too.

During the talk I learned some things I had never known about Stan The Man. As we sat in lawn chairs on his well-manicured property, Stan told me that in high school he was as interested in basketball as he was in baseball. At one point he could have gone either way, because he was offered a basketball scholarship. Think of baseball—or the Redbirds—without Musial’s historic participation.

Even more mind blowing to me was that Stan’s baseball career—long before he mastered the art of playing outfield—might have been as a pitcher. He was a pretty good hurler in high school and in the minors. The road towards the pitcher’s mound was barricaded when Stan badly banged up his pitching arm while playing outfield. If that hadn’t happened, can you imagine Musial starting a game as a pitcher? Or relieving Gibson?

And on the subject of injuries, I asked Stan what he thought about all the players being out on the disabled list for extended periods. I could tell he wanted to be diplomatic here, because he declined giving me any responses about current players on the subject of injuries. No matter how cleverly I cloaked my questions, Stan showed an amazing talent and a sly smile while dodging my curve balls. But he didn’t mind talking about the guys who played the game during his heyday.

“We were a tough bunch of guys back then,” he said. “We played hurt a lot. We had a game to play, and when you hit the field you forgot a while about this or that hurting you. You get a bruise, you pour a little iodine on it and keep on playing. You get a sprain, either you or the team doctor would tape it up real tight and you’d head back out in the field. I used to think of all the fans that paid their hard earned money to come see me play. They didn’t buy tickets to see me sitting on the bench.”

Stan was too modest, or had forgotten the exact number, but later on I learned that Stan had played in 895 straight games! The long streak was ended by an injury that you just know had to be serious. I mean, here was a guy who took just five days off the field after his tonsils and appendix were yanked out in ’47. That must be what “playing with pain” really means.

What about the big salaries being commanded these days by players? Stan, again, wouldn’t condemn any current players or salaries, and he told me, with a little coaxing, that he never made more than $100,000 in any one season. What’s more, he said the team bought the first pair of shoes for players in his day, and they would have to buy any second pair they wanted. There was no players union in his prime, and owners tried to get away with paying players as little as possible.

In our post-interview conversation, Stan mentioned that Gussie had wanted to keep him around after he hung up his cleats. So when the year 1967 rolled around, two years before Stan breezed into the Hall of Fame, Busch anointed Stan as Cardinal General manager and gave him a nice office befitting the title. Stan twiddled his thumbs in the front office for less than a year till, he told me, he “couldn’t stand being cooped up not knowing what I was doing in there.” Stan quit that job, even though the Cards shortly thereafter won a World Series.

I’ve been privileged to run into Stan frequently at civic events, especially those with a patriotic flavor. We really laid on the red, white, and blue when we appeared together one night at a Queeny Park concert in July of 2001—Stan with his harmonica and I with a tribute I had written to America.

When one is in the presence of the great Stan Musial, one could easily echo the inscription on the bronze statue of Stan that was carefully moved from the old Busch Stadium to the new Busch Stadium:

“Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior. Here stands baseball’s perfect knight.”

  

Curt Flood

When Cincinnati traded Curt Flood to St. Louis in 1957, the brilliant young centerfielder struck up a relationship with the then-flamboyant and irrepressible Sergeant Fred Grimes of the St. Louis Police Department. The colorful sergeant and his partner, Oscar Farmer, kept more law and order in my old neighborhood than was maintained in the sum total of all TV series on the subject. Sergeant Grimes’ daughter Sheila was the apple of my youthful eye at Sumner High and we were in the same homeroom. In fact, Sheila was my first date in high school. She was also at the top of our class in math and science, giving balance to my bottom-dwelling status in some of those subjects, as my report cards show.

I prevailed on Sheila to give me tutorial assistance in math, and super-tough Sergeant Grimes, much to his dismay, would occasionally find me studying with his daughter. In fact, I remember the hell he raised one time when we were studying and the door to Sheila’s room was closed during the tutorial session. I believe he threatened me with arrest and more that night. It is only through the intervention of Mama Grimes that I wasn’t tossed out onto the street.

