The Pecan Park Eagle

I received this beautifully framed photo narrative of the 1944 St. Louis Browns yesterday as a gift from Ron Pawlik, a buddy I played ball with back in 1951, but only yesterday caught up with again for only the second time in the past year.

Yesterday I attended an alumni luncheon at St. Thomas High School in Houston where, I must note, the natives are quite happy with their still new baseball coach, Craig Biggio. Just in case you haven’t heard, and in only his second season at the helm, Coach Biggio has now led the fighting Eagles to a state high school baseball championship. We can only hope that Craig stays a while before he heeds the big league call to manage somewhere.

Something else happened yesterday to powerfully remind me of how far-reaching the cord of baseball has traveled in my life. Out of the blue, but not really, I ran into Ron Pawlik, a buddy of mine from St. Christopher’s Parochial School in Park Place. Ron was a year ahead of me in school, but we played in the same outfield together one year for the 1951 ever-rambling St. Christopher Travelers. I had seen Pawlik at last year’s alumni luncheon for the first time since 1997, when we held a reunion at old St. Chris, and before that time, I had not seen Ron since his graduation from St. Thomas in 1955.

The short of it is the fact that he gave me that beautiful framed Browns piece displayed here. Ron had been reading some of blog articles over the past year and had become aware of my affinity for the old Browns. I was both shocked and appreciative of his generosity. I really like the Browns piece on ts own merit, but also because it simply helps drive to the surface the realizations I’m trying to express this quiet Saturday morning.

Like a lot of you, the long  cord of baseball has been with me forever, often serving as the X factor in whether or not I became friends with, or worked things out with, other human beings that came into my life over time. Once I knew that someone liked baseball, and was sure they understood not to call runs points, umpires referees, or managers coaches, we could overcome just about all other obstacles to working out the parameters of our everyday life relationship.

When I was a kid, growing up in the Houston East End, we were all Houston Buff fans. of course, and almost 100% of the adults I knew were St. Louis Cardinal fans when it came down to supporting a favorite major league club. I too became a Cardinal fan as a result. They were the parent club of my local Buffs – and their roster was loaded with all the Buffs who played good enough to get there.

My admiration for pitcher Ned Garver converted me into a St. Louis Browns fan in 1951, but I now think that change was helped by my need as a kid to rebel against the Cardinal blanket that totally  surrounded me. Besides, I didn’t totally abandon my support for the Cards. I just added the hapless Browns as my underdog battling American League club.

By the time I reached St. Thomas High School, I was assigned to a home room that was run by a Basilian priest scholastic named “Mr. Klem.”

Aha! Now there’s a major clue as to the ongoing presence of the baseball cord. Mr. Klem turned out to be the nephew of Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem, a real baseball guy, and a fan of the New York Giants, his home state club. I had never met a Giants fan previously, but Mr. Klem seemed to be as knowledgeable of baseball as all the Cardinal people I grew up knowing. It made me think that maybe Giants fans weren’t all that bad after all. Besides, Mr. Klem seemed pretty high on his club’s young center fielder, Willie Mays, and of course, 1952 was the year that followed the 1951 Shot Heard Round the World. During Mr. Klem’s religion classes on miracles in our daily lives, we got to hear a lot about Bobby Thomson as a primary example of same.

For some unfortunate reason, I never dated any women that really cared for, or knew much about, baseball. I did have a Freudian theory professor in graduate school at Tulane whose brilliance was matched, and  somewhat neutralized by her thick German accent and the upside down Nazi-way she held her lighted cigarette during lectures. I couldn’t find the baseball rope or Freudian string on this period in my life, but I survived.

“You vill learn zee theories of Herr Freud und you vill not be deceived by all zee sick patients who unconsciously or sociopathicly wish to manipulate you, zee doctor, unto seeing zem as honest und trustworthy!”

I survived Dr. Gestapo and the concerted efforts of the formal education process I had embarked upon to change the way I thought, talked, wrote, and viewed life in general, If I was of any help to people who sought me out as clients over my years of practice as a professional counselor, it was because of what I had learned from baseball and from growing up in Pecan Park – and not from some cold burial in the theoretical alien-spirited offerings of Tulane University.

A good friend of mine in New Orleans, a fellow named Donald M. Marquis of Goshen, Indiana, wrote one of the seminal books on the history of jazz in 1979. That book, which is now being made into a movie, is called “The Search for Buddy Bolden,”  and it took Don Marquis seventeen years of focused research and investigation into the life of jazz’s first trumpet man before it was finally done.

Where did Don Marquis acquire his patience for the job? Easy. He was a Cleveland Indians fan. If you want something done that takes a ton of patience, hire an Indians fan.

One of my best friends in graduate school at Tulane was Sue Elster-Hepler-Liuzza. Sue was easy to like. She’s a north side Chicago girl who loves the Cubs and, of course, hates the White Sox. I was a little shocked, but not really surprised earlier this week when Sue told me that she never even stepped foot on the South Side until well into her adult years. She also explained that she is typical of many North Siders. They want nothing to do with the South Side or the White Sox. Unfortunately, this knot n Sue’s baseball rope came at a cost. She never got to see the original Comiskey Park in person. By the time she went there, it had been torn down.

My own baseball rope on life trucks on, flaring lessons all the way: (1) The days of our lives are like the games on the schedule of the long baseball season. You win some. You lose some. And you take each day one at a time and go on from there. (2) Whatever you’re doing, keep your eye on the ball. A few of the pitchers we face in everyday life may try to throw a few emery balls at us. (3) Pick a project team of people you know you can trust – and go into combat with them. There aren’t many things you can do out there well alone without help and you probably will need to rely upon people who know their jobs and your expectations of them – ones who will also cover your backside honestly, but still be strong enough to hit you with the truth when you need that feedback most. (4) keep your word. (5) take responsibility for your “E”s, learn from them, and move on. (6) Look for some kind of joy in all you do. (7) Never give up on anything that’s really important to you.

