The Pecan Park Eagle

Back in 1950, we kids of the Houston East End didn’t possess a whole lot of sophistication about  good movie acting or the importance of a multi-dimensional story narrative, but we knew who and  what we liked to see up there on the silver screen.

The Bowery Boys, The Three Stooges, and just about any western that the Avalon Theatre at 75th and  Lawndale threw at us were good enough filler for our Saturday afternoons in Pecan Park.

The big hope-spiritual fire-lighters, however, usually turned out to be any of those old classic black and whites  about baseball. And there was no bigger actor in these film epics than the great old character actor William  Bendix.

No bigger baseball movie of the time ever surpassed the endearment of one flick in particular. The 1948 biopic called “The Babe Ruth Story,” starring William Bendix, was our killer choice, as 8 to 10  year olds, for greatest movie of all the time. We were stunned when neither the movie or its star  won an Academy Award for the effort.

What’s even more stunning to me today is the fact that we even knew what the Academy Awards  were back in 1948. There was no television in Houston back then, so, we had to have either heard about the deal over the radio, read it the newspapers, or else, heard our parents talking about them.

Whatever the case, we found ourselves again nursing encouragement for Bill Bendix when he came  out as the star of “Kill The Umpire,” the story of a neer-do-well ex-ballplayer who hates umpires, but whose stronger addiction to baseball causes him to lose one job after another for sneaking off to the ballpark during the workday.

Bendix’s wife in the movie, played by the wonderful Una Merkel, makes an early far-sighted statement in the movie for what it reveals about our future understanding of addictions. Totally frustrated by her husband’s compelling attraction to baseball, regardless of consequences to his job security, she says something like, “I wish they had a program like AA for baseball nuts. Then I could call up Baseball Anonymous and have them come over here and straighten you out.” – (Hey! That was pretty good thinking for 1950!)

As much as Bendix loves baseball, he hates umpires even more, (Whoops! Here comes “irony.” The writers worked that little literary twist into the story line.) When Bendix finally runs out of job choices because of work-skipping attraction to day-game baseball, he’s at rope’s end for work until his retired umpire father-in-law gets him into school as an umpire-in-training. Bendix hates the ide of becoming an umpire, but he fears the thought of losing his wife even more.

The rest of the movie is about what Bendix learns from actually becoming an umpire. He has to deal with the receiving side of fan contempt and ward off the bribery and intimidation attempts of gangsters to control the game through the umpires. A ton of slap-stick and car chase action also then invades plot for the sakes of holding our kid-attention spans. (Yep! We had short kid attention spans even before doctors found a way to diagnose and make money with the drug companies from exotic variant opinions on “attention deficit disorders.”)

Back to the movie: After “Kill The Umpire,” we are now totally convinced that Bendix takes the Oscar this time. Of course, he doesn’t.

I still love the characters and blue-collar settings and feel of these old movies, even if I haven’t improved much on picking Oscar winners. In one scene from “Kill The Umpire,” Bill Bendix is come home to his wife, who knows that he has been fired again for going to the ballgame and being detected there by his boss when he attempts to attack an umpire with a coke bottle.

Una is waiting on the small concrete porch of their little bungalow with hands on hips and a scowl on her face. Bendix is walking head down toward his wife in silence.

When Bendix reaches his wife, he asks a question that only a husband from 1950 would ask, especially, under these circumstances.

“What’s for supper, Sweetheart?” Bendix asks.

“Better get your catcher’s mitt!” Una says.

Gotta love it. And I still do.