Who's On First?

Baseball is almost here.


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Junger's War

Sebastian Junger, you may recall, is the author of The Perfect Storm, a gripping account of a fishing accident in the Outer Banks region of the Atlantic off the coast of New England. George Clooney starred in the movie, which wasn't too bad, but not nearly as riveting as the book.

I read Junger's 2010 reportage, War, shortly after it appeared. The book wasn’t nearly as inspired as Storm, but it was a fascinating read nonetheless.

Junger spent time embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in a Taliban-controlled segment of Afghanistan's Kunar Province near the Pakistan border, entering and leaving the region five times over the course of 14 months.

Taliban fighters controlled a thirty-six square mile swath in the southern area of the province, in the Korengal Valley. (We don’t know what they control today because reporting like this is basically not happening now).

The valley is a tight area of villages hugging the Korengal River, which confluences with the Pech River to the north. The stretch of road from the Pech River to a series of U.S. outposts situated at the lower end of the valley was then in the heart of Taliban fighters' turf. At the time of Junger’s reportage it was considered the most dangerous road in the country. A majority of U.S. casualties in the Afghanistan War were occurring in the Korengal Valley when Junger embedded with the troops in 2008. He describes in detail what happened there over a harrowing year.

War correspondents are usually nuts, and Junger is no different. He got caught in firefights, had a Humvee blown out from under him, and fell in love with the Army grunts he wrote about. Like the soldiers under his reporter's gaze, he lost interest in the politics of America's war and turned survivalist to cope.

The book is about survival and the warrior bond.

Junger notes that grunts in the heat of a firefight are unconcerned with moral questions. There are no moral questions when someone is shooting at you. Reading War, one is struck by how all the memoirs and reportage of war correspondents are always similar. Inevitably, the writer falls in love with the troops, drops attempts to question the war's meaning on any level that hasn't a warrior's slant, and tells a gripping story.

In other words, you've read this book before.

The usual suspects show up in the narrative. Only their names and home towns have changed. The crusty old-timer reappears, along with the cherries new to the killing business. The rough but brilliant sergeant is in the hooch next to the frightened and inexperienced young officer.

The types are ready-made for a movie set. (In fact, Junger made a documentary of his experience; the footage above is from his Restrepo.)

The commanders are asses more concerned with dress codes than strategy. The soldiers are quick with their bios and tell Junger things like: it was either the Army or jail; the Army or a dead-end job in a Subway; the Army or boredom.

In rare cases there is patriotism.

This book doesn't reach the plateau of the best books about war, but it is serviceable, particularly in the way the author draws the terrain of Afghanistan and Korengal Valley, as well as the personalities of the kids who travel into harm’s way in support of America’s military.


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Mance Lipscomb

I saw the widely influential Texas blues player Mance Lipscomb in Eugene in 1973. He played outside on the lawn of the University of Oregon music building, and quite honestly the performance presented one of those life moments I now revere, an educational moment as such, a breakthrough in my understanding and deepening appreciation of roots music.

Mance Lipscomb's hometown of Navasota, Texas became one of the focal points of the blues revival movement of the sixties. In the summer of 1960, Mack McCormick and Chris Strachwitz drove deep into Grimes County, Texas and began quizzing the locals regarding the best musicians in the region. They were repeatedly referred to Lipscomb. They found him, heard him, and recorded him on the first day of their meeting. The label was Arhoolie and the first recording was called "Texas Songster," the guitarist/singer's chosen handle.

Lipscomb was born in 1895, the son of a former slave from Alabama and his half-Choctaw Native American wife. Sixty-five at the time he made his first recordings with Arhoolie, he was invited to Barry Olivier's Berkeley Folk Festival the next summer and thus began a recording career and touring schedule that often brought him to the west coast, including Eugene.

Lipscomb played a Dobro the day I watched him, sitting in awe on the lawn of Oregon's music school. At 78, his voice was yet remarkably resilient, tinged with a Texas drawl, his love of performance obvious.

Lipscomb died in 1976, age 80.


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The Pot is Boiling

I'm at the tail end of a few projects that are quickly coming to fruition.

One involves a new publication, which I will formally announce here on Monday. The other two involve management scenarios designed to enhance the visibility of a couple of previously published Round Bend titles.

The pot is boiling, in other words.

So don't go away, or withdraw, or pout about stuff you can't control.

