The Boys of Summer Read online

  “That’s in my head. What I didn’t know is over on the Yankee bench Mize and the others have been kidding Collins. They tell him the World Series goat record is five strikeouts. One more and his name goes into the book forever.

  “He goes to the plate entirely defensive. He’s choking up six inches on bat. He’s using it like a fly swatter.

  “I get two strikes on him real fast. Still, I have this fear of the short porch in right. The last. pitch I throw is a curve and it’s a dandy. It snaps off and it’s about ankle-high. So help me, he swings straight down. He beats it into the ground and gets enough of the ball to nub it back to me. I get my record. Think of the two minds. It ends with me scared to death of the long ball and Collins scared to death of striking out. He doesn’t get to hit the long ball and I don’t get to strike him out.” Erskine grinned and refilled our glasses.

  “A great thing about our family comes ten years later. It’s 1963. Sandy Koufax goes out and strikes out fifteen Yankees. We’re living here then, but we see it on television. And one of the boys, looking real blue, says, ‘Don’t feel sad, Dad. You still hold the record for righthanders.’

  “All of the kids give pleasure, in different ways, the older boys, Susan, Jimmy. It’s hard for some to understand that Jimmy is fun. Heck, we had an Olympics for all the retarded kids of Madison County and Jimmy won a big event.”

  “What event was that, Carl?”

  “Ball bounce. He bounced a basketball twenty-one times.”

  Erskine sipped at his Coke. “You wonder, of course. You look for guilt. When was he conceived? Was somebody overtired? Did you really want him? A few months along in pregnancy Betty got a virus and ran 103. Did that affect Jim? Whose fault is it? We’ve talked to scientists and doctors and you know what mongolism is? A kind of genetic accident. There’s an extra chromosome there that can come from mother or father and no one has any idea why, except that illness or being tired doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. You establish that, a man and his wife, and go on from there. You’re not alone. Jimmy isn’t alone. There are three thousand retarded children just here in Madison County, and when we came back to live here, there wasn’t any place for them. I’m on a committee. We’ve set up schools. We’re making beginnings.”

  Easy in his den, sitting against his louvered bookcases, the son of the Middle Border let his mind range. “The Erskines are Scots. It would have been my great-great-great-grandfather who settled in Virginia, and then moved on to Boone County, Indiana. That’s sixty miles west. I remembered my Scottish background once in the Ebbets Field clubhouse when a lady wrote me a letter. She lived in Scotland and had seen my picture in a magazine. I must be Scottish and a relative of hers. I looked just like her Uncle Willie.”

  “Willie Erskine?”

  “Or something.”

  “How do Presbyterian Scots become Indiana Baptists?”

  “Easy. The Baptists take anybody.”

  He got up and brought in a dish of nuts and picked up his story. “When my father was very small—Dad, if he were living, would be eighty-six years old—near the end of the nineteenth century, the Erskines left Boone County and moved here. Anderson was a center of glass-blowing, and there was a naturalgas industry. My family had swampy farmland in Boone County they’d gotten for twenty-five cents an acre. Now it’s been drained, and it’s really valuable. But there are Scots and there are Scots. My family sold the land for twenty-six cents an acre, or maybe twenty-four.

  “The auto industry came to Anderson long ago and General Motors tied in with an electrical company called Remy Brothers. And that was Delco Remy, spark plugs and electrical systems. There are seventeen local plants. There’s no one who’s been here any time who hasn’t worked part of his life—a year, a month, a week—for Delco Remy.

  “My Dad was real interested in baseball, and I guess I had the most promise of his three boys. At night at the side of the house, there’d be four or five congregated for catch. It got to be quite a thing for these older people to play burnout with me. You know. Step closer and closer, keep throwing harder and harder. I’d hang in and end up with a bruised hand. At nine, I was pitching from sixty feet.

