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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilkerson, Roland H.

Looking for Lincoln, America in Crisis

/ by Roland H. Wilkerson, Jr.

p. cm.

Paperback: ISBN 978-1-936172-28-3
Ebook: ISBN 978-1-936172-29-0

I. Wilkerson, R. H., II. Title.

16 15 14 13 2012
5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA on acid-free paper. ∞

Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.

George Bernard Shaw

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.

The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.

And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

Elie Wiesel

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral crisis.

Dante

Chapter One

It all began with the alphabet and baseball.

I met Vickie in Mr. Roth’s sixth-grade homeroom, and we would stay together in every homeroom until we graduated from high school. The alphabet brought us together – his last name was Vickers, mine was Wall.

In our sixth-grade homeroom, Vickie sat directly in front of me in the row of desks nearest the wall of windows that opened to the seasons of the year. They were large, heavy, double hung windows like every old school in America used to have. Below the windows, running their full length, were loud rattling and whizzing gray-green ventilators framed by wooden bookshelves full of outdated dusty books. We all knew the books were never to be read again, nor was that any longer their purpose – they were just there to collect dust and look intimidating.

We lived in a small Pennsylvania valley town, a rural town of no great distinction or fame. New kids like Vickie were few and far between, making them an instant object of interest, and suspicion. The kid in front of me that morning in homeroom was definitely a “new boy,” and my first impression was that he appeared to be a rather remarkable new boy if one were to judge by appearance alone. Still, the new-boy investigation would have to wait until lunch, when we would gather all the boys to formally extend a most cordial and heartfelt welcome.

My immediate concern, as homeroom was about to begin, was to focus on Mr. Roth, who would not only be my homeroom teacher this year, but also my math teacher. While new to me as a teacher, he was not new to my family; the fact was he had been my Mom’s teacher, which was weird enough, but to one-up weird, he had lived only three houses away from us for as long as I could remember. I had long ago sized him up as a neighbor, (he got passing grades in that department, but barely, because he dressed like a teacher even while doing his yard work) but as my teacher, well, here we were entering uncharted waters.

As he carefully called out our names with the precision of a Marine sergeant on parade, Mr. Roth passed his first test with flying colors. The key to quieting the ventilators – as all kids knew and most teachers had forgotten – was to park yourself on top of the venting, lean against one of the windows and begin teaching. Since every school in America had this type of heating, I always envisioned that on any given school day successful teachers attempted to teach their little wards perched atop the ventilators of education. Or, if they were very creative, they piled the ventilators high with some weighty old books to quiet the rattling, and thereby gained freedom of movement to wander the classroom. Later in the day during math it was from such a position that Mr. Roth launched us into the math world of sixth grade and soon of fractions and percentages.

For the next seven years Vickie and I would be in the same homerooms together as well as all the other end-of-the-alphabet named kids. Homerooms that were different, yet still all eerily the same, stretched out before us, and in all of those years, Vickie and I were never more than two seats apart, in spirit even closer.

While the alphabet brought us together, baseball united us. Mr. Roth introduced us to baseball, actually to math and percentages, but I wasn’t smart enough to figure that out at first. I just thought he was trying to teach us about the game.

School began just after Labor Day, toward the end of the baseball season, when all the pennant races were just heating up. Each morning before Mr. Roth began homeroom several of the students would update the baseball standings from the night before. We would recalculate with paper and pencil the winning percentages of each team, the standings, and the statistics for the top ten players in each league. Mr. Roth had the blackboard along the side of the classroom away from the windows set aside just for baseball, and each morning a few of us would begin by erasing and washing the blackboard clear of yesterday’s standings and stat leaders and post the new updated standings and stats. I can remember thinking that this early morning “home work” was a bit unfair and bordered on the edge of child abuse, but soon the lure of baseball began to quietly work its magic on me.

When we finished our morning work, Mr. Roth in his twice-starched shirt would crisply march his buffed wing tips over to the board to check out our efforts. He would carefully scan the board and if all was not correct would tell us, “Boys, this won’t do, do it again, get it right.” He would turn and walk away more with a look of sadness than anger or disgust, as if we had failed, but failed at what, I wasn’t sure. It was no use asking him where the errors were. That was our job – to find them and correct them before homeroom began.

Even as young boys we were beginning to understand the rhythm of the game Mr. Roth was playing with us. It was not many days before we were error free, and Mr. Roth could turn away from his morning examination of our work with a “hmmmm,” and his signature tug of the ear and march back with military-like precision to his desk of neatly arranged papers. While he became absorbed in his preparations for homeroom, we became absorbed in the stats of baseball.

This was our introduction to baseball, and to the practical world of math. In the opening days of sixth grade both Vickie and I fell in love with the beauty of the game, and in love with the meaning of numbers that gave substance to the game. Numbers weren’t just numbers, but numbers were links to a team or a player; soon we would find out they were the keys to the past – to the past of baseball. Even more important was the realization that all these thousands of players with their millions of statistics had set the standard for the future of the game. Mr. Roth was pretty smart.