It was in the lovely Grimes home on Margaretta that I began to see Curt Flood hanging around. Some of the black baseball players like Ted Savage and Lou Brock have told me how difficult it was for black players to find places to socialize between home games during the Fifties and Sixties, in particular. No country clubs, no fine-dining restaurants, no admission to most of the town’s movie theaters, and no hotel accommodations until federal law changed things in 1964. So Curt was among the black Redbirds who, between home games, could not check out a flick at the Loewe’s State or Loewe’s Mid-City or any of the other movie theaters on Grand Avenue. Nor could any of the brothers join the local country clubs to play a few hands of gin. They weren’t even allowed to play the country club courses as guests of members. The Missouri Athletic Club was not open to hosting Blacks for a quick dip in the pool or a crab dip in the dining room. How about a nice pasta dinner at any of the fine restaurants on The Hill? Fugetaboutit! Surely a black Cardinal baseball player could just lounge around in his hotel room. Well, not at the Chase, the Ambassador Kingsway, the Coronado, the Statler, or any major chain hotel. Whether they had two or three Golden Gloves in their luggage, a batting average of .300 in their wallet, or even if they played for the home team, black players, like nonplayers of the same color, were barred from these establishments.

My friend, former Cardinal outfielder Ted Savage (1965-1967) brought tears to my eyes at lunch one day when he told stories of how he and his black Cardinal teammates had to seek out black folks in a town on the road to put them up for a night or two or three. Even long after Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Accommodations Act of 1964. And, Ted told me, often the funeral homes in a town were the most luxurious places available for players of color to lay their heads for a good night’s sleep. Black players would actually bunk overnight and in church basements when there was no lodging available in Black homes during road series.

When the Cardinals played in town, Lucille Grimes, Sheila’s mom and police Sergeant Fred Grimes’ wife told me she could count on at least two things. She could be sure she would get a phone call from Curt Flood’s parents in California saying they would be in town and would like to stay at the Grimes home, and there would also be a call from Curt Flood to tell Lucille that he would love to come by and put his feet under her kitchen or dining room table. That’s how Curt Flood ended up so often at the comfortable and accommodating Grimes house. Mama Grimes always laid out some mighty fine grub. I was privileged to have lunch, or dinner, or a snack at the same table with Flood and the Grimeses on numerous occasions, while ostensibly studying with Sheila. Sometimes when the hash browns were being passed around, the adults hashed out some heavy-duty conversation. Talk about a “fly on the wallpaper.” Had I been a sports reporter in those days, I would have had some juicy scoops. Flood thought he should be making a lot more than the $90,000 the Cardinals’ front office was paying him at the time. And he was a grumbler, an unabashed bellyacher. But with some justification, I’m sure. Eventually, he thought, Gussie Busch and the management were trying to get rid of him. He was more than paranoid. He told the adult dinner assembly that there was a bulls-eye on his back because he was, in the words of the front office, “uppity, a trouble-maker, and a shit disturber.”

 It is understandably hard for us to fathom how much money $90,000 was back in those olden days. To offer perspective, I’ll tell you that after getting our teaching degrees, Sheila and I began teaching full time in 1965 at $5,250 a year. And we thought we were in fat city. But those were the days when a loaf of bread cost 19-cents a loaf. And my brand new ’67 Chevy Impala I took delivery of in late 1966 set me back $6,100 … stretched out in monthly payments for three years, of course. An economist friend of mine at Saint Louis University, Bonnie Wilson, computes that Curt’s $90,000 salary in today’s money would be about $507,332 and change, taking inflation into account. But I just read that Andruw Jones—whose centerfielding and batting average are somewhat comparable to Flood’s—signed a two-year, no-trade deal that will put more than $36 million in his pocket. Curt Flood was a seven-time Gold Glove winner.

Curt Flood must be rolling over in his grave to learn what less than super-spectacular centerfielders are hauling in these days. The Dodgers are awarding Juan Pierre a 5-year, $44-million deal; Gary Matthews, Jr. will take the Angels for a 5-year, $50-million ride; and Torii Hunter, no relation, will dip into the Angels’ coffers for a record 5-year $90,000,000 take. But, of course, a loaf of bread is no longer 19-cents.