You'll get what's coming to you from Round Bend, I promise you, and you will live with it.

I'm not telling you that.  The guy in the picture is, and he has my back.  Buddy Dooley is one guy you do not want to cross.  Ever.

You've been warned.


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William Saroyan

The Armenian-American writer William Saroyan (1908-1981) was a huge favorite of mine during my early romance with writers and stories. Born in Fresno to Armenian immigrants, he was raised for eight years in an orphanage in Oakland, after the early death of his father. Rejoining his poor mother in Fresno as a teenager, he sold papers and worked in local vineyards to contribute to the family income. He attended Fresno Technical High, but didn't graduate due to disciplinary issues.

He decided to become a writer after reading, at the behest of his mother, some of the stories his father had written. After a brief stint in the California National Guard, he went to New York for the first time at 19, only to become homesick. He returned to Fresno and plunged into his literary endeavors.

Saroyan famously spent the money he made writing as fast as he earned it, and he was prolific. He was an addicted gambler and drinker, but remained a high-spirited humorist over the entirety of his career. He met early success by publishing stories in the legendary Story Magazine and elsewhere. Those stories became The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, published in 1934. The stories of Depression Era hardship, told with compelling optimism, had great critical and commercial success, giving Saroyan the opportunity to travel. Daring...has often been compared favorably with other stories of hardship and oppression by Knut Hamsun (Hunger) and Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London).

Saroyan wrote fast and with abandon, often getting reasonable first drafts out to his editors in rapid succession. With his early success, he was afforded the opportunity to submit and let others correct little spelling and grammar problems where they arose. Every writer should be so lucky, or good.

Two of my favorites of Saroyan's vast output are a pair of his non-fictional works: Places Where I've Done Time (1972) and Here Comes, There Goes You Know Who (1961).


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Bernardo Bertolucci

He began his career in revolt, lashing out at the injustices of capitalism and the blinding middle-class decadence he witnessed as a young man. The son of an affluent and highly regarded poet, he was born in Parma, Italy. As a young man, Bertolucci fell under the spell of family friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, who gave him his first job in cinema and became his mentor.

Bertolucci's first films dealt with an early personal conflict of values. Awakening to the struggle of the lower-classes, he sought a method of disowning the comfortable. To combat the emptiness of bourgeois conformity, he turned to Marxism in the 1960s. His second film, Before the Revolution, probed questions of political identity. How is the tension between individuality and forms of governance reconciled? How does one live a moral life within the framework of materialism and the uneven hand of fate? What choice has man between how he feels and what society expects?

They're age-old questions, and every artist deals with them. In fact, they are entirely the point of art. Answered or not, they reflect the artist's worldview—that is, their importance is judged on a scale by the artist, whose work is always metered by perceptions of "what it means."

The "it" can be everything or nothing.

Of course, one doesn't necessarily have to be an artist to deal with such questions. One need only be human and engaged with life. But artists are the messengers, and what they do interests me, so I keep my eye on them.

Bertolucci's movies fit my style, and a few of them have sat near the top of my Top 25 list for years.

His movies speak to political evolution in the context of self-examination.

The Conformist, finished and distributed in 1970, gave the filmmaker international cachet. The story of how one man deals with 1930s fascism and his own broken psyche, the film's appeal rests in its recognition of an historical imperative—that individualism is in constant peril under the restraints of governance.

If you've seen this film, you know its message is as pertinent today as it was in 1970, when aspects of fascism similar to Mussolini's in the thirties were once again infiltrating Western thought.

The Kent State Massacre, in 1970, is one obvious example of fascist suppression in the U.S. from that era. Like mindless conformists, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire at a student demonstration, killing four innocent people.

There are of course many other more recent examples from around the world, from the squelching of dissent in China to the fundamentalism of the Taliban to elements of the Christian Right. What they have in common is the ability to herd people into a niche that makes conformity expected and of paramount importance across a social spectrum. Holdouts are regarded as outlaws and are ultimately shunned by the conforming mass.

Tomorrow's news will bring more evidence that the murderous conformist is still plying his trade, in the name of one ideology or another.

Bertolucci's career skyrocketed after The Conformist appeared, and he made the blockbuster, Last Tango in Paris. The popularity of that film allowed him to make the five hour-long epic, 1900, his final exposition of his hoped-for utopianism. The film didn't sell well, crushing Bertolucci and causing him to rethink his ideals.