At the same time I was discovering my love of baseball I found a friend in Vickie. Boys don’t describe other boys. It’s not just that we don’t want to – it is genetically contrary to our molecular structure. I remember one time being required in some English class to read one of those women’s novels, maybe by Austen, I think Emily Austen, but it doesn’t really matter, you know the kind of book I mean. She went on forever describing this woman’s hair, her hair color, other facial hairs, color of eyes, cheek bones, forehead, neck, and hands, her dainty ankles, and after about two pages I still didn’t know if she was built or not. So let me get this out of the way as quickly and painlessly as possible – Vickie was small, thin, and ugly of face.

If I can try to be Austenesque-like for only a moment, I do remember that sitting right behind him that first day of school I was aware that his hair was a lot longer than I would be allowed to have, or that any of my friends could get away with. I remember thinking that all that hair might offer us the opportunity for a little tête-à-tête. I could briefly take one further moment to comment on his clothes, or, as I assumed, the clothes his mother bought for him. They were bright and very colorful. Too colorful by half for the likes of our school – not a lot of the guys did yellows, oranges, and greens. That is it, though – that’s the outside limit of my observations; I retire exhausted.

He was not Vickie until lunch break during the first day of school when we agreed as a group (Vickie was naturally excluded from this group discussion) that his real name, Neal, was most unfortunate and that from lunch forward, he would be Vickie. The motion was voted on and passed without objection. We all agreed that it was in his best interest. No one should be required to walk around central Pennsylvania being a Neal.

Selecting Vickie’s name was only one small part of our lunchtime duty. The guys met as an ad hoc committee to further our investigation of the new kid in town. What we needed to determine was exactly who this kid was and could he make it – in short was he friend or foe? Our initial impressions did not bode well for this alien – for an alien he was, on this there was total agreement. He fit the classical definition of “alien.” That is, he was not born in Mill Gate and it was likely that he came from more than fifty miles away. We began by immediately convening after lunch under the trees that fronted the school, large oaks that had historically provided us both shelter and things to throw. Unlike congressional hearings, our questions were direct, pointed, and to the mark. “Who are you?” “Where are you from?” “Why are you here?” Corollary questions followed about what he liked to do, his parents, and were there any brothers and sisters lurking in the bushes – particularly big brothers.

By the time the school bell rang for classes to resume we had our answers. To our relief there were no big brothers, but there was a matching set of two-year-old twin sisters – the latter offered no interest and we quickly dismissed them as immaterial. We took great pride in tricking him to admit that he moved to Mill Gate from Baltimore – this would prove to be one of the two most amazing pieces of information that we were to gather from our investigation. First, it was not enough that he was from Baltimore and that his parents were with the college, but when B.O. asked, “What do you like to do?” his response was like a punch to our collective gut. Even a lifetime away, I can still remember him saying, without embarrassment, I might add, “Well, I like to read – and write of course.” You could have tied every one of us to a tree for a month – no, longer – before we would ever have come up with that answer. In fact, I don’t believe we would ever have come up with such an answer. To like to read and write was not, to our collective understanding, one of life’s choices. As we went back to class we had answers, but we also had doubts. For the time being it was agreed that we would keep him on a trial basis.

This stuff about liking to read and write presented to all the guys an obvious area of concern. It didn’t seem like this kid was getting off to the best start. In brief – could he make it? In my own assessment, there were a number of pluses and minuses.

The minuses first – there were those nagging issues of reading and writing. Big hurdle. Then there was that issue of coming from faraway Baltimore. Then there was the major mistake that moms of new kids in town often make – that is, sending their little tykes – little boy tykes – to school in pretty clothes. Bad idea! If Vickie were to gain membership in our select patched-flannel gang, he would definitely have to shape-down. To be blunt, we do not do fashion in Mill Gate. I was certain that we would have to work with him on this issue, but, in time, we were all convinced that he could become messy.

On the plus side – he was shorter than I. The boys you grow up with can be any size they want to be, they are what they are. But – and this is a very big “but” – the new kid in town should plan to arrive short. It is in everyone’s best interest.

Over the next days we somehow forgot that Vickie was an alien. He was so easy to know and he knew so much without being some prissy wise-ass. It was soon understood, without ever saying it, that if you needed to know something, well, Vickie was the one to go see. Why ask an adult and get a lecture, when you could go to Vickie and get an answer? His answers were never put-downs. Nor were they ever show-offish.

Most kids tread lightly through the day because there is always some adult lurking around the next bend with one of the world’s great backhands to your ear and to your pride. We were starting to appreciate this kid from Baltimore. He was becoming our life shield. Those sudden backhands were becoming fewer and fewer. And, after all, that’s the real test, isn’t it? Any kid who can make a teacher a little less certain, a little more hesitant, is definitely worth having on your side. Vickie was indeed a keeper. Welcome to the club.

