The Boys of Summer (35 page)

“The book also says you came to bat 620 times and that was your only home run.”

“Yep. You got a secret weapon like that, you don’t want to go showing it around.”

A small black and white sign announced the border of Arkansas. “My first time in this state,” I said.

“That right?” Preacher said. “Well, nice to have you.”

A blue Oldsmobile whipped up the winding road, passing unsteadily in a seventy-mile-an-hour rush of air. “Lotsa people git hurt driving that way,” Roe said. “My dad got hurt bad in an auto wreck back around 1950. He lived up till ‘52, but he weren’t the same man afterwards.

“My dad seen to it that I got myself educated and went to a good college, Harding College, in Searcy, Arkansas. It was a church school and the president was a baseball nut and I had good stuff and got publicity. Like that kid in Pittsburgh ya caught me being comical about, I had smoke. Only I’m serious. And a good curve ball. I’d strike out twelve and walk seventeen. Pitched that way till Branch Rickey said, ‘Son, if you walk five more than you strike out, you’re five behind.’ At Harding, I averaged eighteen strikeouts a game.

“Here come the scouts and offers from, I believe, five teams. It was the Yankees and the Cardinals made the best, but this part of the United States isn’t Yankee country, if n you get me. The Yankees was thought of as the best club in baseball, which no doubt they was, but down here we
talked
about the Cardinals.

“Branch Rickey sent his brother Frank to see me and my dad in my junior year. He said they’d pay a bonus of five thousand dollars, worlds of money. My dad and I drove from Viola to West
Plains, and went to the First National Bank. My dad took out the contract and showed it to the bank president. He read it slow and then said, ‘Dr. Roe, this seems like a good contract for the boy.’ I signed and the bank president got no fee for his advice, ‘cepting for a pretty good deposit.

“Counting that trip to the bank, I’d been in Missouri twice. Never seen a city. Never worn a necktie in the daytime. The Cardinals bought me a suit and put me on a train to New York and said when I reached there to go to the Hotel Lincoln. They was expecting me.

“I got off the train and found me a taxicab. With my hillbilly ways, ya coulda seen me comin’ five miles. ‘Hotel Lincoln,’ I said in a deep voice, to show the driver I been around. Okay. We get there. This is ‘38, the Depression. Nine bucks is what the meter says. My bonus is now $4,991.

“We play a couple games in New York and some fellers take me in hand. Pepper Martin, he was from Oklahoma and they called him ‘The Wild Hoss of the Osage.’ And Lonnie Warneke, he’s from my own state, and they called him ‘The Arkansas Hummingbird.’ Pepper and Lon and me stayed at the hotel a couple days. Then we were due to leave town and I said, ‘Train time’s ‘bout an hour. Let’s get a cab.’

“Warneke said, ‘What’s this?’

“I said, ‘Get in the cab.’

“Warneke said, ‘That’s the station twelve blocks down Eighth Avenue. Keep your legs strong if you wanta pitch. We’ll walk.’

“That first cabbie took me to Brooklyn, the Bronx, Astoria. Man, I saw it all. The country boy’s nine-buck city tour.

“So I’m grateful to Warneke, but my gratitude had limits. He was through ‘round ‘45 and commenced to become an umpire. Now by the time I got to Brooklyn and I was working the wet one, I didn’t have that real hard fast ball any more. I needed the corners. I pitched to four-inch spots. Figuring both ways, that means I needed an ump could see two inches. And one day in
a tough game I was passing Lonnie Warneke and he said, ‘Preach, I may have my superiors on the bases, but when it comes to balls and strikes, I’m second to no man.’

“And I commenced thinking careful and when I was done I told him, ‘Horseshit, Lon.’

“See that gas station up there? Well, that’s Viola. You done brung me home.”

The gas station, old pumps and graveled driveway, stood at an intersection. Small clapboard houses, mostly white, were scattered beyond it. You could see in one glance school, church, houses and the little sign that read:”
viola. pop.:
196.”

“Growed,” Roe said. “Another sixteen. I told you things was picking up.”

At the crossroad he turned right and drove six hundred yards up a narrow country road and parked in front of a sprawling white house, with a sheet-iron roof. “The clinic my dad run burned down, but this is my home, just about the way it was. Over here, I want to show you something. Let’s get out.” We walked to a retaining wall, between lawn and blacktop road. Someone had written in the wet cement:

“We were kids,” he said, “but we built the thing ourselves.”

