To celebrate the defeat of the Yankees in the American League playoffs and blatantly promote sales of my novel “Dirty Billy,” I am for the next four days posting excerpts from Chapter 12, wherein a planned trip to an Atlanta Crackers’ game takes a ghastly turn. To read other excerpts, visit my Reading Room; to buy the whole durn book, click on the red dot.
The first day of August fell on a Sunday, and it was the worst day of my life. After walking the hot mile down and up Dill Avenue to church and dozing sweaty through an hour of Sunday school, I raced out the backdoor of the education building and was pulling my dress up over my head when I ran smack into our youth pastor, Tommy Leatherwood.
“Mornin’, Mary Kay, nice outfit.”
“Back at you, Tommy, you’re not looking so bad yourself.”
“Well, I’d lot rather be in those shorts and that Crackers T-shirt than in this shirt and tie. I can tell that you’re not a candidate for Preacher Simpson’s eleven o’clock sermon.Too bad — it’s called, ‘The Invisible Man Meets God’s Only Begotten Son.”
“No, sir. I’m meeting my grampa Thompson and he’s taking me to the Crackers double-header. But he promised my mama we’d leave the second game early so I can get back for youth fellowship and then hear you preach tonight.”
“Even as minister of the gospel, I’m always surprised by small miracles.”
I liked Brother Tommy Leatherwood. In fact, I liked him a whole lot more than Preacher Simpson, a long, tall drink of water who looked like a thin Boris Karloff with less of a smile. I always skipped Sunday morning services, but I never missed a chance to hear our youth pastor in the evening. Tommy didn’t preach down on you, he stood in front of the pulpit and talked straight out at you. He wasn’t afraid to say something about everything important — baseball, rock-and-roll music, new movies like Blackboard Jungle, Levis, even the atom bomb. He was the only adult I ever heard say it was the KKK that ran Nat Peebles out of town after he opened the season with the Crackers. (Everybody else said Mr. Earl Mann traded our first colored ballplayer because he “didn’t have AA skills.” But how could you tell after only one game?) And Brother Leatherwood certainly was the only Atlanta/Milwaukee baseball fan who was willing to publicly speculate that another brand-new colored ballplayer named Henry Aaron wouldn’t just stick with the Braves, he’d become a better home run hitter than Eddie Mathews.
I left the education building, crossed the street and trotted down the short alleyway to the back gate of PaPa Thompson’s vegetable garden. After stuffing my dress down behind one of the garbage cans, I sat down to wait, pulled my knees up under my chin, closed my eyes and started thinking about the former manager of the Atlanta Crackers, Gene Mauch, who last season drew more girls to Ponce de Leon Park than anybody could remember. Mauch was only twenty-eight years old and he looked like I wanted my friend Billy to look when he got up to that age — deep tan, cat-green eyes, swept-back brown hair he kept pulling off his cap and running his hand through, not even a pooch of a stomach hanging out over his belt.
The Milwaukee Braves were the big league affiliate of our AA Atlanta Crackers, and on that Sunday afternoon they’d be playing the despised Dodgers. Mr. Aaron, Mr. Mathews, Joe Adcock, and Del Crandall would be banging the fences at Ebbets Field, and Warren Spahn would be pitching up there. Down here at Ponce de Leon Park, Tricky Dickie Donovan would be pitching against the Mobile Bears, and Billy George would be catching for us and double-dog daring somebody to run on him. Chuck Tanner would be pulling down sure homers from the center-field wall, our big old Italian stallion first baseman Frank Torre would be smacking balls into the left-field bleachers, and Bob Montag would be hitting rockets plumb out of the stadium in right. Montag was hitting homers almost every other day now, including one that landed in a coal car up on the railroad tracks in dead center field, traveled five hundred miles to Nashville and back, and became the longest home run in baseball history (at least according to Mr. Earl Mann). We’d won the Dixie Series with the Texas League champs at the end of the season a jillion times before, and we were headed there again, so every day and night at home since April 9, Ponce de Leon Park had been nearly sold out, including the colored bleachers. If a kid could get there early on and snag an outside peanut job, you got in free after selling a hundred bags. That usually happened about the end of the second inning, and once you got out into the white bleachers you were free to bet what little money you had on foul balls, pop outs, third strikes, and just about anything else. Mostly we bet on foul balls, and we were pretty good at it, because an older, wiser boy name of Henry Alonzo taught us all he knew …. (to be continued tomorrow).
