Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

A few days later, fortified by the prospect of a lucrative book contract, I sashayed into my managing editor’s office and resigned from the Ledger-Enquirer .

Way I look at it, minor league ball back then was sort of like B movies. Thrills on the cheap. Cheap buses, cheap hotels, cheap stadiums, cheap seats, cheap equipment, cheap talent.

Cheap-cheap.

Sound like an Easter chick, eh? Or like the mechanical conductor on those subway trains out to Atlanta ’s airport. What do people call it, a “robot voice”? Yeah, a robot voice. Sorry. Can’t help it. At least with this gizmo up to my throat, I have a voice. Couple of long stretches in my life, I couldn’t talk. Back then, Mama would’ve reckoned this sci-fi gizmo an honest-to-God miracle. Awful as I sound, she’d’ve paid money to hear me talk with it.

Oh, yeah: B movies. What I meant was, they were second-line stuff. Not Gone With the Wind , not For Whom the Bell Tolls , none of that highbrow crap. Sometimes, though, they were fine. Made on the cheap, but not tacky. Monster flicks. Nifty musicals. Gangster shows. You got your money’s worth.

Same with an evening at the Highbridge ballpark, McKissic Field, watching the Hellbenders take on the Mudcats or the Boll Weevils. There was a war on. Half of what you wore and three-quarters of what you ate was rationed. Not movies, though, and not ball games. Folks flocked to both for about the same reason-to forget the war, especially the bad or the confusing news, and to have em a bang-up time. To get lost in something besides a muddle of depressing newsprint.

In June of ’43, I went into the CVL, the Chattahoochee Valley League, right off my high school team in Tenkiller, Oklahoma, near Tenkiller Lake, in Cherokee County. My county was part of the old Injun Territory set aside by the U. S. Congress for the Cherokees, that Beulahland in eastern Oklahoma the bluecoats herded them to in the winter of 1838 and ’39. The Trail of Tears. Anyway, I’m one-eighth or one-sixteenth or one-thirty-secondth Cherokee, some bollixed-up fraction, a kind of Injun octoroon.

Me heading to Georgia from Tenkiller was slogging the Trail of Tears backwards. In more ways than one. I was glad to get out of Oklahoma, to know I’d be pulling down real pay playing on an honest-to-God pro baseball squad down in Highbridge. It beat the stuffing out of pushing a mop in a factory. Or walking into a Jap-infested bunker on the ridge of some steamy coral atoll.

And it beat the fire out of unemployment.

For three years I played ball for the Tenkiller Red Stix, the only team I even tried out for in high school. As a sophomore, I played utility and pinch hit. As a junior, I started.

I idolized Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee shortstop. His first two years with the Yanks were my junior and senior years at Tenkiller High. My teammates called me Scooter because Yankee fans called Rizzuto that. Actually, they called me Sc-scooter because, if and when I talked, I st-st-stammered.

I could take that. Being called Sc-scooter, even if it made fun of my handicap, at least showed me the other fellas respected my talent. I hit like Scooter. I fielded like Scooter. I could flat-out play.

What I hated was, some of my non-ballplaying school-mates called me Dumbo. To keep from stammering, sometimes I’d just say nothing at all. I’d stare at whoever tried to talk to me. They figured me for a mute; in spitefuller words, a dummy. Also, even before I made the ball team, everyone in Tenkiller had been over to Muskogee or up to Tahlequah to see Dumbo , a Disney flick about a pint-sized elephant with humongous ears. Hilarious movie. A scream. And I was the perfect sap to stick a tag like Dumbo on because I couldn’t or wouldn’t talk and had me this really terrific set of ears. Ha ha. The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve sorta grown into them, but as a pimply-faced kid just barely over the puberty line, I looked like a drip.

Back then, kids called nerds drips. A drip equaled a nerd. My schoolmates saw me as the uncrowned king of the drips. The guys, even teammates, pulled gags on me-put horned toads in my locker or cracked raw eggs into my jockstrap. Girls giggled behind their painted fingernails. The one time I nerved up to ask a girl to a dance-a semipretty gal, not the holy homecoming queen-I stammered like Sylvester the Cat and turned fire-engine red.

“You’re sweet,” she told me, “but I’ve got this algebra test to study for.” And burst out laughing.

So I wanted out of that hick town. All my problems would go fffftht! , like a blown-out match, the instant I left Cherokee County. I’d step into Arkansas or Texas and turn into Clark Gable. (Or Alan Ladd, who was more my size.)

Talk about a naive fool.

My chance to get out of Tenkiller came from playing shortstop for the Red Stix. All our teams-track, wrestling, basketball-had the nickname Red Stix. We were called after a renegade band of Indians-Creeks, not Cherokees, but the Creeks belonged to the Five Civilized Tribes too-that’d fought General Jackson’s Tennessee militiamen at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama. The batons our track team used in relays were red, and our baseball team had red bats, even though it was hard to keep them looking decent. The barrel of my bat, for instance, was always flaking paint, letting the grain of the timber show through. I got enough hits, only the handle of my bat would stay ruby-red the entire season.

In the spring of ’43, the Red Stix regularly beat up on the squads of surrounding schools, even monster schools with a lot more students. Once we took care of an uppity bunch from Fort Smith, Arkansas. That April and May, scrapping every Tuesday and Saturday afternoon, we went fifteen and three. The folks in Tenkiller loved us. We were local heroes. Nearly every working stiff in town took time off to come to our games, even if they had to make up the lost hours later.

Tenkiller is a typical eastern Oklahoma burg: a grocery, a barber shop, a beautician’s, a pharmacy, a seed-and-feed depot, a hardware store, a mechanic or nine. Back then, our chief industry was Deck Glider, Inc. Deck Glider belonged to a Tulsa-based firm called the H. C. Hawkins Company. Before the war, Tenkiller’s Deck Glider plant made heavy-duty floor waxers. My mama’d gone to work on its assembly line in the fall of ’37. Her moonlighting outside the home irked Daddy so bad, though, it goaded him to walk.

Anyway, after Daddy left, without so much as a fare-thee-well or a forwarding address, Mama had to work to keep us fed. By the time of Pearl Harbor, she’d worked her way up to a line manager’s position. Problem was, after FDR declared war on the back-stabbing Nips, the WPB-War Production Board-told us floor waxers didn’t contribute to the defense effort. Neither did toasters, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, vending machines, toothpaste tubes, and lots of other products with metal or plastic in em. So the WPB cut the supply of materials our factory needed to make the Deck Glider. In fact, it was illegal to make a floor waxer. You could even get fined for hoarding old toothpaste tubes.

Mama nearlybout panicked. How’d she support us if Deck Glider shut down? Tenkiller didn’t offer much in the way of jobs for women. It already had all the carhops, waitresses, switchboard nellies, and secretaries it needed. Besides, any of those jobs would’ve meant a step down in pay. Mama had monthly house payments to meet. There were men, heads of bigger households bigger than ours, even scareder than Mama.

Then a section chief from H. C. Hawkins headquarters in Tulsa motored down to soothe everybody’s fears. The parent company-old Mr Hawkins had brains-had arranged some war-production contracts with Uncle Sugar. Deck Glider, Inc., would close for a month to convert its equipment and its assembly lines to the boring of gear housings for antitank guns. No one would get laid off. It might even be necessary to add on to the plant and hire some line workers from out of town. Local builders would have to put up housing for these people. Commuting-even with car pooling and special gas and tire allotments for defense workers-was unpatriotic.