The Boys of Summer Read online

  “Is your room all right?” Shuba said.

  “Fine. What are you doing?”

  “Just finishing up.”

  “I mean what do you do at the post office?”

  “Clerk-typist,” Shuba said. “I knew the room would be good. I put all the inspectors in the Williams Motel. I’ll be by soon as I finish. We’ve got a dinner you’ll like.”

  “I haven’t eaten much Slovakian food.”

  “It’s lasagna,” George said, sounding very serious. “Didn’t you know? I married an Italian girl.”

  Unpacking, I remembered George on the day he had joined a radio engineer and myself batting a softball in Forest Park, St. Louis, and how, taking turns pitching, we worried about upsetting George’s timing. “Just throw,” he said, “just throw.” He pulled low liners one after another in the park and that night did the same against a Cardinal pitcher called Cloyd Boyer. And then a year later a certain quickness went from his bat, and he was not a fierce hitter, although still dangerous, and outside the Schenley Hotel I saw him carrying a lightweight portable typewriter.

  “What’s that for, George?”

  “Oh,” he said, and looked around, as though afraid to be overheard. He winked. He had a plan. “I’m not gonna be through at thirty-five, like some. Maybe I’ll be a reporter. Some of those guys go on working till seventy. Look at Roscoe McGowen. So I’m teaching myself how to type.”

  “George,” I wanted to say, “to write, you have to read and know the language and how to organize and, damnit, spell.” Thinking that, I said, “Could be a pretty good idea.”

  At the door leading into Room 26 at the Williams Motel, Shotgun Shuba, now a 46-year-old male clerk-typist in the U. S. Post Office in Youngstown, Ohio, appeared heavier. The face, a study in angles, sloping brow, pointed nose, sharp chin, looked full. The middle was thick. But the sense was of solidity, rather than fat. I hadn’t remembered him as so powerful. “You could still go nine,” I said.

  “Ah.”

  “Or pinch-hit.”

  “I got no time for that stuff. Come on. Dinner’s waiting. We’ll have some red wine. You like red wine? I’ll drive.”

  In the car Shuba mentioned an old book I had written and a recent article. “About student rebels with long hair,” he said, “or something like that.”

  “About the SDS coming apart in Chicago.”

  “Yeah. That was it. Why do you waste time writing about them?” There was no harshness in his voice. He simply did not understand why anyone who was a writer, a craft he respected, would spend time, thought and typing on the New Left.

  “I try to write about a lot of things. It keeps you fresh.”

  George considered and turned into a street called Bent Willow Lane. “Kind of like exercising your mind, isn’t it?” he said finally. “Yeah. That must be it. Move around. Do different things. Sure. Keeps up your enthusiasm.” We had entered a middle-income neighborhood, of tract homes and roads that twisted, so drivers could not speed, and hyperfertilized lawns of brilliant, competitive green.

  “I thought Youngstown had mills, George,” I said.

  “Over there,” he said, indicating the northeast. “You won’t see any mills around where / live.” He pulled up to a gray split-level, saying “This is it,” and parked in an attached garage. “I finished this garage myself. I’m a home guy now. Wait till you meet my wife. She’s taking courses at Youngstown University.”

  As we walked into her kitchen, Katherine Shuba, nine years younger than George, said a warm hello and called Marlene, Mary Kay and Michael, nine to four, who greeted me solemnly over giggles. Mrs. Shuba turned off a large color television that dominated the living room and placed the children at a kitchen table. We sat promptly in the dinette. It was six o’clock. Old ball players pursue the pleasures of eating with lupine directness. Suddenly George bowed his head. Katherine clasped her hands. The children fell silent.

  “Bless us, Lord,” George said, beginning Grace. Then, in almost apologetic explanation he said, “My father said Grace in Slovakian every day of his life. He died when I was pretty young, but I’ve never forgotten it.”

  “Well, it’s something to remember.”

  “Ah,” George said and we proceeded with an excellent Italian dinner, lasagna and salad, lightened, as George had promised, with red wine.

  “So you don’t play any more or coach?”