These boys of summer owe all they have in summer, fall, winter and spring to little Curt Flood, the intrepid crusader. He boldly defied the rules of the day and refused to be traded to the city where he expected to encounter racially tinged epithets, catcalls, and threats on his life just like Jackie Robinson did. Certainly, he anticipated little “Brotherly Love” in Philly. Had I been old enough during the time we shared the Grimses’ hospitality, I surely would have tossed back a few brewskies to commiserate with a guy many thought was philosophically and temperamentally in far left field.

Flood said eloquently on a number of occasions: “A well-paid slave is, nonetheless, a slave.” And when he lost his Supreme Court case against baseball slavery, Flood dropped out of baseball. And ultimately he dropped – or was dropped – out of life. During my earliest days as a news anchor, in Flood’s honor, I would violate the “no editorials” policy of my position. Whenever outrageous salary offers headlined the sports segment, I would invariably say on-air to my sports colleague, “You know, every player in major league baseball, and maybe even in the minors, should each send Curt Flood a hundred bucks as a tribute to their freedom.” That would have made Flood an overnight millionaire many times over … and deservedly so. He can be called the father of free agency because of his refusal to be sold to another team.

Nonetheless, Flood’s story ended sadly. Also sad was my last encounter with him. I was researching a “Where Are They Now?” series and asked viewers to send us the name of one-time newsmakers who had dropped out of the limelight. Curt Flood’s name was high on the response list. Nobody I talked to or wrote to seemed to know where Curt was. A friend who knew him well said that Curt had become a virtual ghost, a fugitive, a runaway, a hermit. He had legal troubles and debts, I was told. And I heard from reliable sources that he had abandoned some domestic responsibilities. And a few friends who knew him suggested that Flood was hitting the bottle pretty good.

Around that time of my investigation, I was getting a haircut and mentioned to my barber that I was trying to locate the elusive, mysterious Curt Flood. A waiting customer in the barber shop overheard my inquiries and told me he thought Curt was living somewhere out in L.A. He wasn’t listed, but sure enough, through some super- sleuthing that tested all I had learned about investigative reporting, I found him. I reached him on the phone.

Curt sounded depressed. I got him to recall some of the good old days . . . which happened just before the bad old days he complained about at the Grimeses. I tried to jog his memory of the skinny little boy that used to study with Sheila, and occasionally eat with him and the grownups. He said he couldn’t remember and I reasoned “Why should he?” When I told him about my “Where Are They Now?” project he asked rather bitterly, “Who gives a shit where I am these days?” I assured him that there were tens of thousands of St. Louisans who would love to know that he was alive and well. He responded, “Well, I’m at least alive.”

“So, are you not well?” I asked with genuine concern.

“I don’t want to talk about it. We’re not recording now, are we?”

I assured him we weren’t. He asked what we wanted from him specifically. I told him I just wanted to fly out to L.A. and sit with him and videotape some reminiscences with him about his twelve years in St. Louis. Just shoot the breeze. He then threw me a bit off guard when asked what he would be paid for the interview. I told him that the station did not, would not pay for an interview of that sort.

Flood’s response was “You mean to say your cheap ass station is going to fly you out to California all expenses paid, and maybe put you up in a nice hotel someplace and pay for your meals and stuff, and they don’t have something to pay me for my time?

I was, quite frankly, a deer in the Floodlights at that point. Stunned into a pause … not even a stammer. Having flashbacks of those lively times around the Grimes kitchen table. Thankfully, after three or four beats or more, an embittered Curt Flood kick-started the conversation again.

“Well, where would you want to record this free interview, which I ‘m not much interested in doing?” he asked.

“We could, uh, uh shoot it at your house so you wouldn’t even have to leave your house,” I offered magnanimously . . . I thought.

“What?” Curt snapped. “You mean to say you wanna come trampling through my house … and use my electricity that I have to pay for … and your cheap ass station won’t even pay me for my electricity?”

Deeply saddened and stunned by the lack of reciprocal cordiality, I counter-offered, “Well, is there a little park somewhere? We could do the interview on a park bench or even standing up. And not have to use any electricity.”