  “It was Dad who showed me a curve. First he taught what he had: the old barnyard roundhouse. You threw it sidearm and it broke flat. No break at all, except sideways. When I was eleven, Dad bought a book on pitching. We’re in the living room. Dad has the pitching book in his left hand, held open with a thumb and he has a baseball in his right hand. He’s reading, and very engrossed. The arm is carried back. The wrist is cocked. At this position you come forward with a snap and a spin of the fingers. He goes through the motion, staring at the book. He releases the baseball. The ball goes through the doorway to the dining room and into a big china cupboard with a glass front. It breaks the glass. It breaks the dishes. We stand there. Dishes keep falling out. My mother comes in.” Erskine’s eyebrows rose in merriment. “Maybe a year afterward my father said that was the best break he ever got on a curve.”

  It was the sort of boyhood Booth Tarkington memorialized with a romantic Saturday Evening Post glow, but Erskine is an existential man. “I guess there wasn’t any money,” he said. “I needed a mastoid operation and for a long time I’d keep bringing laundry to the doctor’s house. My mother was paying the surgeon by taking in his wash.

  “Around 1930 there was a lynching thirty miles north in a town called Marion. The day after it happened, Dad drove me up and showed me where it was. Two Negroes had been taken out of the jail and hung in the jailyard. The bark was skinned off the tree where they were hung. I can still see that naked branch. There had been a scramble. People had made off with things as souvenirs. But there was a piece of rope. I saw a lynching rope before I was ten.” His soft voice carried controlled horror.

  “One Negro boy grew up in my neighborhood, Johnny Wilson. We played grade school basketball together; he made allstate in high school and went on to the Globetrotters. He’s a high school coach today. Jump in’ Johnny Wilson ate maybe as many meals at my home as he did in his own. With a background like that, the Robinson experience simply was no problem. It was really beautiful in a way.

  “Somewhere Jack said he appreciated help from some white teammates in establishing himself, but to me it goes the opposite. It’s 1948. The Dodgers want me from Fort Worth. I’m twenty-one and scared. I don’t know anybody on the big club. I cut their names from the newspapers when I was a kid. The team is in Pittsburgh. I walk into the Forbes Field dressing room carrying my duffel bag. Just inside the door Jackie Robinson comes over, sticks out his hand and says, ‘After I hit against you in spring training, I knew you’d be up here. I didn’t know when, but I knew it would happen. Welcome.’”

  Erskine’s face lit. “Man,” he said, “I’d have been grateful if anyone had said ‘Hello.’ And to get this not from just any ball player but from Jackie Robinson. I pitched that day and won in relief.

  “Whenever Jack came to the mound, he always gave me the feeling he knew I could do the job. He just wanted to reassure me. Whatever words he used, the effect was: There’s no question about it. We know you can do it. Here’s the ball. Get it done. Times when I wasn’t sure I could do it myself, he seemed to be.

  “Now here’s what bothers me. He wins a game. We go to the next town. We’re all on the train, a team. But leaving the station, he doesn’t ride on the team bus. He has to go off by himself. He can’t stay in the same hotel. But I didn’t do anything about it. Why? Why didn’t I say, ‘Something’s wrong here. I’m not going to let this happen. Wherever he’s going, I’m going with him.’

  “I never did. I sat like everybody else, and I thought, ‘Good. He’s getting a chance to play major league ball. Isn’t that great?’ And that’s as far as I was at that time.

  “Now I hear people putting him down. Black people. To Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown, he’s a period piece. When I hear that, I feel sorry for them. Carmichael and Brown can never understand what Robinson
did. How hard it was. What a great victory.

  “But he can understand them. He was a young black man once, and mad and hurt. He knows their feeling, and their ignorance must hurt him more.”

  In the little Indiana den, it is the old story of the father and the son, a startling sunburst over autumn haze, expressed by a father whose own son is robbed of expression.

  Anderson, Indiana, site of the annual Church of God Camp Meeting, thirty thousand strong gathered within and about Anderson College’s Styrofoam-domed amphitheater, dubbed “The Turtle” by undergraduates, is a community that takes pride in its parks. “There are thirty-eight in all,” said Carl Erskine, the morning go-getter. He had risen early, driven Jimmy to school at the Methodist church on Jackson Street, phoned the insurance brokerage in which he is a partner and stopped off at the First National Bank of Anderson, of which he is vice president.