Kids from Mill Gate knew Baltimore only as a place name on a fifth grade geography test, and then probably only half got it right. We were not travelers. If Baltimore had a ring to it, it was because of football or baseball, but those were teams and not really a city. I don’t think most of the guys I knew had been more than one or two states away from home, and B.O. had never been beyond the county line. The kids in Mill Gate were free of the worrisome responsibility of deciding where to go for vacation. I do not mean to imply that we were wanting in adventures – far from it; we had the state parks for camping, and in season there was hunting and fishing, and of course, the Grange Fair in August. In my world, summertime was the busy season for Mom at Brodie’s Dairy Soft, so vacations were few and far between. I could count my trips from home on one hand and still have a finger left for picking. Certainly none of us had lived in a city. So in the area of being an experienced traveler Vickie also had things to tell us.

At school, math was difficult for me – but not “baseball math.” Baseball math was important, made sense, and was easy, especially since my newfound friend was a whiz kid with numbers. I needed to know how to figure out that the Yankees were playing at a .572 clip and that Boston was challenging right behind at .540, and that the Orioles were only four games back in the loss column, and then be ready tomorrow morning for all new numbers to appear on the sports page. When school was over for the day we would meet in the cafeteria and go over all the averages we had from last week – who was up, who was down; who was hot, who was not. At first, when I got the numbers wrong, Vickie would show me my mistake by giving me a player’s name, like Johnny Bench, and say, “Now look, if Bench went 3 for 5 yesterday and 1 for 4 Monday, what would his two-day average be?” In no time at all I could figure out how to determine batting averages, standings, and any other numbers having to do with baseball. Listening to the incoming scores at night over the radio and with yesterday’s stats in hand we could determine all the new numbers over breakfast.

Off to school and the blackboard. Look, Mom, I can fly! I was living math, and too dumb to know it. It looked like Rod Carew would win the batting crown in the American League and that Steve Carlton’s ERA would hold up to be the best in the National League. We poured over numbers and possibilities as if they were the air we needed for life. Until my first days in Mr. Roth’s class, baseball had been only a game for me, but with Mr. Roth and Vickie it became something new and important – only after a lifetime would I fully understand the importance of baseball and sixth grade in shaping my life.

By late September and into early October, the season had ended and the World Series was over; the blackboard was cleaned, and suddenly strangely empty. The World Series was won by the A’s defeating the Reds in seven games. It was the first time I had really watched the Series; oh sure, I had seen them, but never really watched them. Vickie and I watched, kept score cards, and together we listened to the games on radio and TV, and on those glorious fall weekends when the world seemed to be all about baseball, we had all the joy in life that one could wish for.

Then the last pitch of the last game was thrown and the last out recorded. The next day in school Vickie and I were knocked down. How could baseball end when school was just beginning? It was simply another example to the young that life and school are a little bit short on fairness.

“Well, Tommy,” he said, after seeing that the blackboard was clean and that Mr. Roth was finished with baseball, “why don’t we keep our own stats and our own records.”

“What do you mean, Vickie? It’s over. No games till next season.”

“Yeah, this year’s over, but we can go back to the records of other years and compare teams and players. Remember that old book that Mr. Roth has behind his desk?”

“Sure, his old blue bible.”

“Everything’s in there. That book is all we need.”

“What’s in….”

“Don’t you see? If we had that book – gosh, every team, every player.….”

“So what!”

I will be the first to admit that I didn’t get it. He had to run it by me a few more times. Then the light came on – I got it. Bingo! The nub of his thesis was that baseball was alive in the book, all day, all year, all the time, and that all we had to do was open the book to play ball. The light got brighter as we walked the halls between classes, and brighter still by lunch as we talked about how we could play baseball all year long. By the end of the day the light became a beacon. Vickie was smart and I was his disciple. Off we went to spread the word. The book was the answer; with the book we could do anything. We could make up our own all-star team from 1925 and compare it to the all-star team of 1948, or any other year; we could create the best team made up of players whose last names began with “B,” or the best left-handed team, or the best funny-named team, or the best whatever – it was endless, and it was fantastic. With that book we could do anything. The baseball season would never have to end. Homerun!

We got to homeroom early the next day to talk to Mr. Roth; actually, Vickie did the talking, and asked Mr. Roth if we could borrow “the book.” “Which book boys?” he asked. Vickie said, as brave as only a new kid in town could, that we wanted to borrow “the baseball book, the old blue book.” And to sink his hook in a little deeper Vickie looked up, like that angel near the altar in church, and said, “You see, Mr. Roth, we love the game.” I thought he had overplayed his hand, but there we were. It was too late now to bring in a relief pitcher. Mr. Roth looked at us for a long time – as if we had asked for the keys to his car, then he slowly turned, walked to the windows, and looked out toward the distant mountains. What do we do now, I thought, stay, sit down, or leave? What?