That’s enough for now. And thanks again, Ron Pawlik. And thanks to you too, great wondrously flexible cord of baseball. You keep popping up to remind me where my real education came from in the first place. The Pawlik gift is simply another life reminder:

(8) Loyalty and real friendship are forever.

1950: The Wings of Summer Were Mainly Named Schwinn.

Back in 1950, summer spread out upon the imaginations of us kids in Houston as though it had been sent to us from God as a little time slice of Heaven and a virtually endless lawn of non-stop sandlot baseball, a game we all loved and played with poor equipment and virtually no adult interference for as long as the light came upon us with the dawn and lasted for us through the dusk.

Parental fears about the relationship between summer temperatures and the possible onset and development of infantile paralysis hit us hard. We ran into the “Heat of the Day” requirement in the Summer of 1950 – and that amounted to a three-hour parental suspension of outside play from 12 Noon to 3:00 PM daily in the belief that we were being protected from polio by this action. With five hundred cases of polio hitting Houston children in the summer of 1950, it was hard to argue against the time-out call, even though we actually knew very little back then about the virus that actually had spawned the epidemic.

Summer had time limits, but we also soared through the vast free space available to us in that time on the wings of summer, our mainly classic big-wheeled Schwinn bicycles. I owned one of these bright red beauties, one that looked very much like the model depicted in today’s article. As was true with all of us, that Schwinn bike and me were pretty much one unit together once we hit the road. I could lean myself around corners with hands on a comic book and almost never crash, except for the time that a lady over on Keller Street also turned onto Flowers from the other direction and scared me into a last second plunge into a drainage ditch.

She did stop to make sure I wasn’t dead and, of course, I never said anything about the near miss when I much later in the day finally found my way home. You just didn’t report things that might limit your future freedom back then, but I think that kid code is still in effect. Some things never change.

We wore no bike helmets back in the day – and, yes, we probably did destroy a few now-sacred Mickey Mantle cards as noisemakers that we clothes-pinned to play against the spokes of our wheels.

We  never surrendered our bikes voluntarily. Those wonderful machines really were our wings through summer and out to the larger universe beyond our East End homes and neighborhoods.

When Little League Baseball came to Houston in 1950, a large bunch of us rode our bikes over to Canada Dry Park on the Gulf Freeway for the city-wide tryout. Hundreds and hundreds of kids had shown up to tryout for the few team rosters that were going to be available to all Houston kids that first year. I think I got to catch one fly ball, but got no times at bat before I was told “thanks for coming.” I felt pretty bad about it until I learned that none of us from Pecan Park had been given the chance to hit. That privilege seemed to be going to those kids whose fathers had the freedom to come with their sons to the tryout during the work week. None of our Pecan Park dads had that kind of time luxury on the morning of a weekday – and we could figure that the dad-presence factor was a big fat difference-maker in a situation like this one. We didn’t blame our dads, but we did lose a lot of respect for those first year Little League people running the show. Over time, I grew to see what a no-win situation those early Houston Little League founders faced here that first 1950 season, but I was nowhere close to understanding or forgiving the way we were treated that particular day.

Collectively, those of us from Pecan Park knew we weren’t that undeserving, but we could see what we were up against with the numbers and the daddy-presence factor. So, we did as we were told. We went home.

We rode home as a squadron of dejected East Enders, but that also happened to be the day the Pecan Park Eagles were born. By the time we got home, we had gone to the sandlot and reorganized our identity as the Pecan Park Eagles. We also named our home as Eagle Field for the first time and we recruited one of our adult neighbors to serve as our coach. We then organized a simple schedule of games against other nearby sandlot clubs and played once a week at Mason Park for a short while.

Our efforts made us feel better about the jobbing we took at the Canada Dry tryout. That much is sure, but the experience also taught us that you have to rally from disappointment and do whatever you can do to learn from setbacks and go forward in a different way.

The End of Schwinn, 1954.

We still travelled by bike for quite a while beyond the summer of 1950. The end of Schwinn as the Wings of Summer Era didn’t arrive until we aged enough to start dating girls. Once that little shift in priorities settled in, we traded in our summer wings for the four wheels of summer that we found on those spontaneous combustion engine-powered muscle cars that now consumed our imaginations.

I lost my heart, and my freedom from debt, to a 1951 Oldsmobile 88. “Ain’t that a shame” that those kinds of changes also signal the death of childhood’s freedom wings, at least, for a while.

Over time, I recaptured my freedom wings of summer and, this time, they came without a bicycle. The formula may vary for each of us who want those wings back may vary a little, but basically, I think it goes like this:

(1) Put yourself in a position as much as possible in which you control your time. Make sure your time does not control you; (2) Give yourself to causes that go beyond making money and acquiring things, replacing these with activities which aim for the betterment of something bigger than the fulfillment of your own selfish goals; (3) Do things you can really give your heart to doing; (4) Stay away from selfish people who want to use you for their personal gain at the sacrifice of your health and well-being; (5) Enjoy each day that comes your way and make the most of honoring each day for whatever it is; (6) Never make promises you don’t plan to keep; (7) Let go of all resentment and regret about the past, but learn from your mistakes; (8) Hang out with happy people who share some of your particular joys in life; (9) Keep your priorities in order and live life from there; and (10) Love baseball.

I just threw that last one in to see if you were paying attention, but you should be able to get the drift of what I’m suggesting overall. The better I get at these things, the more my happiness grows – and my personal list really does include all ten listed items.