“Tell you what, my friend,” Flood said with a tone that did not make the word “friend” have its traditional drift, “Lemme talk it over with my wife. And why don’t you call me back tomorrow or sometime.”

“Alright, Mr. Flood. I’ll call you back just about this same time tomorrow. Would that be okay?”

“Yeah. Bye.” He hung up. I hung up second.

It would not surprise you to learn that I was not able to reach Curt Flood the next day, or the day after that, nor any day thereafter. I tried often. But it soon became crystal clear to me that I was never going to be able to reach Flood again. Too bad.

Curt Flood, one of the greatest centerfielders in baseball history passed away about a year-and-a-half after our phone conversation. He died in virtual hiding, and in irreversible poverty. He struck out in life’s big game while those he freed would make millions of dollars that he all but personally crammed into their bulging bank accounts. And sadly, some of baseball’s millionaire players may not even know Curt Flood’s name.

  

*****

Lou Brock: Entering Baseball as a Punishment

There’s not a single time that I’ve run into Baseball Hall of Famer Lou Brock that he hasn’t hit some verbal line drives that caused me to run home to jot them down.

Did you know that this great base burglar (938 stolen lifetime) and ball banger (3,023 lifetime hits) got into baseball as the result of a punishment? Lou told me recently that when he was a boy of nine or ten down in northeast Louisiana, baseball meant nothing much to Lou. “I loved to pull pranks, and was a spitball artist in grade school. One time I fired a spitball at a girl in my class, but it hit the teacher by mistake,” Lou told me. “Miss Sofonia Young didn’t have much of a sense of humor about that. Ooh, was she hot!” Lou continued. “She made me study up and do a book report in front of the whole class as punishment. She’d handed me a Life or a Look magazine – I can’t remember which -- to get some information from an article about baseball.”

“That’s what turned my head and made me get interested in baseball,” Lou remembers. “The article said that big league baseball players were earning ten dollars a day for meal money in those days. Ten dollars a day! Some of the grownups that I knew back then were making two dollars a day for hard labor. This baseball seemed like the big time to me! I wanted to make the big bucks playing a game.”

“On our school softball team back in Collinston, Miss Young made me play first base. Every time I’d drop the ball, Miss Young, who boarded with my family, would give me five licks with a leather strap for being clumsy. That’s what made me a better player. I didn’t drop a lot of balls knowing what I’d get if I did. That punishment helped my concentration a whole lot!”

I wanted to know how he got interested in running and stealing bases. It didn’t take Brock a second to respond. “Up until the sixties,” Lou told me, “players had to be good at everything in the game: hitting, throwing, fielding, and catching. Maury Wills wasn’t particularly good at any of these things, so he concentrated on stealing bases. That fascinated me. The time of specialty skills entered the sport and began to dominate baseball. You could get by doing just one thing well.”

Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know unless you’re a card-carrying member of the Lou Brock Fan Club: Lou got his training in mad-dash running from one of the most legendary, fleet-footed runners of all time—Jesse Owens. This superstar sprinter/dasher/jumper/relayer said “Heil, no!” to Hitler and shattered any Nazi notions of Aryan athletic superiority at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. “I worked for the Humble Oil Company up in Chicago off-season when I first joined the Cubs back in 1961, and Jesse ran a little club with a Tahitian theme in Chicago. My job was to deliver heating oil to places around town … including the club that Jesse Owens ran. That’s when I struck up conversations with Mr. Owens and asked him to teach me some things about running. He told me and showed me on the Chicago University track and field that, while some folks mistakenly think running is all about your legs and feet, it’s actually about getting the quickest start by leading off with your upper body—your shoulders.” I’m sure you’ll agree that Lou excelled like no other base-stealer you’ve ever seen. And now you know that Lou learned all he knows about base-burgling thanks in part to Jesse Owens’ gold-medal-winning tip.