With The Last Emperor (1987), he moved into the mainstream and altered much of the political ideology he had so carefully manipulated as a young filmmaker.

Correspondingly, his movies became less interesting, at least to me.


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Something Novel

It’s entirely something else now, but when I conceived of Round Bend Press I imagined it to be a conduit to my collection of plays at Lulu, the printing company that makes all this possible.

Anyone can publish a book these days, and that is a new democratic reality. However, as with democracy in general, it is not a perfect thing. A lot of crap has joined the publishing parade. (On the other hand, some very reputable presses, the mega-monoliths, publish their own fair share of crap.)

A few years ago I was brooding about not having a job and sending out dozens of resumes a week to various companies and hearing nothing back except a rare letter thanking me for my interest.

I was collecting unemployment at the time and working four to eight hours a day slamming out cover letters, fine tuning my approach to job hunting, and lamenting the old adage that says hunting for a job is the hardest job you'll ever have.

At the same time I was writing a novel.

Who in the hell is going to publish this I thought as I finished a draft. It hasn't novelistic qualities at all. It's a mystery, but not really a mystery. It's a crime novel, but not one in the ordinary sense. It's social satire, but loosely constructed. It's an anti-war novel, but marginally concerned with war. It's a social novel, but has elements of the anti-social throughout. What is it? Well, I thought, it's a slightly deranged stab at several genres at once and not a very good novel at all.

But there it sat in my laptop; several weeks of work come to naught.

Then I discovered Lulu. I'd never heard of it, but searching the Web for publishers, I read a story about "print-on-demand." Lulu was mentioned prominently in the story, so I investigated. I soon learned how the concept works and I decided to give it a try. I got terribly excited, typing my novel up as per the web site's suggestions, decoding the Cover Design template (but not fully), creating an actual book. Before this happened you might say I was out of touch. I still am usually, tagging along behind the masses, out of touch with what is happening in the technological world, movies, science, contemporary lit, art, pop culture, etc.

Holy cow! This is the job I've wanted all along, I realized as I worked at making my own book. I don't need to write deferential letters to strangers trying to convince them that I am a sincere hard worker who will do their company proud. I can do this instead!

Well, one can't simply stop looking for paying work, which I haven't, but let me put it this way—I now spend more time with Round Bend Press than I do with my futile job search. The economy is so bad in Oregon that I feel like quitting altogether and taking a tent into the woods; one would either die there or manage to live with the beasts. Or one could turn into a Ted Kaczynski-like figure, writing incendiary tracts against capital.

(I’m not advocating bombing anyone FBI guy. I’m not advocating anything here.)

I called my novel The Friends of Round Bend and self-published it at Lulu. The book wasn't ready to be published I discovered soon thereafter, having an assortment of typos and misspellings and a myriad of other problems (narrative, syntax, vocabulary, etc. etc.) All and all, a quite amateurish job filled with problems that I'd managed to overlook in my excitement to finally publish a book.

A slightly better issue of the novel was still up at Lulu until recently. I decided in the end that until I rewrite it or completely lose interest in its possibilities, I'll just leave it alone as a symbol of my subsequent efforts. (Today I have a collaborator on the project; perhaps something will come of that.)

It used to be said about Sherwood Anderson that he was a mediocre novelist and that short stories such as those he published in Winesburg, Ohio were as close to perfection as anything he wrote. His novels were too episodic, critics said. They lacked the necessary cohesion of the novel form, which is organic and fluid in structure. Winesburg, Ohio is indeed an unstructured, informal novel inasmuch as all the stories in it are interrelated. It is a fragmented glimpse, but not novelistic in the usual way we define the concept. As short stories however, the book is masterful.

The ideal novel wouldn't have chapters; it would open with the first sentence and each subsequent sentence would make perfect sense relative to the previous sentence and the next sentence, so that if one sentence diverged from its novelistic essence the entire structure of the thing would collapse and be indecipherable. In a sense, this is what Hemingway was talking about when he said his method was to write "one true sentence" at a time until a story was told. To banish the extraneous would then be the ultimate goal, giving the novel a ringing truth like the best haiku. A long novel would break into a myriad of haiku moments. No padding or flowering, simply the author's voice giving recognition to a moment or an object or a thing.

I imagine that nothing would ever to need happen in the novel if this were the case; it might perfect nothingness, which, as Sartre postulated, is the most significant realization of the way things are.

