A different writing approach for the holiday
Author’s note: By now, most of you who read my stuff know I’m mostly focused on more objective, clinical analysis. I do have more of a story-telling side to me – a raconteur if you will. When people can get me going (not often), I can usually entertain with a good story. For whatever reason, the mood suits me tonight, so this popped out and I decided to throw it out there and see how people reacted to a different style. Happy holidays.
As I sit down and put fingers to keyboard, it didn’t start about baseball. Oh, there are Cardinal references mixed in to be sure. This is a Cardinal blog after all. Just not the central theme. Maybe the only time I do this. I saw a while back a humorous string of posts that more or less asked “Who is Jake Wood”. As I often do, I wondered how I’d answer that question if asked. Turns out, pretty simply. I don’t know anything about Jake Wood. End of article.
Ok, I get it. That wouldn’t be the question asked of me.
Since this is a baseball site, I will answer this question following a familiar pattern … my first memories of how I became a St. Louis Cardinals fan. My absolute earliest memories of life, baseball and the Cardinals all come from around 1968. Yes, 1968. A time many of you might not know a lot about. My family moved around a lot when I was a kid. In 1968, my family moved (yet again) back to St. Louis, traveling on the day Robert F. Kennedy was buried. I can remember seeing the funeral procession on the black-and-white TV. Back in Florissant that summer, I discovered that our new backyard had a short cyclone fence that backed up to a bunch of other houses, all of which contained boys my age (7) up to about 10. As the new kid, I’d lean across the fence and watch these kids play a game called “hot box” (remember that?). Two bases, one runner, two throwers. It was intended to see who could steal a base and avoid being out in the rundown. I knew nothing of baseball but was thrilled when they asked me to play. I didn’t realize it at the time (nor did I care), but the group of kids was … well, in today’s terms “diverse”. That wasn’t the word my grandfather used when he found out. I loved my grandpa to death, but he was sure bigoted. Never did figure out why. I just didn’t understand. All I cared about was whether they were able to come out and play. There was no such thing as DEI back then. Baseball (and sports in general) was the great equalizer.
To my benefit, our backyard was perfectly shaped to contain a full on whiffle ball field. A peach tree was first, the telephone pole second base, a pear tree third and home plate was a round dirt area we rubbed out where no blade of grass dared grow. Drove my dad nuts! He had no sense of humor. If you knew my mom, you’d understand why. And we played baseball seemingly sunup to sundown. We even had floodlights in back, so could literally play til the streetlights came on. If you’ve watched the movie Sandlot, there are a lot of similarities. I was “Smalls”.
That was my introduction to the game. Later that year, I can remember my parents getting in a big fight because my dad scored tickets to a World Series game (he was a Tigers fan), but he didn’t want to take me (too young) and my mom was really mad. My Mom was the daughter of Italian immigrants, so when she was mad, everyone within 5 miles knew it. I have no recollection of the game. I can’t even tell you if I got to go. By the next season (1969) I was really into the Cardinals. Amazingly, my mom would let me go with the older kids, taking the Bi-State Bus from Florissant down to the stadium and go to the game as a group. I faintly recall that a bleachers seat was like $3 (at Busch II). Boy, those were different times. One of the coolest moments in school was when our 5th grade teacher (Ms. Ewers) let us have a small TV (yes, black and white) in the classroom to watch late season games as the playoff race with Pirates and Mets boiled down to the last days. As I grew up and got to junior high school (Cross Keys), I kept my grades up enough to get Post-Dispatch sponsored Straight A tickets. Those of us that got them got 3 pairs of tickets. We’d trade around and end up going to 6 games (all on the bus). Boy, that marketing investment by the Cardinals in giving away nosebleed seats to mid-weeknight games has really paid off!
Baseball was (is) life. My parents had no trouble getting me to be the grounds crew for the backyard ball field. I groomed it religiously. My dad would drop in zoysia grass on the pitcher’s mound and home plate each spring, but no blade survived very long. As I peak on Google Earth, I am mildly surprised to see grass there even now. That was my Field of Dreams.
I read voraciously about baseball. My mom would buy me baseball books and magazines. I didn’t realize at the time, but I’m sure now that she did it to get me reading and learning, using something I was interested and motivated in. My favorite book was Joe Garagiola’s “Baseball is a Funny Game”. The first autograph I ever got was Stan Musial. Also, the last. Wasn’t my thing. I used to have a transistor radio I’d sneak into bed so I could listen to games past my bedtime. I remember waking up at like 1am when Bake McBride scored from first in the top of the 25th inning (I think it was a blown pick-off attempt) to seal the win against the Mets. I now suspect my mom knew of my sneakiness.
In high school, we moved again, off to Southern California (my dad was an engineer, working on top-secret military contracts with McDonnell-Douglas, now Boeing). We lived smack in between San Diego and LA, so I kept up my allegiance, catching the Cards each time they made a west coast swing. I followed the box scores every day in the paper. Getting The Sporting News in the mail each week was the highlight of the week. I read it cover to cover.