The house stood against the sky on a grassy crest. “We played some ball right here,” Roe said. “I want to show you the school over yonder. That big brick building’s the Wayman B. Roe building. He was my older brother. Died in an auto crash.” There was no sadness, but a kind of resignation, that country people acquire to survive.

Roe walked with long strides, his head bobbing on the long neck. “Now here’s something else.” A stone gatepost bore an
inscription:
“GIFT OF CLASS OF
1934–35.
ELWIN C. ROE, PRESIDENT. VEDA E. UPTON SECRETARY.”
“I finished third. The secretary finished second. Her boy friend finished first. We’re all pretty old and scattered now. That little house across the way, not fancy, is where my wife was raised. She and me used to sit on fences here and spark.

“Over there you seen the Methodist church, where I was raised in all my life. That’s all there is of Viola. I’ve hunted and fished every hill and stream in this country. I grew up in the woods here and the fields. Let’s commence back country a ways, unless you’re tired.”

We drove and turned onto a dirt road for two miles. He stopped between two houses and a clearing in oak woods. “This was my real home field,” Preacher said. “Old backstop’s gone now. There’s some stones come up. Native flint rock. And as you see, it’s all overgrown.”

“What’s that, rye grass?”

“Sage. Let a field be and the sage takes it.” We got out of the car and sat on a bank at the side of the road.

“Here’s where it really begun,” Preacher said. “One of my brothers and I lived in those two houses once. We had a regular Roe community, but when I was a boy, there weren’t any houses at all. Just woods and this field, trimmed neat. Gray Field, owned by Mr. Gray, and open spaces. Can you imagine startin’ here and getting to pitch for the championship of the World Series in New York City?” Roe shook his head in wonder.

“Can you imagine it?” I said. “Can you make it come alive?”

“All of it,” Preacher said. “One thing makes a feller sad is knowin’ that’s behind, and what’s wrong with him is nothing that giving back twenty years wouldn’t cure. ‘Cept they don’t do that, do they? Say, we had some pretty good days.”

Country quiet held us briefly.

“That Mr. Rickey,” Preacher said. “First time he talked to me
he told me two things. He said, ‘Son. Always be kind to your fans. You get back what you give and when you’re through, you’re just one more old ball player, getting back from life what he gave.’ I heeded that and I wisht someone would give advice to Joe Namath. I don’t know the man personally, but
I
get the impression he ought to walk more humble.

“Second, Mr. Rickey said, ‘Remember, it isn’t the color of a man’s skin that matters. It’s what’s inside the individual.’ And he said some of the people with the whitest skins would be the sorriest I’d meet and some of the darkest ones would be the best. That was 1938. I know now that Rickey had in mind breaking the color barrier almost ten years before he did. I respect him for that, and I went through my career with that respect always in mind.

“I first seen colored at Searcy, ‘cepting colored passing through on trucks and once a year a colored team’d come down from Missouri for an exhibition game in Viola and draw a crowd.

“Now I’m playing with Jack. I’m gonna tell you frankly I don’t believe in mixed marriages.”

“Neither does Robinson,” I said.

“Well some do, and I won’t argue with ‘em. But as far as associatin’ with colored people and conversing with them and playing ball with them, there’s not a thing in the world wrong with it. That’s my way of looking at the thing.

“Lots of people here reckoned like me. And some did not. A few times people come up to me in the winter and said, ‘Say, Roe. If you’re gonna go up there and play with those colored boys, to hell with ya.’ But very few. I always said, ‘Well, if that’s how you feel, I considered the fellers I play with, I considered your remark, and to hell with
you!’”

The sun was lowering toward a line of oaks. Before us stretched a wide, bright sky, big sweeping woods, a field of sage. “When I was starting,” Roe said, “the Cardinals would look at me in the spring and send me back and take another look in the
fall. For five years I pitched at Rochester and Columbus. Then Frankie Frisch, who’d managed the Cardinals when I first come up, moved on to Pittsburgh and wanted me there. I pitched opening day, 1944, the first year he had me. Threw a two-hitter and got beat, 2 to 0.

“In Pittsburgh I commenced to change my style. In ‘45 my control was a lot better and I led the National League in strikeouts.

“I came back to coach basketball and teach a little high school math that winter. At one game I didn’t like a referee’s call and I shouted something.

“He shouted, ‘Shut up.’

“I thought he shouted, ‘Stand up.’

“He decked me. My head hit the gym floor. I got a skull fracture and a lacerated brain. The fracture ran eight inches long.

“I wasn’t much good the next couple of years; but I was changing my style and messing with the wet one. I won less than ten games in the next two years, but I was learning.

