The Wanderer

My good old friend and songwriting partner Matt Corbin is working on a new music video project called The Wanderer.  The production utilizes a sort of "one shot, one kill" approach.  All of the original music is recorded and video-taped live as he roams city streets, malls, barbershops, and truckstops around Columbia, SC.  

Pretty interesting concept.  Check it out.

#7 Mickey Mantle

Mickey Mantle is Big J's all-time favorite ballplayer.  When he was growing up in Columbia, a young boy, there weren't any professional baseball teams west of Chicago and St. Louis, and there were none at all in the South.  Papa, Perky, Big J, and Uncle L didn't get their first TV until about 1953 or 1954.  That was while they lived on Denny Road in Columbia.  Big J said, "Believe it or not there was only one televised game a week, creatively called The Game of the Week by CBS."  Papa and Big J started watching the game together, and since the Yankees were the dominant team in the land, the televised game usually turned out to be the Yankees versus whoever they were playing that day.  They watched Mantle, Maris, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, their home-state boy Bobby Richardson from Sumter, and manager Casey Stengel every time they were on TV.  

Big J wrote about some of the highlights of the new, televised games:  

The broadcasters for The Game of the Week were Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean.  Often when the game was slow (or truth be told, most of the time), by the late innings, Old Diz had drunk one-too-many Falstaffs.  One time, the TV camera panned over into the right field bleachers where the crowd was sparse and showed a young man and young woman really going to it.  Dizzy's all-time great Falstaff-inspired line was, 'Ah, look out yonda in the bleachers.  A couple of youngsters having fun out at the old ballpark this afternoon.  It appears as if he's kissing her on the strikes, and she's kissing him on the balls.'  There was a blacked-out silence for two or three minutes while the booth got their composure back.

The summer after Big J's high school graduation, Papa won a trip to the Provident national convention in New York City for selling a lot of insurance.  He took the whole family along.  They stayed in a big, fancy hotel.  The popular band, The Herman Hermits, was staying in the same hotel so there were screaming groupie girls running around everywhere.  They took a Gray Line boat tour that week up the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge, turned onto the Harlem River going north, came out on the Hudson, and followed the whole western length of Manhattan going south back down to The Battery.  The 1964 New York World's Fair was also going on at the same time at Flushing Meadows in Queens.  The family spent a whole day there.  

The city had constructed a brand new stadium on the fairgrounds, Shea Stadium, which was the first of the monstrous, multi-purpose, cookie-cutter stadiums built for football and baseball, concerts and other entertainment events.  There happened to be a game that day between the new New York Mets and the San Francisco Giants.  Many New Yorkers were still bitter because the Giants had moved to the West Coast from New York along with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  It was practically a home game for the visiting Giants.  That day, Papa, Perky, Big J, and Uncle L sat in the third deck of the new stadium and watched Gaylord Perry, a country boy from North Carolina, pitch for the visiting Giants.  It was a muggy summer day and Perry was soaked by the end of the first inning, sweat streaming off of his chin.   Willie Mays hit the game winning home run for the Giants, and the crowd went went wild.      

   

There is something that I want for you to know about Big J and me, and I want for you to understand it plainly.  We were both born and raised in the Deep South, not only physically, but also ideologically.  Our childhoods were very different from yours.  South Carolina has never been a friendly place for black folks.  Your ancestors were slave owners.  We have family documents officially freeing the slaves years after Lincoln's "Emancipation Proclamation."  Schools and busses and restaurants and water fountains were segregated while Big J was growing up.  When he was a boy, he said it was common for pranksters to ride through "Niggertown" in their cars throwing rotten apples at people in their yards.  While I was a boy in Camden, I went to an integrated school, but there was a deep divide between whites and blacks.  Train tracks literally cut Camden into two distinct communities.  South of the tracks, there was extreme poverty.  As I grew older and started to drive, I would secretly explore streets most whites never dared to drive.  Sad images are stuck in my mind of dilapidated shanties, weathered and oppressed men and women sitting on their porches in the severe heat of summer afternoons.  North of the tracks, there were beautiful, shady, oak-lined avenues, horse-drawn carriages in the streets, marvelous marble-columned colonial houses with four-foot high slave entrances in the back--dark tunnels that led into the kitchens.  I heard racist jokes on a regular basis.  I laughed at them.  I even learned to tell them by the time I was 13 or 14.  I used the "N word" on a regular basis for a few years, and I believed that I was part of a superior race of human beings.  I only tell you this because I want for you to know.  I want you to know how far we have come.  You see it now.  People can change, R.L.