To celebrate the defeat of the Yankees in the American League playoffs and blatantly promote sales of my novel “Dirty Billy,” I am for the next four days posting excerpts from Chapter 12, wherein a planned trip to an Atlanta Crackers’ game takes a ghastly turn. To read other excerpts, visit my Reading Room; to buy the whole durn book, click on the red dot.
The first day of August fell on a Sunday, and it was the worst day of my life. After walking the hot mile down and up Dill Avenue to church and dozing sweaty through an hour of Sunday school, I raced out the backdoor of the education building and was pulling my dress up over my head when I ran smack into our youth pastor, Tommy Leatherwood.
“Mornin’, Mary Kay, nice outfit.”
“Back at you, Tommy, you’re not looking so bad yourself.”
“Well, I’d lot rather be in those shorts and that Crackers T-shirt than in this shirt and tie. I can tell that you’re not a candidate for Preacher Simpson’s eleven o’clock sermon.Too bad — it’s called, ‘The Invisible Man Meets God’s Only Begotten Son.”
“No, sir. I’m meeting my grampa Thompson and he’s taking me to the Crackers double-header. But he promised my mama we’d leave the second game early so I can get back for youth fellowship and then hear you preach tonight.”
“Even as minister of the gospel, I’m always surprised by small miracles.”
I liked Brother Tommy Leatherwood. In fact, I liked him a whole lot more than Preacher Simpson, a long, tall drink of water who looked like a thin Boris Karloff with less of a smile. I always skipped Sunday morning services, but I never missed a chance to hear our youth pastor in the evening. Tommy didn’t preach down on you, he stood in front of the pulpit and talked straight out at you. He wasn’t afraid to say something about everything important — baseball, rock-and-roll music, new movies like Blackboard Jungle, Levis, even the atom bomb. He was the only adult I ever heard say it was the KKK that ran Nat Peebles out of town after he opened the season with the Crackers. (Everybody else said Mr. Earl Mann traded our first colored ballplayer because he “didn’t have AA skills.” But how could you tell after only one game?) And Brother Leatherwood certainly was the only Atlanta/Milwaukee baseball fan who was willing to publicly speculate that another brand-new colored ballplayer named Henry Aaron wouldn’t just stick with the Braves, he’d become a better home run hitter than Eddie Mathews.
I left the education building, crossed the street and trotted down the short alleyway to the back gate of PaPa Thompson’s vegetable garden. After stuffing my dress down behind one of the garbage cans, I sat down to wait, pulled my knees up under my chin, closed my eyes and started thinking about the former manager of the Atlanta Crackers, Gene Mauch, who last season drew more girls to Ponce de Leon Park than anybody could remember. Mauch was only twenty-eight years old and he looked like I wanted my friend Billy to look when he got up to that age — deep tan, cat-green eyes, swept-back brown hair he kept pulling off his cap and running his hand through, not even a pooch of a stomach hanging out over his belt.
The Milwaukee Braves were the big league affiliate of our AA Atlanta Crackers, and on that Sunday afternoon they’d be playing the despised Dodgers. Mr. Aaron, Mr. Mathews, Joe Adcock, and Del Crandall would be banging the fences at Ebbets Field, and Warren Spahn would be pitching up there. Down here at Ponce de Leon Park, Tricky Dickie Donovan would be pitching against the Mobile Bears, and Billy George would be catching for us and double-dog daring somebody to run on him. Chuck Tanner would be pulling down sure homers from the center-field wall, our big old Italian stallion first baseman Frank Torre would be smacking balls into the left-field bleachers, and Bob Montag would be hitting rockets plumb out of the stadium in right. Montag was hitting homers almost every other day now, including one that landed in a coal car up on the railroad tracks in dead center field, traveled five hundred miles to Nashville and back, and became the longest home run in baseball history (at least according to Mr. Earl Mann). We’d won the Dixie Series with the Texas League champs at the end of the season a jillion times before, and we were headed there again, so every day and night at home since April 9, Ponce de Leon Park had been nearly sold out, including the colored bleachers. If a kid could get there early on and snag an outside peanut job, you got in free after selling a hundred bags. That usually happened about the end of the second inning, and once you got out into the white bleachers you were free to bet what little money you had on foul balls, pop outs, third strikes, and just about anything else. Mostly we bet on foul balls, and we were pretty good at it, because an older, wiser boy name of Henry Alonzo taught us all he knew …. (to be continued tomorrow).