In SoCal, we got to play ball year-round. That was fun. My lasting memory of Dodger Stadium was one night as teens, two friends of mine and I went up and caught a Cardinal game. Their dad played for the football Rams, back when they were in LA (before St. Louis). I know, bad topic. He gave us the keys to his Mercedes and off we went. Caught the game, have no recollection of how it went, other than the knowledge the Cardinals never played well on the west coast in the mid-1970’s. After the game, we headed home. Except we missed the entrance to I-5 to head south and instead ended up in a neighborhood that I believe was called Boyle Heights. I did not know it at the time, but two black kids and a skinny white kid driving a Mercedes around Boyle Heights after 10 pm at night was considered a significant crime. Who knew?
I became aware when we were stopped at an intersection and our car lit up like Dodger Stadium and the police were ordering us to come out of the car one at a time, with hands in full view at all times. What the hell? My friends knew the drill. You will understand why as I finish the story. This was a felony stop! Driver dropped the keys out the window, put his hands out and slowly got out. Me, I had no idea and wasn’t particularly cooperative. We hadn’t done anything wrong. One might say at that age I could be a little mouthy, too. This is a bad combination. They came and got me. I came out of that car by my hair (which was long at the time) and somehow moved from the car door to the top of the trunk without once touching the ground, all the while doing a complete wind-aided somersault. Ouch.
After the shock wore off, I became aware of one of LAPDs finest hovering over me with those mirrored sunglasses. Remember those shades from CHIPS? I made a comment along the line of how odd it seemed to be wearing sunglasses at 10 pm at night. There is an old Ron White joke that goes “I don’t know how many of them it would take to kick my a**, but I knew how many they were going to use!”. My friends convinced me that being quiet was an improved strategy over what I had adopted, and things settled down after I took a few shots to some sensitive areas, and I shut my big mouth. After everything checked out and we were sent on our way (remember, there were no cell phones with cameras back then), my friends introduced me to the reality of life in LA. The “thin blue line” as they called it. Turns out, back in the day, in California there was a section of the penal code numbered 502 for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI). Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Everyone called getting a drunk driving arrest “getting a 502”. We weren’t drunk. Hadn’t been drinking. My friends educated me that there was an unpublished piece of section 502, entitled 502B. Instead of DWI, it was DWB. Driving While Black. Who knew? Boy was I naïve! This, of course, was years before the Rodney King incident made the world more aware.
We moved back to St. Louis (yet again) in the middle of my junior year and landed in Chesterfield. Roger Werhli was our neighbor. Why did we always have to live next to football players? It would’ve been the coolest thing ever to live next to a Cardinal baseball player. Chesterfield, by the way, was NOT very “diverse”. Not like the Florissant I had remembered, and definitely not like Southern California. I graduated from Maryville College (back when it was a college, and not a university). It had, however, 70:30 ratio of girls to boys. If you a young man picking what college to go to, that is considered an advanced metric.
I was one of the first software developers to come out of there and went back to the heart of the software revolution (California) right after graduation (1983). I did all right. Without getting into too much detail, I bet you all are familiar with my software work. If you’ve ever bought a car with a loan and you got a printed-out form called Truth-in-Lending, with all those big boxes that show the principal balance, total interest to be paid, APR %, etc.? That’s me. I wrote one program for each state in the union, plus something like 52 more, because Georgia had to have a different form for each county in their state. How many different ways can you present Loan Amount, Payment, Interest to be Paid, and APR? Both Donald Trump and I tend to view politics in the State of Georgia as a little on the different side.
I eventually left SoCal (again) but never returned to St. Louis. If you knew my mother, you’d know why. I ended up in Eugene, Oregon. That explains the OR in my username. We live in the shadow of Autzen Stadium where the Oregon Ducks play. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? Married, kids, divorced. Re-married. More kids. 6 in total, 5 boys, 1 girl. The one girl is the toughest of the bunch and best athlete. I never treated my kids differently. She wore jeans, not frilly dresses and played sports like everyone else did. My oldest son was an all-league catcher, went to college to play and hurt his arm. Total bummer! Several of my kids are Cardinal fans, too. No idea how that happened . Back to my one daughter. The tough one. She carries a gun for her job. She is a lot like my wife. If either is mad, or fearful for their children, the only safe place to be is behind them. One son is a lineman and one working on the ground crew with Xcel Energy in Colorado. One is a nurse here in Eugene. One is a farmer in central South Dakota. The youngest one just turned 19 and is still, well, searching for who he is. He has yet to discover video games is not the be-all, end-all in life. I’m confident he will figure it out.