  “I watch the kids. Maybe umpire a little. I don’t coach small kids. It doesn’t make sense to. With small kids, up till about fifteen, let ‘em have fun. You know what’s damn dumb? A father getting on a small kid, telling him this or that, stuff he can’t use much yet. All the father does is spoil the fun.”

  “Somebody must have coached you.”

  “It was a different time, and nobody coached me that much anyway. My father, from the old country, what could he teach me about baseball? What did he know?”

  “Your swing was natural.”

  “I worked very hard at it,” Shuba said.

  Katherine guided the children back to the living room, which was carpeted and comfortably furnished, but showed no sign that Shuba had hit for pennant winners or even that he had played professionally. “Oh, I’ve got some equipment still,” he said. “Maybe after we finish the wine, if you like, we can have a catch.”

  He fished a half dozen gloves from the trunk of a car and we walked to the back of the house. Shuba’s home shares three acres of greensward with other houses, framing a common play area. “If my little guy wants,” Shuba said, “he can do some hitting here.”

  The dusk light held as we started to throw. Shuba did not have an outstanding major league arm. Scouts described it as uncertain, or weak. Now he cocked that arm and fired easily. The ball shot at my Adam’s apple and I knew, with a clutch of anxiety, that I was overmatched.

  In Gamesmanship, Stephen Potter describes that clutch seizing you on a tennis court when an opponent’s service turns out to be overwhelming and you return it forty feet beyond the base line. “Cry, ‘Where was it?’ “ Potter recommends.

  “ ‘Where was what?’

  “ ‘My shot, of course.’

  “ ‘Why, it was out. It went over the fence back there.’

  “ ‘Very well. In the future please indicate clearly whether my shots are in or out.’”

  The Shubas of Youngstown live removed from English drollery and there was nothing clever or sensible to call at George. Weak or strong, he had a major league arm, and I knew what I would have to do, and hoped I could. Aim at face height and, while appearing to work easily, throw hard by snapping the forearm as I released the ball. That way there could be a rhythm to the catch, a kind of exchange. A good catch is made of sight, sensation, sound, all balancing from one side to the other. The ball is in white flight. Red stitches turning, it whacks a glove; it is back in flight and whacks the other mitt. You can tell quickly from the sound and the speed of the throws and even from the spin what is going on, who has the better arm.

  George took my throw and returned it, again hard. My glove felt small. You try to catch a ball in the pocket, so that it strikes the leather at a point slightly lower than the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of the hand within the glove. There is control there without pain. Catch a baseball farther down and it stings. Catch it farther up and you lose control. When you catch a ball in the webbing, you may not realize that you have made a catch. Each point of impact creates a different sound: thin at the webbing, dull toward the heel, resonant and profoundly right in the pocket. Sound tells when you are playing catch, how the other man is grabbing them.

  Shuba delivers a heavy ball; it smarts unless caught exactly right. Mostly he threw waist-high, moving the ball from one side to the other. I caught mindlessly, ignoring slight stinging to concentrate on my throws. They sailed true, but after ten minutes a twinge raked the inside of my right elbow. We caught in silence, communicating, as it were, with ball and glove. George was studying me and I could feel his eyes and it was a wa
rm evening and I was wondering about my arm and beginning to sweat.

  “You’ve got good body control,” Shuba called.

  “Hey. You’ve made my day.”

  Ebullient, I relaxed. As soon as the next throw left my hand, I knew it was bad. The ball sailed low, but fairly hard to Shuba’s backhand. Nimbly, angrily, he charged, scooped the ball on a short hop and fired at my face. The throw thwacked the small glove, low in the pocket, burning my hand.

  “What are you trying to do,” Shuba said, “make me look bad?”

  “No, George.” Then very slowly: “That’s the way I throw.”

  “You’re trying to make me look bad,” Shuba said, pressing his lips and shaking his head.

  “George, George. Believe me.” All the years the other writers had made jokes—“Shuba fields with his bat”—had left scars. They should have played catch with him, I thought.

  Half an hour of light remained. “Come on, George,” I said. “Show me the old neighborhood.”

  “What for?”

  “I want to see where you started playing ball.”

  “I don’t know why you’d care about something like that,” Shuba said, but led me back to the car.