  “I thought I’d show you a little of the town,” he said at 10:30. “Then we can pick up Jimmy after class and the three of us can go to the Y.” We crossed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Bridge, fording the White River, and leading downtown. The old masonry structures of Anderson are yielding prominence. “That new one with the glass front is the bank. Next to it is the San Francisco Restaurant. This isn’t San Francisco, or New York, but it isn’t all that sleepy either. Now we’ll head out toward the college.”

  A large library, donated by Charles E. Wilson of General Motors, stands near the Turtle. “I do a little radio sports show from here once a week, and I coach baseball,” Erskine said.

  “How do you move around?”

  “You mean the limp? It’s more embarrassing than anything else. When I was through with ball, I began to develop pains in my left hip, the hip you land on when you throw righthanded. The pains got worse and worse. My arm hurt every day for ten years, but this was agony. Finally I went to a local man and he said I’d damaged a bone in the socket and the thing to do was to ease up. No running. No handball. I love handball. All right, I’m thirty-nine years and through, because the kicker is that he tells me if I do ease up, I only put off the wheelchair a few years. Whatever, a wheelchair is just ahead.

  “When I was pitching and I had the constant arm pain, I went to Johns Hopkins and a famous surgeon said something was gone for good and I should pitch sidearm. But the only way I could get velocity and a good break was to come straight over. Saying pitch sidearm was really telling me don’t pitch. I kept pitching overhand and it kept hurting, but I got a dozen years in the big leagues.

  “This wasn’t pitching. This was walking. I flew to the Mayo Clinic, and one of the surgeons there had worked out a procedure for rotating the bone in the hip socket. He said I could keep the pain and look all right. Or he could operate and stop the pain and leave me a limp.” Erskine smiled as an irony stirred. “All the time I had bad pain, nobody knew. Now that I have the limp people keep coming up and asking if my leg hurts. With that limp they figure it must hurt bad and”—a thin, swift smile—“it’s painless.”

  As we reached the Jackson Street Methodist church, boys and girls straggled out a doorway. The class for retarded children was letting out. One boy’s head shook from side to side, flapping straight straw hair. A girl of eleven squinted through thick glasses. Someone was snorting. Jimmy Erskine saw his father and broke from the flagstone walk.

  “Hello, Jim. Want to go swimming? Want to swim?”

  “Ihmin,” Jimmy Erskine said. “Ihmin.” He jumped up and down with excitement.

  A few blocks off, at the YMCA, Erskine put on gym clothes and dressed Jimmy. Carl and I shot baskets for twenty minutes. Erskine took one-hand set shots, as Indiana schoolboys did in 1945. Jimmy found a ball and bounced it. He bounced it three times, four times, five times. When he bounced it longer, he shouted with joy. Carl played a round of handball, his limp suddenly more noticeable. Jimmy sat next to me watching. “Hosh-uh,” he said, and climbed into my lap. “Ihmin, Hosh-uh. Ihmin.”

  There were only three of us in the Y pool, warm, green and redolent of chlorine. Carl swam with a smooth crawl. Jimmy splashed about, making little cries. “Swim, Jimmy,” Carl said. “Show how you can swim.”

  Jim fell onto his stomach, thrashed his arms and floated for three strokes. Then he jerked over to his back and showed a wide grin.

  “Attaboy, Jim.”

  “Hosh-uh,” Jimmy said.

  “Watch him jump in,” Carl said. “Jump, Jim. Show us how you can jump into the water.”

  The little boy hurried to a ladder. His foot slipped at the lowest rung. Carl put a strong hand to Jim’s right buttock and pushed. Jim stood by the side of the pool, took two deep breaths and jumped into a kind of dive. He struck the water hard, chest first.

  “Good goin’, Jim,” Carl said.

  Another grin split Jimmy Erskine’s face. Praise delights him. He waded toward the ladder and, climbing for a second time, held a support with his left hand. Then to show his father that he knew how to learn, he placed his right hand on his own buttock. What Jimmy Erskine had learned, from his father’s boost, was that one leaves a pool with a hand placed on a buttock.