It’s funny how sometimes a moment in time, coming without warning or fanfare in childhood, remains with you forever. Why that moment? Was it defining? I remember Mr. Roth slowly turning from the window and walking to his desk. He picked up the book and opened it. “Do you know who Lou Gehrig is?” I’m not sure what we said, I’m not even sure we said anything. “Lou Gehrig!” he repeated. I don’t know why, but I knew that that moment was important to Mr. Roth, and to Vickie and to me. He closed the book and handed it to us on the condition that we guard it with our lives. In fact, he made us understand that if there was ever any question of saving either ourselves or the book we were not to hesitate, not to blink, but to calmly, rationally save the book. For Mr. Roth that was as close as he would ever get to humor. The moment was over. “Get out of here,” he said, “you shouldn’t even be in here for another ten minutes. Off!”

Around the school and in the halls Mr. Roth had a well-earned reputation as a wing-tipped, spit and polish type of guy, a no-nonsense type of guy. In other words, on the combined warm and friendly scale of one to ten, with one being ‘icy cold,’ he consistently registered a three. He was the kind of adult whom you could not possibly imagine ever having been a kid – a kid who laughed, sneaked about innocently, farted in crowded rooms, or proudly earned school detentions. No, that would not have been our Mr. Roth. Our collective image of Mr. Roth was that he had been born into the world a math teacher at the age of forty-five, a small, pencil-thin man, and so remained. Further accenting the theme of thinness were his thin lips topped with a paper-thin mustache. We could, with very little effort, make his thin lips disappear into the thinness of his face with one or two wrong answers, and the gang took more pleasure than is polite in making his lips disappear on a regular basis. But for that brief moment before homeroom when he gave us the blue book he was no longer Mr. Roth. He wasn’t a teacher. He wasn’t even a neighbor. For one brief moment he was one of us. For one brief moment, we were three companions in baseball. And that one brief moment lasted forever, for in that brief moment began a friendship that would grow and grow to last a lifetime.

On our way home from school, with the book safely tucked in Vickie’s backpack, I began to look at him with newfound respect. I remember thinking to myself, “This kid’s not half bad.” Still, I made a mental note that I needed to work with him on dipping it out a little too thick. So, as we got close to home, I said, “Where did you ever get that ‘love of the game’ stuff?” He looked at me the way a grown up looks at a kid who has just asked the obvious. “But Tommy,” he said. “We do love the game.”

“OK, Vickie, OK, but you got to be careful with that ‘love stuff.’ We don’t do a lot of that love stuff around here. It’s a little creepy if you must know. Suppose some of the guys heard us talkin’ about that kind of stuff. I’d have to move out of town and take you with me.”

“Results, Tommy, results,” he said with a smile on his face. “We’ve got the book, and a new baseball season is about to begin.”

“The book,” a dark blue, serious-colored book, was the official book of baseball, containing the names and statistics of every player and pitcher, with the averages of all who had ever played the game. Every team, with their standings. The World Series scores and All-Star stats. Everything about the history of baseball was in the book – all were neatly contained and arranged in this old thumb-licked blue book of Mr. Roth’s. Who won the batting title in the National League in 1908? In the book. Who stole the most bases in 1922? In the book. What was Ty Cobb’s nickname? In the book.

It was a book of more than two thousand pages of fine print containing little more than column after column, page after page of statistics. No opinions, no lies, no prejudices: the Book was packed from beginning to end with honest achievement. There were no failures in the Book because to make it to the major leagues was the achievement. Even the worst player to ever play was in the book, and to be in the book was all the joy in life that the worst player would ever need to hold his head high. Mr. Roth had handed Vickie the book without fear or hesitation and Vickie, as in some ritual rite of passage, had carefully placed it in his guarded backpack.

In that moment of transfer, Mr. Roth had looked like he wanted to be us – young and discovering baseball for the first time; like he wanted to go with us and sit in some far off corner and rediscover his love. In that moment he had not been old or a teacher, but just a baseball fan. Years later Vickie recalled the moment, saying it had been like Mr. Roth knew that he was passing on the future of baseball to us – and that the future was safe.

Baseball, thanks to Vickie, wasn’t over in October; it could now run the entire year – and a year in sixth grade was forever.

I can now admit to myself that I was correctly placed in sixth grade. In fact, I believe my teachers would have argued the point that sixth grade was a bit of a stretch for me. Not for Vickie. I recognized early on that Vickie was actually a closet ninth-grader. No more proof was needed than the quickness with which he extended our baseball season.