  Fernwood Street was where he lived when Bent Willow Road was part of a forgotten farmer’s pasture. Wooden frame houses rise close to one another on Fernwood. Each one is painted white. “This neighborhood hasn’t changed in forty years,” Shuba said.

  “Mostly Slovakians?”

  “All Slovakians.”

  His father, John, or Jan, Shuba, left a farm in eastern Czechoslovakia during 1912 and settled in Youngstown, where other Slovak Catholics had come, and took a job in a mill. George does not know why his father left Europe, but the reason was probably economic. Before 1930 Slovakian emigration was coincident with crop failure. Since then it has been political, to escape Hitler or Soviet Communism. Slovakians have contending symbols. The drotar is an itinerant tinker, never anxious to settle down, unable to make use of the resources of the soil. A cry rang through old Slovakia: “Drotar is here; have you something to repair?” Slovakians say that drotari were the first to emigrate to America. After the long journey, nomadic longings spent, drotari settled into jobs in mines and mills. The old itinerants then built fixed, unchanging neighborhoods. The other symbol is based on the historic figure Janosik, who fled a Slovakian seminary in the seventeenth century. Slovakia still was feudal and any lord had power of life and death, but Janosik became a bandit, along the lines of Robin Hood. Caught at length, he was hanged. Disciples of Janosik were called zbojnici. When zbojnici and their idolators found the relative freedom of the United States, they turned against the romance of roguery and, like Shotgun Shuba, stood strong for law, obedience and the Church.

  “We like to keep things the way they were,” Shuba said. He parked on Fernwood, in a dead-end block. All the houses rose two stories. “Here’s where I first played,” he said. “In this street. Day after day. Three on a side, when I was little. That’s good baseball, three on a side. Each kid gets a chance.” Tall maples made borders at the sidewalks. “We played so hard, when we were kids, you’d have thought we were playing for money.

  “It was a big family. My brother John is a steel worker in a mill. Ed is a photographer for the Youngstown Vindicator. You know about my brother Joe. He’s doing very good in the Church as a monsignor, in Toronto, Canada. I’m proud of him. Counting the ones born in Czechoslovakia there were eleven of us. I was the last. Some died over there. I had one brother died here. He got the flu. They didn’t have fancy medicines. My mother gave him a lot of soup. Soup was good for the flu, but that brother died.”

  We were walking down Fernwood toward ball fields. “This is Borts Park,” Shuba said. “Mrs. Borts gave it to the city. When I got older, instead of playing in the street, I played in Borts Park. I was a second baseman.”

  “Your father must have been proud of you.”

  We continued under the tall maples. “You don’t understand the way it was. My father was forty-five years old when I was born. He never saw me play. Old country people. What did they care for baseball? He thought I should go and work in the mills like him and I didn’t want to. I wanted to play.”

  The nearest diamond at Borts Field was bare; patches of grass had been worn off. “Boy, did I play here,” Shuba said. “I had that quick bat. One year there was a Dodger tryout. It was 1943. I was seventeen, not in the mills. I was working in a grocery store. And at the cemetery on Sundays I’d pack black earth to fill around the graves. They could plant flowers in it. I’d get ten cents a box for the black dirt.

  “The Dodgers didn’t come to sign me. They wanted a pitcher. Alex Maceyko. They had me playing third. I had the quick bat, but Wid Mathews, who Rickey liked, was the scout and he signed somebody, Alex I guess, who never did much, and I went home, and forgot about it. Then it was February. I remember all the snow. Somebody come to the house on Fernwood and said, ‘George, my name is Harold Roettger. I’m with the Brooklyn Dodgers. I want to see you about a contract.’

  “I let him in and we sat down and he said he was going to offer me a bonus of $150 to sign. But I’d only collect if I was good enough to stay in baseball through July 1. I thought, hell, wouldn’t it be better, a big outfit like the Dodgers to give $150, no strings or nothing? But that was the offer and I took it.”

  Night had come. Borts Field was quiet. “Well, George,” I said, “your mother must have been proud.”

  “Ah,” Shuba said. “You know what she told me. ‘Get a job in the mills like Papa. There’s lots of better ball players than you up there.’”