  After leisurely dinner at the San Francisco Restaurant, Carl asked, back in his small, warm den, if I remembered the World Series of 1952. The sun of October flooded my memory and I saw again the blue crystal sky and the three-colored playing field and shrill, excited people thronging to Yankee Stadium, and my father’s walk, lurching with expectancy.

  “I had first-class stuff,” Erskine said. “Not much pain. The curve is sharp. We go into the fifth inning ahead four runs. Do you happen to remember the date? It was October 5. That was my fifth wedding anniversary. My control slips. A walk. Some hits. Mize rips one. I’m behind, 5 to 4. And here comes Dressen.

  “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, no. I got good stuff.’ I look at Dressen coming closer and I think. The numbers are against me. October fifth. My fifth wedding anniversary. The fifth inning. I’ve given the Yankees five runs. Five must be my unlucky number.

  “Charlie says to give him the ball. You weren’t allowed to talk when he came out. He was afraid you might argue him into leaving you in, and you had to wait on the mound for the next pitcher, so’s you could wish him good luck. Now Charlie has the ball. I’m through. The fives have done me in. Suddenly Dressen says, ‘Isn’t this your anniversary? Are you gonna take Betty out and celebrate tonight?’

  “I can’t believe it. There’s seventy thousand people watching, as many as in all Anderson now, and he’s asking what I’m doing that night. I tell him yes, I was planning to take Betty someplace quiet.

  “ ‘Well,’ Dressen says, ‘then see if you can get this game over before it gets dark.’ He hands me back the ball. I get the next nineteen in a row. We win in eleven. I took Betty out to dinner and we celebrated the first Series game I ever won.”

  “What do you think,” I said, “your life would have been if you hadn’t been a pitcher?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like asking what my life would be without Jimmy. Poorer. Different. Who knows how?”

  “But you always knew you wanted to play ball.”

  “Except I never recognized myself as having extraordinary ability. Now we did have a coach at high school, Charles Cummings, who made sure we played with a National League baseball. During World War II those balls were hard to come by, but Mr. Cummings saw something and he made a terrific effort to see that I pitched with a ball that later, someday, maybe, if I was lucky, I’d make a living with.

  “The nearest Dodger scout was Stanley Feezle, who had a sporting goods business in Indianapolis. He’d come around from time to time and look at my glove. ‘Hey, that’s a little tacky,’ he’d say, and hand me a new one. I wasn’t signing anything, but soon enough I wanted to play for the Dodgers.

  “In service the Navy stationed me in Boston. I worked out with the Braves, and Billy Southworth, their manager, said I reminded him of Johnny Beazley, and if I signed with Boston, I’d be in the majors inside two years. Organized
baseball had a rule against signing servicemen. Remember that. It’ll be important.

  “I’m nineteen and up in the Braves office and John Quinn, the general manager, is pressing me to sign, but I’m thinking I want to be a Dodger.

  “I tell him I can’t sign because I’m a minor. He says that’s all right. The All-Star Game is going to be played right here in Boston, in a week. He’ll arrange for my parents to be his guests at the game, send them Pullman tickets and everything, then I can sign with my dad.

  “I get out of there and call Stan Feezle. Nothing is changed, he says. My dad and mom are going to the All-Star Game, but not as guests of the Braves. They’ll be guests of the Dodgers.

  “A week later, my mother, my father and I sit in a big parlor in a suite of the Hotel Kenmore. And who’s with us, puffing a cigar? Branch Rickey.”

  In the den in Anderson, graying Carl Erskine fires the Kenmore scene to life. Rickey, bushy-browed, prolix, grandiloquent, leaned back in his chair and told the Indiana Erskines about his own farm boyhood in “Oh-hi-yuh.” The father and mother were overwhelmed. Carl, in Navy bell-bottoms, felt proud and nervous.

  “I understand,” Rickey said, “that the Boston club is after you, young man.” Rickey puffed, allowing suspense to gather. “I don’t know what they’ve offered and I don’t really care. The Boston club has never been able to sign someone we wanted. And I want you, young man. Just how much should you get to sign with Brooklyn?”

  The parents were speechless. “Well,” Erskine said, “Boston has offered twenty-five hundred. Would three thousand be all right?”