Sometimes when Big J talks about Mickey Mantle now, there is a tinge of regret in his voice--just sometimes.  Now, when he speaks of Mantle, he often points out that one of the biggest baseball questions of the day was whether Mantle or Mays was the better player of the era.  According to the numbers, it's obvious that Mays was the better of the two, but many whites at the time couldn't see past the contrasting colors of their skins.  Mantle was a good ol' country boy from Oklahoma with a million dollar smile.  He appeared to be the All-American kid.  The TV camera loved him.  But Mays was another black boy, born into a working class family in Alabama, trying to break into the white man's world.  A lot of people resented Mays and lauded Mantle as a heroic baseball god.  Period.  No matter that Mantle was a womanizing alcoholic in real life who showed up to as many games hung over or drunk throughout his career as he did sober.  I would not understand this side of the Mantle vs. Mays question if Big J had not explained it to me, and I am grateful to him for being so reverend in his honesty about the subject matter.  His anomalous transformation from a typical, racist South Carolina boy to the all-inclusive, accepting, and loving man that he is today is heartening.  

Regardless of all that ugly stuff, Mickey Mantle was a fabulous ballplayer.  There's no telling what he might have done if he hadn't torn up his knee in a stupid drain grate out in center field at Yankee Stadium during the 1951 World Series. 

#7 Mickey Mantle.  5-11.  198.  Throws right.  Switch hitter.  Outfield.  Hall of Fame.  536 career HR's.  Mantle was the greatest switch hitter ever.  A real legend of the diamond.      

   

Reading List

All of the short stories on my reading list are new to me.  As I discover new ones, I'll continue to share them.  Pick one and read it every now and then.  It only takes a few minutes, and it's so much better than news! 

Shot Down, For Now

Arkansas Times is reporting that the church-gun bill is off the table.

Holy Ghost! We're Packing Heat.

LITTLE ROCK (AP) — An Arkansas legislative committee has backed a bill allowing concealed weapons in churches, despite concerns of a pastor who said he was shot in a sanctuary two decades ago and still opposes the measure.

The latest on the church-gun talks at Arkansas Times.

Up the Creek at Oaklawn

JB and I spent Friday afternoon at Oaklawn watching the horses run.  We had a great time visiting with a couple of friends of mine that work at one of the betting booths.  We learned how to place some new kinds of bets, and we got some pretty good tips--in hindsight--if we had known how to listen to horse betting tips.  By the end of the eighth race, with one race to go, we were about $70 in the hole between losing bets and $5 beers.  

I had missed a golden opportunity in the 5th race.  I go to my friend at the booth and say, "$2 for the win on 2 and $2 to show, the 8."

  

And my buddy at the booth says, "Have you turned gay?"  

I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, and I said, "Yeah, I want to play this one conservatively." 

"Then put your money in your pocket if that's what you want to do."  He handed me the ticket, 2 to win, 8 to show and mumbled, "betting a show on a short field."

The 8 won the race.  It paid $58.  I won $7 for my show bet.

Before the ninth race, I studied the card.  M had given me a hot tip right when we had arrived earlier in the afternoon, "the 3 and the 12 in the 9th race," he had said, almost before hello.  Luckily, I had subconsciously grabbed a pen B was holding out toward me and circled the two while I introduced JB.  

B had said a couple of things throughout the day that were starting to get to me.  "Bet your lucky numbers.  Bet the names you like."  He's worked there for years.  "You can beat a race, but you'll never beat the track."  I needed a win badly.  I had never dropped so much money on gambling before and wondered how I would explain it to H.  I looked in my wallet--$2, I cashed in the winning $7 ticket from the stupid "show" in the fifth, and I called the bet out to B. 

Dollar amount first, then type of bet, and then the horses last.  "$6 exacta box on the 3, the 12, and the 2."  

B nodded his head and smiled.  First time he had done that all day.  When we heard the bugler, JB and I ran outside to watch the last race.  He got set up to take a picture of the break.  For the mile and a sixteenth, the starting gates were directly in front of our spot on the track.  At the bell, J squeezed off the beautiful picture below.  In it, you will see the 2, Uptstream, getting out of the gates well ahead of the rest of the field.  Also, closest to you in the photo is the 12, Indian Moonshine.  Upstream led the race wire to wire, and Indian Moonshine came from second to last with a stormy charge down the stretch to finish second on a photo finish as I danced alongside them screaming, "They're gonna do it, they're gonna get it, they got it, they did it!" 

I proudly went to see B at his booth and collected $78.  M had put me on the 12 horse before I had stood inside Oaklawn for five minutes.  And I picked Upstream because, well, I was up the creek at that point and needed a miracle.  Right before the bell, JB leaned over," "You picked that horse cause you're a fisherman."  

I said, "Goin' Upstream, where no one else wants to walk." 

The bell sounded, and he snapped his best photograph of the day.