I have tried to recall what it must have felt like to “read” the book for the first time. It must have been numbingly nonsensical, the way the stock market pages still are to me today. The book at first glance appeared to be overwhelming – an incomprehensible maze of meaningless numbers that promised only failure to all who opened its pages. My own defense was that I was only in sixth grade and what could anyone expect from a kid. Faced with such an obstacle I could have rapidly lost interest in this winter baseball thing and, also, might have lost confidence in the “wunderkind.”

Vickie, however, quickly came to the rescue. He showed me that the wonder of the book was that there was no need to begin at the beginning – or for that matter to end at the last page. Baseball was alive in the book; all we had to do was open it. It was one great book! Its magic was that it was a book that didn’t have to be read. As a matter of fact, it was a book that shouldn’t be read at all. That fact alone, to any sixth-grade boy worth his salt, made it special.

The book even made school tolerable. The book didn’t even have very many sentences, let alone dangling participles, or split infinitives. This wasn’t one of those English novel types that demanded starting on page one and tortuously plodding your way to the end, but rather a most magical book that encouraged you to discover the mysteries found on any of its pages, or even any single line on any page.

There was page 1155 where I met Mel Ott. Ott ushered in all the wonders at the top of page 1155 and Mickey Owen anchored the bottom of the page. This was the beginning, later we would discover that while Ott was a hero to New York, Owen was the goat of goats – go ahead, check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me. And once you discovered Ott and Owen, then you could proceed directly to page 682 and meet one of the real giants of baseball – Ernie Banks. Look at his numbers: 512 home runs – for a shortstop and almost 3000 hits; Banks was a ballplayer, one of the best to ever play the game. They appeared to me as the kind of numbers that those guys on Mount Olympus would have had if they played a little ball. Every ballplayer gets a line in the book for every year they play, but the truly great players like Banks or Stan Musial, get line after line earned year by year. And what lines they were. That one line of one year told you everything – at bats, runs, hits, singles, and home runs, everything the player did that year. Unless you were a pitcher, then the book listed your wins and losses, and all the other stuff like strikeouts and walks.

There were names and more names – endless names. Sometimes they were strange names, sometimes humorous like “Puddin’ Head Jones,” or “Daffy Dean,” but always they were names that called out to Vickie and me, saying, “Hey kid! Here I am. What do you think?” Names we did not know, but names like Phil Rizzuto, Robin Roberts, and Bob Feller who became our gods of baseball. They were all there on a page, all wanting to be remembered. How could you not love a book like that? We read the book, we studied the book, and bits and pieces of a name or a line became burned into our memory to the point that a lifetime later they would still be there. Baseball was not over with the last out of the World Series. Baseball continued all winter long in the basement of Vickie’s house.

Let me go back for a minute to talk about Vickie being a closet ninth-grader. Basically, being smart and a boy in sixth grade is not a good thing. I believe that most thoughtful people know that to be true. I’m sure there are some categories of people who may not think so, but they can generally be dismissed as inconsequential and non-participants. Real people, sensible people, people well grounded in getting along in this world, know it is not smart for a boy to be smart. Then along came Vickie.

Almost from day one everything we were doing in our classes seemed to be not only effortless for Vickie, but also enjoyable. He seemed to really like school. He was thumbing his nose at the conventional wisdom that our gang lived by – that being smart and enjoying it is of little significance in a girl, but in a boy is most troubling. At least to the other guys in school. I’ll put it to you – how would you feel about a guy who could go to the blackboard and diagram a sentence? Correctly! On purpose! How would you feel about a guy who knew what “pluperfect” meant? That seemed to be the classic telltale sign of a boy who was about to have a falling out with his peers. So there we were faced with the task of sizing-up the new kid. He was new – strike one. He was smart – strike two. He liked school – a swinging strike three. “You’re out!”

Still, somehow it worked for Vickie. Day one, we changed his name; we gave him a girl’s name, and he loved it. Day two, he was helping me with fractions and percentages without a trace of smugness. Day three, he – well you get the idea. He wore being smart as comfortably as an old shirt. And this next bit of oddness was really strange. Somehow Vickie got away with refusing to do our homework for us or giving us his, but never would he refuse to help us do our homework. Vickie would stay after school to help the guys, or go over after dinner to one of our houses. He had the potential to be too helpful, too good. In short, he was the kind of kid who could easily be disliked. That was not a good formula for success, yet the new kid in town pulled it off.

The new kid in town moved into a new house with a new lawn on a new street in the only new development the town had ever experienced. Before this construction boom of a half dozen new streets and about fifty or so houses our town’s last growth spurt had been some time in the 1920s. We were basically an anti-growth town that found comfort in the sameness and predictability life offered. The people in Mill Gate did not embrace change in either a revolutionary or an evolutionary package and would probably have found their ideal town in some small medieval Bavarian village with a market day on Tuesday. I’m not sure how much the people of Mill Gate understood the impact the new development, Olson Estates, would have upon their lives, but later, years later, we would all come to realize that the development was the first chipping away of who we were in Mill Gate. My Mom was different. She knew right away. She could smell it. She knew the development would destroy our town. As usual she was right, but only time would validate her fears.

