The Boys of Summer (30 page)

“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?”

Rickey waited. Six eyes sought him. “Carl,” he said, “we won’t give you three thousand.” Pause. “We’re going to give you a bonus of three thousand, five hundred. What do you think of that?”

Erskine thought that Branch Rickey was even a bigger man than he had heard.

Erskine pitched nine games for Danville in the Three-Eye League, named from the states through which it spread: Illinois, Iowa, Indiana. He struck out fifty-two men in fifty innings—one strikeout an inning is a remarkable pace—and returned cheerfully to Anderson, where he was startled to find himself declared a free agent. Someone—Erskine suspects a Boston official—reported to Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, the Commissioner of Baseball, that Rickey had signed a serviceman, and Chandler invalidated the contract. Rickey protested, and then asked if the ruling meant that he could get back the $3,500 bonus from the Erskines. (He could not.)

Four other teams sought Erskine. The Boston Red Sox offered $10,000. The Phillies offered $11,000. Still emotionally a Dodger, Erskine telephoned Feezle and said, whatever the other bids, he’d sign a new Brooklyn contract for $5,000.

A quarter century later, Erskine laughed at himself. “I got the five thousand,” he said, “which makes me the only man in history to collect two bonuses from Branch Rickey, but what I didn’t know was that the second time, instead of settling for five thousand, I could have gotten thirty thousand.”

“Did you have the great curve then?”

“No. That came later. Let me ask you. How do you throw your curve?”

“Break the wrist and snap the fingers.”

“Snap,” Erskine ordered. “Which finger do you use? The middle one. But when you throw a curve, you snap it off the index finger. Most people do. I had a good year in Danville my second season there. I won nineteen and two more in the playoff. But Jack Onslow, who managed Waterloo and later the Chicago White Sox, explained that I was tipping the curve, by kind of tucking the ball against my index finger before I threw
it. ‘I’m only telling you this ‘cause you’ll be out of this league next year,’ Onslow said. ‘But with that curve you got, you may not go all the way.’”

In Havana, where he played winter baseball in 1948, Erskine began throwing a curve off his middle finger. For weeks he could get no speed on the ball, nor any significant break. Gradually over months, the new curve snapped off the middle finger, became faster and sharper. But whenever he pitched a game, he reverted to the relative safety of the old curve that had worked in high school and at Danville, Illinois.