But of course Sartre may have been full of shit.


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Frederick Exley

One evening in 1979, in Portland's Goose Hollow Inn, Peter Fritch told me about a book he'd recently finished called A Fan's Notes, by a writer named Frederick Exley.

Pete was a favorite customer of mine in the Goose, where I worked at the time, and I listened closely to his description of the novel.

He gave me a brief summary of the story, about a guy obsessed with Frank Gifford, the ex-USC and New York Giants football star. I knew about Gifford naturally enough because I grew up watching him play in news reels and on television.

Pete told me the first-person narrator in the book was a drunken madman, likely Exley embellishing autobiographical scenes from his life. You must read this book, Pete said.

The narrator of A Fan’s Notes fails at work and in marriage, obsesses about Gifford, drinks relentlessly, and repeatedly finds himself institutionalized for mental illness, Pete further informed me.

And, by the way, it’s funny, he said.

Pete's description of the novel struck me immediately as an interesting premise for a story.

As a kid just a decade earlier, I'd worshipped Joe Namath, the New York Jet who famously predicted victory against the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. I had owned a poster of Namath, resplendent in his clean green and white uniform, dropping back to pass. Scanning down field for his sure-handed receiver Don Maynard, daubs of what looked like black shoe polish under his eyes, the curls of his longish, dark hair protruding from the back of his helmet, he seemed God-like to a kid who grew up idolizing the athletes who played the games I loved for money.

I had my share of fantasies about being a professional athlete, as kids have since sports came on the scene. When I was fifteen, I wanted to be Broadway Joe Namath.

Namath fascinated me. He wore white shoes and averred that the three elixirs—Johnny Walker Scotch, white shoes and long fur coats—combined to help create his greatness.

Along with the strongest arm to ever play professional football, until Dan Marino and John Elway came along, all of that may have been true.

But likely not.

Despite my idolatry, it hadn't occurred to me to write a novel with Broadway Joe as a central character. But as I would eventually come to realize, I hadn't an ounce of Frederick Exley's talent and imagination, either.

Exley was, quite simply, a great writer. His reputation rests on the extraordinary book my friend Pete turned me on to, and two others that weren't as well received by his critics (his biographer Jonathan Yardley calls him a "one-book" novelist).

Frederick Exley died after his long fight with alcohol and depression in 1992. He was 65.


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Jerzy Kosinski

Waiting for a train one morning on 5th Avenue, I fell into conversation with a fellow going to his job at the central library in Portland.

He told me how he secured his job, which I won't get into; suffice to say it was not through what might be considered normal channels.

You see, he was a contract laborer. Our conversation turned to wages and how the American economy has been stymied by the wages versus costs gap, the inflationary reality we love to hate, which is a terrible problem for a vast segment of low-income workers in the U.S. and has been for years.

Naturally enough, the conversation turned to the day the free-fall of real wages for workers started, which we agreed was the day Ronald Reagan became president and over the next eight years when the effects of Reaganomics took hold. I mean, this fellow and I, about the same age, were in sync about this.

We commiserated some more, recalling that when the bad actor-turned president died, a vast outpouring of sentimentality seized the nation, perpetuated by the contrived sentimentality of big-assed corporate media.

Why?

My new friend was quick with it, knew the score, had been around the block a few times, had read the news, was in tune, had been there and done that, had been a witness to history, had felt the hard hand- slap of fate, was down with it, was as clear as the Oregon sky on a rare good day, was hip and knowing, etc.

He said, "Because Americans are stupid."

That was the correct answer, exactly what I wanted to hear! And this was a stranger, honest to God, not some crony in the street, or a planted co-conspirator of mine tempting passers-by to berate us.

This was an honest-to-God citizen of Portland, a beautiful character, a truth-teller.

Then, being brilliant but perhaps lacking a few synapses like the rest of us, he said Reagan always reminded him of Peter Sellers in that movie...what was it called...you know…Seller plays this...

Ronald Reagan was Chauncey Gardener in Being There, the Jerzy Kosinski satire about an ignoramus thought to be a sage.

The train rolled to a stop in front of me and this brilliant man I'd come to know so well after only five minutes.

We got on, certain we had solved one of the great mysteries of life, and went our separate ways.