-0-

(Editor: Please note that “ Heil, no!” is intentional. Jkh)

Last edited

6/10/08

12:12 PM

jkh

*****

Yogi Berra

I was both surprised and relieved when Saint Louis University President Larry Biondi summoned me to his office . . . this time. As his vice president for community relations, I also chaired the committee that chose the annual commencement speakers and honorary degrees recipients. The committee was ostensibly made up of representatives of the faculty, administration, and student body. After the first round of vetting candidates, the committee members and I realized that the Reverend Father President was, and would be, the final arbiter of that speaker choice. It was immediately apparent that Fr. Biondi did, and would, reserve the right to veto any of the committee’s proposed speakers. I learned to console any of my committee colleagues who were dismayed that a committee choice did not rise to the fore with: “Hey, it’s Biondi’s candy store.” And anybody who has worked for the outspoken and dynamic SLU president over his more than twenty-five years in that post knows how the door swings in that candy store.

So when he called me into his chamber in early April 2007, he announced that that year’s speaker on May 19 would be “Yogi” Berra. Whew! That meant no more unnecessary committee meetings in my office. No more reading through reams and reams of resumes to find a slate of candidates that fit all the prerequisites of a Catholic Jesuit university Commencement speaker—nobody with any identifiable political party affiliations; no speakers with any radical, unorthodox religious affiliation; and no speaker with pro-choice or pro-contraceptive philosophies. One year the selection committee put the head of Doctors Without Borders at the top of the list of potential Commencement speaker candidates. Then the committee began to realize that while this international organization of physicians had undertaken commendable healthcare services worldwide, the group also distributes condoms in Third World nations. Oops! Scratch!

So, the Biondi choice to address the Class of ’07 would be the oft-quoted, legendary baseball hero. But I wanted to know right away from Biondi if he thought “Yogi” could hit a homerun with some 1,900 academically-steeped graduates as they set out on a new chapter in their lives. Father Biondi acknowledged that trying to get Berra to appear to be a scholastic philosopher might be a large order; a daunting challenge. After all, we both recognized, Yogi is better known for malapropisms than brilliant oratory. Biondi’s solution was that I should write Yogi’s commencement speech. He thought that I could work famous Yogiisms into an informal address. Hmmm. Maybe instead of a soliloquy … I could write a colloquy. Hmmm.

I knew I would voluntarily be leaving my SLU post on the upcoming graduation date to move a step closer to retirement and write this book . . . so why not give the Yogi thing a shot! Would this be a strike out or a grand slam? I did want to leave in good graces. And besides … once again … I had learned during my five years at SLU that it is better to accept a Biondi order with: “Thy will be done,” rather than “Forgive me, Father, for I will fail!”

I got a hold of all the books and Internet pages I could find on the famous sayings of the St. Louis-born baseball legend. There were some real beauts in the bunch. After lots of fits and starts and a mound of shredded drafts, I came up with a script that would be way different than the typical, traditional Commencement speeches you’ve heard over the years. I began to really believe that the Yogi Speech could be a hit. But if the Class of ’07 rose as one body to give Yogi and me a resounding chorus of Bronx cheers, Yogi and I could probably scamper to the dugout together to safety.

On the day before the Saturday ceremony, Yogi and I, a rookie comedy team, rehearsed our act. I had never played the straight man in front of so many people. And I’ll bet that Yogi had never given a “Godspeed graduates” speech patched together with his famous sayings.

Yogi and his beloved wife of nearly sixty years, Carmen, greeted me warmly when I arrived in the conference room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Clayton for the morning rehearsal on Friday, May 18, 1907. I am sure I was much more nervous than Yogi. But, he made me feel more comfortable when he said he and Carmen had seen me on television through the years when they had come back to town. I certainly had seen a lot of Yogi over the years. I have, however, perhaps unwittingly, quoted his pronouncements throughout my public career.

We had sent the script to Yogi before he arrived in town, but I got the idea that this wasn’t a piece of literature he had chosen to memorize in advance. We both bumbled through the script a couple of times. The Hall of Famer just could not get one of my best lines right. The exchange was supposed to go like this:

   Hunter: So, Yogi, how do you like that duck you work with?

   Berra: With orange sauce.

 Try as he might, Yogi replied instead over and over, “With orange juice.”

My first corrections, I’m afraid, came off like scolding. He looked sadder and more frustrated with each attempt to make sauce out of that juice. The solution? We scratched the line. The 13,000 people at the ceremony never heard it.