Vickie’s house was only a short bike ride away from mine in what had been the old Olson farm and was now Olson Estates, and it was from there that we set out to master baseball. The basement was perfect – large, damp, empty, and unfinished. It was a great place for us to play, and a place to be avoided by any sensible adult. It was a place that enabled us to learn to slide into bases (actually old pillows) like Maury Wills of the Dodgers or to throw a ball against the wall to a chalk drawn first baseman. To practice our swing we attached a tennis ball to a rope suspended from the ceiling and swung at the ball with the bat till our hands were blistered. Now, years later, it seems in my mind that it was in Vickie’s basement I spent my next three winters, only coming out in springtime like a bear from his den.

For us, the basement became everything – an indoor ballpark, club house, game room, and library, and the Vickers stocked it with all the things life required – TV, a fridge loaded with a seemingly endless supply of soda and junk food, and off to one side, a Ping-Pong table. Mr. Vickers was one of those rare adults who had the knack of beginning a conversation with a kid with, “Would you guys like a….” This ability kids view as a true blessing, and in our particular situation it enabled us to redesign the basement to meet our baseball needs. To maintain the sanity of those upstairs Mr. Vickers loaded the basement ceiling with lots of sound deadening insulation, and a sign on the door leading down to our world that read: BALLPLAYERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT!

“The book,” Mr. Roth’s book, always on the Ping-Pong table, was not only old and dog-eared, but outdated as well. It only went up to 1965. But we never saw its imperfections; we only felt its power to draw us into another world, a world of the past. If our two-man club had a CEO it was Vickie. His mind was always working on the next plan; he was an un-kid like kid. On weekends we would go to garage sales searching for old signed gloves, bats, and baseball cards. Once found and price negotiated, we would tote our newly found treasures back to Vickie’s to check everything out in the book. What we found as kids are all now part of a valuable collection that I still “play with.” We kept records of the Yankees and the Mets and soon the Pirates and the Phillies. We would look at the same pictures over and over again – pictures of Johnny Sain as he started his wind up or of Monte Irvin as he stood in the batter’s box or pictures of Willie Mays as he slid into second base. Vickie was the inventor of our games and those games filled our childhood.

Chapter Two

Not only was Vickie’s house new, but so were his parents, at least when compared to mine. My folks had married when they were young, both in their early twenties and had wanted, so I’m told, to have a large family; but my mother was unable to have children. They went to doctors, took stress-free vacations, tried special food diets, and watched for the waning phases of the moon. Mom even had Dad join her in yoga classes. I’m sure yoga must have been the last concession for Dad, for if there was ever anyone more unreceptive to the mental and physical subtleties of the mysteries of the East than Dad, well, I would like to meet them. Name two other people who attended yoga classes in a NASCAR jacket – how about one.

So they lived their life together just the two of them. They were in love, happy, but without children. They had resigned themselves to be childless until, while in South Carolina at a race, my mother announced to Dad that she was pregnant. She was thirty-eight; he was forty-one; and I was a miracle.

I have always wished that I could have been there when Mom announced my pending arrival. I don’t think Joseph could have been more amazed. I have asked Mom time and again to tell the story of how Dad reacted to the news of his approaching fatherhood. To this day, it remains my favorite non-baseball story. You need to know that Dad was always slow to respond to life’s surprises (Mom’s words: Dad preferred to see himself as deliberate and thoughtful). Even with the phone or doorbell, there was significant lapsed time between the moment Dad heard the ring and the early phases of initial movement toward the door. Mom still insists that her news did not elicit a response until hours after the races were over; and they were in the car heading home.

According to Mom the ride home was filled with an endless round of “are you sures”, “I’ll be damns”, and “wows”, all accompanied by a shaking head and a lead foot. Mom thought him so traumatized by the blessed coming that from that moment on she almost completely stopped telling Dad about any event too far in the future, or too momentous. She felt, and rightly so, that he was at his best when not planning more than three meals out.

I fulfilled the dreams of their youth; I’m not so sure I fulfilled the dreams of their middle age. There were times when I now recall Dad, then in his fifties, looking at his little cherub in a most puzzled and quizzical manner. When he looked at me in that special way, he often seemed to have the look that comes to one when they gaze upon one of the mysteries of life – a mystery for which there did not appear to be a satisfactory answer. Later in life, one of Dad’s frequent queries to the gods was, “Oh, where is the justice?” Mom always credited my birth with sparking a more religious fervor in Dad, and I think that was true.