“Then Rickey got me and Billy Cox for Dixie Walker and Vic Lombardi, a little lefthander, and Hal Gregg. Years later, they said, Rickey put a gun to the Pirates, but hell, he wasn’t dealin’ with dummies. Billy had been shook by the war. Close as I been to that man, he never talked about it. So what was Rickey getting? An infielder who had been shook real bad and a skinny pitcher with a busted head.

“Now we come to where I quit flyin’ in airplanes. For 1948 the Dodgers trained in the Dominican Republic, so Jack and the other colored guys wouldn’t have the pressure of bein’ in Florida. I went to Miami by train and got on this airplane to the Dominican Republic. Then I flew from there to Puerto Rico and back and then on to the States, and that began and ended my career flying.

“On one of them flights, the plane ahead of us took off into
a cross wind and almost wrecked against a hangar. After our pilot assured us he won’t do that, we all had to get off. Overloaded. He took off a little gasoline. I knew we was running heavy, and forty minutes out Duke called to the hostess, ‘Why isn’t this thing flyin’ right?’

“She said, ‘Look out your window.’

“One of the inboard motors was stopped. We turned back and a little later there’s more bucking and Duke said, ‘What’s doing that now?’

“The girl said, ‘Look out the other window.’

“Another inboard motor was stopped. Here we are loaded to capacity, two engines out, and we come over a mountain so low, if I coulda pulled down the window, I’da grabbed me a handful of leaves. We get over the coast and the right outboard motor starts smoking. You counting? Three stopped. We’re down to one. Pilot comes on and tells us to buckle in; he might set down in the water. No sharks, he says, just barracuda, so stay on top o’ something that floats. We made the airport, and landed among a mess of fire-fighting stuff.

“Couple of days later, we fly back to Florida and we’re to take the Dodger DC-3 from Miami to Montgomery, Alabama. Pilot run into a storm. There was twenty-one on the plane, and twenty of ‘em was sick. Only Jocko Conlan, the umpire, was okay. Sickest crew you ever saw. We finally had to set down in Tallahassee and we come staggerin’ off, and somebody says, ‘Lunch is being served.’ That was it. I had to see me a doctor. Then someone with the ball club says, ‘Preach, go home for thrse days and pick us up in Asheville, North Carolina.’ I caught up with them ten days later in Washington, D.C., by train. I’ve never been on an airplane from that day to this.

“In ‘48 we started with three lefthanders, Joe Hatten, a boy named Dwain Sloat and me. Durocher’s managing. He calls in me and Sloat and says, ‘Hatten’s made the club, and I’m only
gonna keep two lefthanders. I’m gonna start you both in Cincinnati and the one that looks best gets to stay.’ We all shook hands. Then we flipped a coin and I got to pitch first. I had a good game, a three-hit shutout. Next day when Sloat worked, he gave up about as many hits as I did, but Pee Wee kicked one. It beat him his game.

“Now we have another meeting. Durocher says, ‘Preach, you won, but you have to admit Sloat looked as good as you did. Remember, I didn’t say who won. Just who looked better. You looked the same. So we’re gonna do it all over again in Chicago.’ And we three shake hands again.

“Welp, if you look into the records, you’ll see that in Chicago in ‘48 I pitched my second straight shutout. Next day the Cubs got to Sloat for five. He goes. I stay. That began my Brooklyn success. Those were the only two shutouts I got all year.”

According to the story in
Sports Illustrated,
Roe decided over the winter of 1947—before coming to Brooklyn—that he would try to use the spitter. “But,” he said, “I believe I admitted in the article to throwing exactly four specific wet ones. It was a helluva pitch, but it was just one of my pitches; and just one part of my pitching. I ain’t gonna tell you now I only threw four at Brooklyn, but, cripes, don’t make it come out like the spitter was my only pitch. Some seem to think I threw a hundred spitters every game.”

Sitting on the woody roadside, beside a settled, fiftyish man, I could almost see the skinny lefthander who at thirty-three learned above all things to win. His Brooklyn winning records were phenomenal. He had the league’s best winning percentage in 1949 and in 1951. During the three years from ‘51 through 1953 he won forty-four games and lost only eight. He kept ahead. He yielded more homers than most pitchers, but almost never let a home run cost a ball game. He stood on the mound fidgeting, walking in little circles, muttering, scheming. It could take him three hours to win, 3 to 1. He was always
chewing gum, touching his cap, tugging his belt or chattering to the air.