I knew Yogi would score a homerun immediate after I introduced him. When I announced to the audience that soon-to-be Doctor Yogi Berra had just celebrated his eighty-second birthday the week before this graduation ceremony, the fans in the stands burst into thunderous applause. When I announced his name, the assembly of thousands gave him a standing, rousing ovation. He must have felt like he was in a standing-room-only ballpark with a homer that cleared the bases. That relieved me of my gut fear that the young people in the graduating class might not have heard of Yogi Berra. They might have heard of the cartoon character whose name is a ripoff of Berra’s name “Yogi Bear.” And I had heard from a very reliable source that Yogi was not exactly fond of the cartoon characterization. The reception he received that day at the Scottrade Center proved me wrong on my initial trepidation.

Here’s how the Berra & Hunter Comedy Show went:

Introduction:

Hunter: Members of the SLU Class of ’07, it would be an understatement to note that those of you who leave here today with your new diplomas and degrees are going out into a troubled world.

In fact, Volume 1 of the three-volume Encyclopedia of World Problems, now in its fourth printing, describes the alarming news that there are exactly 9,832 serious problems in the world you will enter outside these doors. 9,832 serious problems. One of those nearly ten thousand world problems for some of us might be that the Encyclopedia of World Problems costs $245 a copy! And to be very parochial, another crisis for those of us in this auditorium is the coming havoc and mayhem that will be caused by the reconstruction on Highway 40/64 may make the number of serious problems in the world number 9,833 by next month.

And to confirm that we’ve got some mammoth problems out there, you can actually check with the Reuters news service’s “Alertnet” where you can find the list of the top ten world crises. The Number One world crisis, as determined by Reuters, involves the atrocities, past and ongoing, in the Congo.

Well, before you go marching off to the Congo or to any of the other 9,831 global hotspots, let’s take a time out for the rest of this hour to lighten up a bit. And let me introduce you to your guest speaker who will impart to you some invaluable, time-tested wisdom this morning.

He was mentioned just this week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Your speaker should go down on you list of stellar, quotable philosophers, right up there alongside Voltaire, Kant, Aristotle, and Locke.

In fact, I’ll bet you that you or someone you know has quoted your guest speaker more times than you can count. And you might not have even known it at the time. And let’s face it, when’s the last time you quoted Voltaire . . . in casual conversation.

But your speaker for today is known more for his outstanding accomplishments in the world of baseball than in his Aristotelian pronouncements.

He began to put words in our mouths as he hung out in dugouts and baseball fields all across the Unites States and Canada going back forty years.

He was first signed to the New York Yankees farm team in 1942 for a whopping $500. That’s $500 a year! When the Yankees moved him up as a platoon catcher in 1946, he was known as a wild, but hot hitter. In 1950, he struck out only twelve times in 597 times at bat!

He went on to become a 15-time All-Star, becoming the American League’s Most Valuable Player three times, in 1951, ’54, and ’55.

Your guest speaker played in fourteen World Series games and snagged a bundle of records including most World Series games played by a catcher and most hits on a winning team.

What’s more, your guest speaker for this special day hit the first pinch-hit homerun in World Series history back in 1947.

He became the New York Yankees skipper in 1964 and won the American League pennant that very year.

Then he went on to manage the “You Gotta Believe” Mets in 1972, and took the then-hapless Mets from last place in the final month of the season to win the National League Pennant.

That made “Old Deep Pockets,” George Steinbrenner, hire your speaker back with the Yanks team in 1984.

It’s no wonder that the man you will hear from next was elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

And one of the things about which he is most proud is that he is a native St. Louisan—born in South St. Louis on the Hill, only a Roger Clemens pitch from where we sit today.

He is here today not to talk baseball but to impart to you some of the wisdom quoted by presidents, princes, and people like us everywhere.

Please give a warm Saint Louis University welcome to a loveable guy who celebrated his eighty-second birthday just last week. “Berra of Truth and Wisdom,” Mr. Lawrence Peter Berra. You know him, and quote him often, as “Yogi” Berra . . . Heeeeeeere’s Yogiiiiiiiiiii!