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Lonnie Johnson

Lonnie Johnson (1899-1970) was a highly influential (Elvis loved him) blues/jazz guitarist and singer born in Orleans Parish, New Orleans. He was raised in a family of musicians and said of the experience, "There was music all around us, and in my family you'd better play something, even if you just banged on a tin can."

A highly trained musician, Johnson was able to prolong his career by moving easily among musical genres and became a player in demand in the U.S., Europe and Canada. But for long stretches in his career he was ignored and had to keep a series of menial side jobs to make ends meet.

He moved from Philly to Toronto in 1965 and eventually opened a club there, but the business failed and he had to sell. He continued to work for the interests that bought the club, but he was fired after an argument with the new owner.

In 1969, Johnson was struck by a car on a Toronto street. Walking with a cane, he performed his final show with Buddy Guy at Massey Hall on Feb. 23, 1970. He died of a stroke in the late spring of that year and was buried in Toronto.

It is said that the great musician died broke.

Now, isn't that an unlikely story?


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Two From Thomas

Somewhere among my papers I have a picture of a drawing Bob Thomas made of Jack Spicer's head, with a cigarette dangling from its mouth, ascending a staircase.

Strange guy, Bob.



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Miles Davis

The music listening I've been involved with in recent months has been very good for me. Like many things over the years of my life, my interest in music and my musical tastes have taken many twists and turns. I'm now finding that I enjoy music more than at any other time in my life.

I grew up a trumpet player, starting at age 10. Over the years I learned to noodle out some faux piano and guitar figures as well and more or less left it at that. I always had the appreciation, but at times I let other things get in the way of my experiences with music.

I think I have a good ear. Not so much in the playing realm, but in knowing good music when I hear it, having the sudden recognition, usually within a few bars, that something interesting or accomplished is happening in a tune. Music has wonderful properties that play hide and seek with the senses. Often subtle and inhibited aural meaning emerges in successive encounters with a particular song, but something has to grab hold of you first, even appropriately placed silence.

I started listening to jazz after high school. That put rock and what little classical music I'd heard growing up on the back burner for many years.

Why was I drawn to the trumpet? I was unaware of jazz to begin with, but something in the sound of the horn caught me, swept me away. As odd as it may seem, I think I heard jazz before I knew jazz. I may have heard Miles before I discovered him.

So much mysticism? I think not.

Playing a typical brass march, which likely contained the first post "Mary Had a Little Lamb" phrases I learned on the horn, didn't stop me from hearing other stuff in my head. I can recall playing improvisations on the horn before reluctantly stopping long enough to learn a piece I had to learn for band competitions. Call it bad, instinctive jazz.

Maybe that is why I finally stopped playing. School band, a diet of Souza marches, bored me, finally. This was a long time before jazz education infiltrated the school system in Oregon, believe me.

Of course Miles Davis didn’t grow up in Oregon and he was no conformist. He played what he heard in his head, and then he took it to the clubs, starting at fifteen. He put it out there. Be damned if you didn't like it because his hero, Charlie Parker, did and Miles knew Charlie understood.

After treatment for heroin addiction and staying out of the clubs for a number of years, Miles founded one of the greatest quintets to every bless New York City. In featuring Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, Red Garland and John Coltrane, Miles Davis hit his stride as a band leader in the 1950s and created some of his most important and dynamic work.

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Kubrick and Southern

Terry Southern had the balls to tell Stanley Kubrick that Dr. Strangelove was a comedy and not the oh-so-serious anti-nuclear, muckraking political tract Kubrick believed he'd conceived.

Kubrick listened and a classic was born. Peter Sellers had turned Kubrick on to The Magic Christian, Southern's masterpiece about human greed, and the book opened the director's mind to the possibility that Southern just might be a special kind of thinker. Plus, face it, if you were Kubrick and Sellers was telling you something, you were going to take it seriously.

Southern knew what kind of film Kubrick was making, even if the director didn't, because the novelist was intimately connected with the absurd. Southern understood plenty about comedy and its role in blowing apart the dearest old myths. To Southern, nothing was as absurd as a nation willing to annihilate humanity to save humanity.

Southern published The Magic Christian in 1959. Surely it is one of the top-ten funniest fictions every written by an American. It satirizes the myth of the detached fiscal aesthete--the man who is above needing or wanting money.