And I, in turn, thought of times like back-to-school nights, when gazing at my parents, I was surprised to see how different my folks looked from the other kids’ parents. This was particularly true of my father who did not seem to be wearing well. I suspected my friends also noticed that about my father and were just too sensitive to make comments.

The album of their wedding showed two young people that I would never know. Dad was Dad, and as a kid you don’t really think too much about who God has you sharing the TV room with, or why he seems to be always so out of breath. But one day when my parents were with other parents of my friends it became clear to me. The obvious had a name – my parents were old. They didn’t just look old, they were old. Mom could hide it pretty well; she was tall, slender, carried herself with grace, and moved with a crisp let’s-go-get-it-done walk. Mom worked at the dairy store, worked at home, and was of the new breed of women that worked out. But Dad – well – he could hide nothing. He had surrendered to life unflinchingly and without shame at the first signs of approaching age. With his surrender his face and body took on the look and texture of a punched pillow. But he was a punched pillow that was both cozy and welcoming. He was not one to run away from the aging process. He sat down, got comfortable, and welcomed it. There would be no health club in his future.

Over the years Mom had decorated the house with the growing realization that there would be no children, and then came their vacation in the Carolinas. Later, to make concessions, Mom slowly evolved the house into two entities – one part of the house for mature, responsible people, and the other part of the house for Dad and me. The mature part of the house had neat slender furnishings with living room chairs that forbade sleep, and a pale pinkish sofa that dared you to try to stretch out; the dining room, perhaps the most formidable room in the house was furnished for dining – or as Mom preferred to say, “fine dining.”

Like all parts of Mom’s half of the house the motif was high-end arts and craft, with walls always freshly papered with flowers and painted to a shine. Mom’s part of the house featured pinkish hues. Mom liked pinkish hues. Mom liked saying pinkish hues. In our part of the house we did not do hues, but rather sought out things covered in rich stain proof vinyl.

As a rule, Dad and I did not do dining well; we both majored in eating. Each dining room chair demanded a sit up straight attitude, supported by a table that all but yelled, “Hey, Barbarians! Elbows off the table!” And when we found the table prettily dressed we knew Mom had us lined up for a long night that would require us to lift each thinly stemmed glass with skill – and even more skill for the salad off to our left. Salads, by nature, are a little tricky and require small motor skills attuned to moving a dripping fork loaded with mixed textures about two feet to the right. The skill in all this seems to be in mastering a fluid motion across the body with the fork in the right hand. Therein lies the rub. If left handed forking was not so socially frowned upon, then it is my contention that the salad would not be nearly as daunting. Dad and I always felt, with some justification, that so many of the world’s problems could have been solved by just “moving the bloody salad over to the right.” His appeals, however, were lost in the winds. All in all, the entire dining room experience was fraught with endless pitfalls.

These adult rooms, and the dining room in particular, were generally off limits to those without an invitation, and for that Dad and I took comfort and not offense. For social events, birthdays (not Dad’s), and other special events, when Dad was required to enter and sit in the “grownups” part of the house, it was always a bad fit. In that domain there could be no place for Dad to slouch and no place to hide from conversation, which seldom included cars or football, but, perhaps most importantly, began nowhere and ended nowhere.

In our half of the house, however, Dad had very strong opinions about how best to create the good life. I suspect Dad, like most men throughout this great land, was an expert on what did and did not constitute the characteristics of a well-designed chair. Over the years Dad had meticulously identified several universal features common to the perfect manly chair. This is not to put too fine an edge on Dad’s chair requirement. Just let it be said that the basic requirements of a good chair should include being covered in gobs of a leather-like substance, providing lots of pockets and hiding places, and having at least three forward gears. Needless to say, Mom’s chairs failed to meet any of Dad’s criteria for the perfect chair. Chairs in Mom’s adult world did not call out to you to come over and collapse, put your feet up, and get comfy. To the contrary, they yelled, “Attention!”

Dad, in a good year, might be exposed to this hostile and alien world of Mom’s for only a handful of days, and in that there was a blessing. My exclusion from most of these events was guaranteed by their being defined by Mom as “adult nights.” Dad at first tried to seek exemption by definition from these “adult nights,” but Mom just shook off his protestations, cleaned him up as best she could, marched him out, and hoped for the best.

Playing our cards right, Dad and I could pretty much move about the house without entering Mom’s area or even making her aware that we were about. Unless she was in the kitchen. Then our worlds collided.

We could plow our way from the back door to the kitchen, to the family room, to the bath, and to the stairs that took us either upstairs or to the basement. This part of the house, what Mom called the “other part of the house,” what we called our part of the house, had overstuffed, tacky, bulletproof furniture with the biggest TV and latest technology available. It was certainly user friendly. Need I add that the house was not evenly divided? I have referred to Mom’s half and our half, but that was only a figure of speech – reality had it closer to an 80:20 split with the men on the short end of the divide. Most of the house was not kid – or Dad – friendly, but in our part we reigned supreme.