(Thunderous standing ovation. I move to the stage podium set up on the left of Yogi’s podiumt; Yogi moves to podium set up on the right.)

 

Dialogue:

 Hunter: Mr. Berra, welcome home! And welcome to the Saint Louis University Commencement of the Class of ’07. We’re so glad you’re here today because we’ve heard all the great things you’ve said. . .

Berra: Oh, boy. To be honest, Julius, I didn’t really say everything I said.

Hunter: Well, Mr. Berra, how does it feel to be back in St. Louis?

Berra: Feels like Déjà vu all over again

Hunter: Since you’ve been back, have you been to the neighborhood bar on The Hill where you and all the old gang used to hang out?

Berra: Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

Hunter: And now to the graduates who will begin to blaze new trails today. What advice would you have for them when they have to make a quick decision on which path in life to take?

Berra: Dear graduates, when you come to a fork in the road, take it! In life the only poor decisions are the ones you don’t follow through on. When you leave here today you will have more choices than you ever thought possible, but when you have to make a choice, make it because you believe in it. Then stick to your guns.

Hunter: That is great advice: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
You know, the graduates have already learned that this is not a perfect world, is it?

Berra: No. If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be. People always tell me that’s a quote I said that doesn’t make much sense, but all of you understand what I’m saying, right? I know you got a good education at SLU, and I’m sure it’s opened your eyes to the people in the world who need your help. But most important, your SLU education has prepared you to give that help.

True, the world isn’t perfect, but you can make it closer to perfect than it is.

Hunter: And what would you say to the graduates who will want to throw in the towel if they step up to the plate and strike out a few times?

Berra: I’d tell ‘em it ain’t over till it’s over. I was a .285 career hitter. That means I succeeded in hitting the ball about 28 percent of the time. That made me a Hall of Famer! Think about it. Twenty-eight percent might not get you far at SLU, but when I was at the Yankees, I learned real fast not to worry about my failures. I did figure out how to learn from mistakes. That’s real important in life.

If I went back in the dugout and beat myself up, I would have been back down in the minors in no time.

There will be days when you wish you were back in class at SLU. Life gets tough, so be tougher. Stand up, take your lumps, and before long, you’ll understand what it takes to be a winner.

Hunter: Well, I’m sure there are some graduates out there who are still not sure where they want to end up in life. Got any advice?

Berra: Well, I say to that, be careful if you don’t know where you’re going in life, because you might not get there. Wherever you go, whatever you do, be the best you can be. Be the greatest. I always said. If I had been a plumber, I would have been a great plumber.

Hunter: You’re certainly living testimony to what hard work can do for these graduates.

Berra: All they’ve got to remember is this: Success is 90 percent mental, and the other half is physical. No matter how you add it up, education is the key to success. I learned from the Hall of Famers I played with. You should try to keep learning for the rest of your life.

You’ll learn from great bosses, co-workers, family, and friends. Find out what they know, and never stop learning. And I hope you will always remember that the future ain’t what it used to be. For example, a nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.

Hunter: And should these graduates just jump right into life, or should they take a little time to check out the scene first?

Berra: Well, you can always observe a lot by watching.

Hunter: So true, so true. Anything you’d like to say in closing?

Berra: I would like to thank Father Biondi and SLU for making this day necessary. It’s like my old pal Joe Dimaggio used to say about opening day: You look forward to it like a birthday party when you were a kid. I say to you, Class of 2007, go out and live your life like every day is opening day. Thank you.

Wow! Another standing “O.” Yogi really hit it out of the park with his simple but straightforward advice to the graduates. The Post-Dispatch said of the presentation:

It wasn’t so much a speech as a skit. Julius Hunter, the university’s vice president for community relations, played the straight man, asking Berra questions to set up (Berra’s) one-liners.

 The Post-Dispatch quotes one graduate as saying, “He was funny, but it was kind of dry.” According to the Post-Dispatch reporter, that student’s grandmother quickly came to Yogi’s defense, “I think he’s precious.” Another student, a twenty-nine-year-old med school grad from San Diego, is quoted as saying, “It’s amazing somebody of his prestige, at his age, can still come in and motivate.”

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Last edited

6/10/08

2:38 PM

jkh