I’ve continued to follow the Cardinals, annually trekking various places with a fellow Cardinal fan here in Eugene to watch them play. I’ve been to most of the ball parks in MLB (many of which don’t exist anymore), with the exception of some in the northeast (Boston, New York). I haven’t been to the new Rangers Park, nor the newest Braves stadium. As I got older and no longer able to play sports, I stayed active in them by officiating. I rose through the basketball ranks and retired out of collegiate officiating (never made it past NCAA Division III). I still officiate high school football. Done that for 30 years. I got assigned the 2024 State Championship game. It is a peer honor to get selected.
Along the way I retired (early) out of the software world, doing most of my work in the electric power utility industry. Somewhere along the way, I became a volunteer Firefighter and EMT with the local fire department. Started out as a way to give back to the community. Probably has its roots in an old teaching, something along the lines of “For he whom much has been given, much is expected in return”, or something like that. I believe I learned that at Vacation Bible School at a church in Kinloch.
I have risen through the ranks in the fire service and have a Captain’s rank and serve as Incident Command from time-to-time. I have served in the Santa Rosa (CA) firestorm as well as the Camp Fire, which was when the town of Paradise, CA burned down. 27,000 homes. I forget how many died, recall it was just this side of 100. You have not lived a full life until you spend a cold, rainy November day doing body search and recovery, or until you accompany a family back into the fire zone to support them as they discover what they knew of as “home” has been completely wiped off the earth. One such family was quizzing me about their neighbors, who they had lost track of during the evacuation. All we found was the burned-out hulk of their neighbor’s car, with the hatch back still open, as they had last seen it as their neighbors were loading up to evacuate. Sad. In the business, they call it a “Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fire”. And it can be rough. Devastation is a good word in these circumstances. The power of nature can be incredible, especially when viewed up close.
Back home, I’m an EMT-I, which is just this side of being a paramedic. I’ve worked in an ambulance, although most of my work now is either in a brush engine or a command rig. I think I can say there is some satisfaction when the hundreds (thousands) of hours of training pays off and we do something that saves a life. That said, the reality of this business is that we come as total strangers and enter people’s lives when they are having the absolute worst day of their lives. Often, they are completely vulnerable. A 90-year-old woman, in diapers, with Stage 4 cancer who isn’t strong enough to get up and make it to the bathroom and probably doesn’t remember where it is since dementia has ravaged her brain worse than cancer is ravaging her body. For all of my medical skills and intervention tools, sometimes all we can do is offer a hug for a family member, clean up and making the patient comfortable and just remember that no matter their story, their background, their race, the person who we are dealing with is human. Showing them empathy and helping them keep their dignity is sometimes all we can do on their worst, and sometimes last, day of their life. Today I read a baseball article where the author opined how tragic some front-office mismanagement was. I thought to myself … his view of tragedy and mine is very different.
When I am not running around in fire engines and ambulances, I have 5 acres of beautiful farmland, which I share with my wonderful wife, who patiently (mostly) puts up with my silliness. I’m not really a farmer. I like to say more of an over-achieving, large scale gardener. When I bring in 18 pounds of squash, she describes it otherwise. Not as loudly as my mother, but with a similar word set. We have a baseball field in our front yard and basketball court in the back. My grandchildren make good use of it.
I have 8 grandchildren. They are the joy of my life. There is nothing I like better than snuggling with an infant or building Legos with a child. I have a low voice, calm demeaner and slow heartbeat, so they really settle down well with me. When they get bigger, I get to pick them up from school many days of the week and I love to hear their chatter, and I love to watch them learn. One of the most humbling days of my life was when my grandson’s Kindergarten teacher came up and asked me if I knew how much this little boy hero worshipped his Papa. Now, I have to live up to that. Being Los Bomberos helps. Everyone loves a Firefighter. The cops? Not so much. BTW. My great grandfather (Warren County Sheriff), grandfather (Civil Defense Corps), uncle (St. Louis County Police) and daughter (Lane County PO) were/are all police officers. I give cops a hard time, but I also know what they deal with. When someone dies in one of our incidents, I get to hand the problem off to them and go home. Except that once, but that is another story…
Baseball is my labor of love. I like nothing more than to wander around my garden, listening to Rooney and Horton describe a baseball game on MLB AtBat while I putter through my garden. I grew up with Jack Buck, Dan Kelly and Bob Costas when he was a kid, but I’m good with Horton and Rooney. It beats silence. Smartphones and Alexa are wonderful tools. Today’s transistor radios. It’s funny how what’s old is new again, sometimes. Airpods are the new-age version of the teeny, little earphones I’d plug into the transistor so Mom wouldn’t catch me listening past my bedtime. Writing about baseball is a great relief valve, where I can immerse myself to whatever degree I choose. Can’t beat it. And I get paid $50 a month to do it! (As wife rolls eyes….).
That is what shaped the user who writes under the moniker ORSTLcardsfan. Thanks for reading. I hope you don’t mind the story-telling style. Cold, clinical analysis will return next week. Be safe!