Dad used our shared space for watching his shows – that is, to sleep. By 8:30 on winter nights, as Dad began to doze off, the turf was mine. If we did have a slight problem in our father-son relationship it centered on “our” part of the house. It was the classic territorial dispute. As an only child the idea of sharing was naturally totally foreign to me. For my father, I now realize the fact that after all those years of being the only child in the house, and now having to share his space – well, it was, at best, disconcerting. In fact, Dad’s fundamental position on the question of sharing was based on the premise of “first come, first served,” and with all the logic behind his case he argued that he had been there first. He further argued that his position could be traced all the way back to First Corinthians, or at least to several of the spiritual hymns of yore. Even armed with the might of Biblical justice he knew in his heart of hearts that the battle for space was a battle that had slowly seen the tide turn against him. Dad took some solace in still being in full possession of his chair. Fortunately for me he was of a nature that sought compromise, and I was of a nature to wait things out.

Vickie’s house was different. It was new, large – actually, huge – and could have been designed by a ten-year-old kid. It had lots of rooms to play in and things to play with, and the thing to play with most often was the twins. They were usually camped out in a stadium-sized playpen placed between the kitchen and the family room; at the time “family room” was a new concept for me, and I suspect for most of Mill Gate.

Then there was the yard. The yards in Mill Gate were all useful yards with vegetable gardens and a few pots lying about filled with flowers. The people of Mill Gate filled in the remaining few empty inches of unclaimed space in their yards with collectibles that acted as obstacles to prevent a kid from getting up a good run without either breaking this or stepping on that. Our yards were to stroll in, and work in, and eventually to sit in. Not Vickie’s. The Vickers’ was a yard built for a kid with a pony. It was huge, an almost endless expanse of emptiness that faded away into the cornfields and the mountains beyond. Look as you might there was nothing in the yard for a kid to break, except for the occasional oak tree, which offered its own defense.

The Vickers’ house was one of the houses that Mom had taken an immediate dislike to when it was still in the early stages of springing up out of the earth. To her it sent all the wrong messages – not just the Vickers’ house, but all the houses that scarred what had once been the old Olson farm. By the end of August the Vickers’ house and many of the others were in the final stages of being finished. Soon families began to move in. To Mom, the new houses with their massive front yards, long winding drives, and walls of windows weren’t really houses the way we had always used the word, they were mansions, and it was that very word, “mansions,” that gave Mom an uneasy feeling. In a word, those houses were threatening Mom’s world. To me, on the other hand, they looked awesome – they looked as if they had been designed for some Hollywood star with oodles of money, and they yelled for attention.

Vickie’s parents were also of a design that a kid could appreciate. Compared to mine they were young and silly – silly with each other and silly with us. In an age when it was no longer proper to describe a woman as first being beautiful, and then as something else, with Mrs. Vickers it simply could not be avoided. She was beautiful. Mr. Vickers was not, but was saved from being ugly by his laughing face perched atop a long thin frame and a shock of red hair that seemed to have a will of its own.

Soon, nothing they did surprised me, but that had not always been the case. The first time that I saw Mr. Vickers he was in full gallop across their back yard in pursuit of a much faster Mrs. Vickers, her ponytail a-bobbing. She was screaming and yelling in a way that had not been heard in our town since the famous Indian raid of ’06. In his hand he seemed to be carrying, as he ran by me – not stopping for introductions, I might add – a cooking pan filled with water. As Mrs. Vickers approached the edge of the yard you could tell that she was contemplating taking the race into the cornfield and beyond – but she didn’t. She stopped and bravely faced her adversary, all the while screaming and laughing to near tears. “You wouldn’t dare, you wouldn’t dare,” she yelled with a stern voice, but a stern voice that was betrayed by twinkling eyes. She was in the middle of another one of those “you wouldn’t dares” when Mr. Vickers did dare, and his aim was commendable. He nailed her with such precision and pride that even the most casual observer would be forced to conclude that his accuracy had to be the result of years of practice. They both paused, and then continued the race, only now Mrs. Vickers was doing the chasing. But you could tell that Mr. Vickers was moving without a plan and with little confidence and that the battle would soon be over. In half a jiffy Mrs. Vickers had her man on the ground, and it was easy to tell that she was one that did not favor taking prisoners. As she knocked Mr. Vickers about their laughter and screams filled the yard and echoed through the cornfields. Only then did they appear to notice that there was a witness at hand – if this domestic dispute were to end up in the courts – and Mrs. Vickers, with barely a slow down to the blows on the back of Mr. Vickers, said, “Oh, you must be Tommy. Go on in. Neal’s waiting for you. Now if you will excuse me for a minute, I’m not quite done.” I remember thinking that it would be best if I just ignored Mr. Vickers’s cries for help; it somehow didn’t seem prudent at the time to choose sides.