  The night was warm and very still. “All right. I’ll drive you to another part of the neighborhood,” George said. It was so dark that all I could see were house lights and a bar with argon and neon signs advertising beer. George angled the car toward a corner grocery. “Dolak’s,” he said. “Where I worked. I loaded potatoes, fifty pounds to the bag, down in the basement, and carried them up. Years in the minors, they didn’t pay me much. I was a ball player, but I still had to come back winters and load bags of potatoes for Dolak.”

  The signs in the store window were hand-lettered. “SPECIAL,” one read, “HALUSKI.”

  “Like ravioli,” Shuba said. “I delivered for Dolak, too, while I was in the bush leagues. Three miles from here is the cemetery where I packed the black dirt. I worked here and I walked to the other work and in the cold it was a long way. A long way a long time ago.”

  When we returned to the split-level on Bent Willow, Katherine was studying a text on the psychology of preschool children. She is a full-faced woman and she looked up with tired eyes, but cheerful to see people, and closed the book.

  “We’re going downstairs to talk,” George said.

  “Can I bring you anything?”

  “Bring the V.O.”

  George loped downstairs. The large cellar was partly finished. A table and two chairs stood in one corner. Files had been pressed against a wall nearby. Farther along the same wall old uniforms hung from a clothing rack. Across the room was a toilet, which George had not yet gotten around to enclosing. The floor was linoleum, patterned in green and white squares.

  I walked to the rack; all the uniforms were Dodger blue and white. Across one shirt letters read “BEARS,” for the Mobile farm team; across another “ROYALS,” for Montreal. The old Brooklyn uniform bore a large blue Number 8 on the back.

  “Let me show you some things.” Shuba opened a file and took out scrapbooks. He turned the pages slowly without emotion.

  “They started me at New Orleans, but I wasn’t ready for that, and I came back to Olean and led the league in home runs that first year.”

  “So you kept the $150.”

  “Yeah, but they shoulda risked it.”

  Katherine came with the drinks. “Then to Mobile,” George said, “and they moved me to the outfield. They were thinking of me for the major leagues and I didn’t have, you know, that major league infiel
der’s glove. But I knew about my bat and one day in Montreal a year or two later, the manager says to me in batting practice, where everyone was supposed to take four swings, ‘Hey, Shuba. How come you’re taking five?’ I told him, ‘Look, let somebody else shag flies. I’m a hitter.’”

  I laughed, but George was serious. Nothing about hitting amused him. I told him Arthur Daley’s story of a catcher chattering at Charlie Gehringer at bat. Finally Gehringer turned and said, “Shut up. I’m working.”

  “I’m in Mobile,” Shuba said. “It’s ‘47. I hit twenty-one homers. Knock in 110 runs. Next spring at Vero Rickey says, ‘George, we’re sending you back to Mobile. Fine power but not enough average. We can’t promote you till you’re a .300 hitter.’ I shorten up. It’s ‘48. I bat .389. The spring after that he sends me to Mobile again. ‘Nice batting,’ Rickey says, ‘but your power fell off. We need someone who can hit them over that short right-field wall in Ebbets Field.’

  “What could I say? As long as he could option me, you know, send me down but keep me Dodger property, Rickey would do that so’s he could keep some other guy whose option ran out. Property, that’s what we were. But how many guys you know ever hit .389 and never got promoted?”

  “There’s no justice in the baseball business, George,” I said.

  The high-cheeked, Slavonic face turned hard. “The Saints want justice,” he said. “The rest of us want mercy.”

  “I thought you had some fun,” I said.

  “It wasn’t fun. I was struggling so much I couldn’t enjoy it. Snider, Pafko, Furillo, they weren’t humpties. I was fighting to stay alive. To play with guys that good was humbling. And I was kidded a lot about my fielding. In 1953 I went out to left field in Yankee Stadium for the second game of the Series. They’re bad shadows out there in the fall. You remember I took you out and walked you around to show you the shadows and the haze from cigarette smoke.

  “I went out and in the first inning someone hit a line drive and I didn’t see it good and kind of grabbed. The ball rolled up my arms, but I held on to it. With two out, somebody else hit a long one into left center and maybe I started a little late, but I just got a glove on it and held it. When I came back to the dugout, Bobby Morgan said, very loud, ‘Hey. I think they’re going for our weak spot.’”