Here is the premise of the story, which was a decade after its publication made into a movie with Sellers in the lead role, but unfortunately without Kubrick as director:

Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire, has a wicked, cruel streak and a desire to demonstrate how hypocritical people can be. He gives people money to make asses of themselves and discovers that nothing is too debasing for a human being to try if enough cash is offered in exchange.

At one point Grand tosses 100K into a vat of shit and tells people to have at it if they want, and of course people jump into the shit to retrieve the money.

Hell, who hasn't done that, metaphorically or otherwise?

Southern is an overlooked American writer.




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Richard Burton & Claire Bloom

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, based on the John Le Carre novel. In this fragment Alec, controlled by London, has finally seen that he has been used by his peers to save an East German double agent during the height of the Cold War.

The great Richard Burton and Claire Bloom were stellar in this 1965 film directed by Martin Ritt.


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Henry Aaron

(Henry Aaron)

As I continue to gather pieces for a new collection I'll consider this one:

In 1980 I researched and wrote a series of historical pieces on the Portland Beavers while working for a community monthly in Northwest Portland. I dug into a trove of microfiche files at the Portland library to find material dating from turn-of-the-century newspapers, and I leaned heavily on many stories by a long-time Oregonian writer, a legend in Oregon named L.H. Gregory, whom I could remember reading as a kid.

Gregory was among the last of the old-time sportswriters. He referred to the ballplayers as "lads" and extolled their virtues as "fine young men," and once described a manager as having a "Romanesque stature and nose," a man whose "dignity" surpassed even his managerial skills, etc.

A night on the town would include players under Gregory's watchful gaze "ice-skating in Fresno" on an off day, and "cutting manly figures" as they circled around the rink and "impressed the local ladies."

It was good stuff.

I used as much of the material as I could find and put together six pieces covering professional baseball in Portland between 1901 and 1980.

Lo, I had a minor hit in the community! One friend urged me to start going to spring training in Arizona and freelance baseball stories. People, generally old men, but a few old women as well, wrote to the newspaper thanking us for the memories of Vaughn Street Park, Portland's home field for over fifty years. Built in 1901, Vaughn had once been the finest ballpark on the west coast, people said. Everything changed when they tore that old stadium down in 1956. It just wasn't the same.

Baseball is American society's biggest nostalgia hook, even when the nostalgia is phony and trumped-up by baseball's never ending self-promotion. Or George Will, the waxiest of the baseball philosophers.

I understood baseball because I played the game. I played Little League, Babe Ruth, high school and junior college ball. But I swear to God baseball doesn't make me nostalgic at all. In fact, I don't even care for the game today. It's too money-centric now, and as with every professional sport most of the players are all about the money and little else. When Curt Flood sued baseball to free players at the negotiating table, the game changed, not just the ballparks, which always get rickety and old.

Curt Flood started free-agency rolling. That was good for the players, but bad for the fans. I knew Pete Ward, who played for the White Sox and Yankees for a decade, from my work in the bar business. He was a beer rep for a Portland distributor when I met him, and we once talked about the big money that came into baseball after he retired. He seemed a little wistful about the entire situation.

The baseball strike in the '90s was the last straw for me. I've seen a couple of games since then, but honestly the game bores me to death now, in part because I don't have the interest one must have to keep up with the revolving door of trades and salary disputes and drunken driving charges and dugout tiffs and on and on.

Throw in the "juicing" controversies--steroid use--of recent years and you have a yawner.

I wrote a small book about the Beavers, which in hindsight isn't really a very good book at all, and then I essentially lost interest in the team. Over the ensuing years I watched a handful of games, and I didn’t miss the game at all. Just a year ago the team's final owner, a rich kid whose father is Henry Paulson, and who is a soccer fanatic, sold the team out of town. He reconfigured the old baseball park into a futbol stadium.

But to get back on point, my baseball history was noticed. The Beaver's organization in 1980 had just switched hands again, this time falling in the lap of a young, aggressive Philadelphia native named David Hersh. Hersh favored long, thick, expensive cigars and nicely tailored suits and had a promoter's sensibility, like Charlie Finley, the then owner of the Oakland A's, and like one of the game's greatest-ever promoters, Bill Veeck (as in wreck).

Veeck, owner of the Chicago White Sox, made an early name for himself in 1951 when he hired 3' 7" Eddie Gaedel to pinch hit against the Detroit Tigers. The opposing pitcher walked him, of course, unable to find the six-inch strike zone a hunched over midget presents. For their part, Finley's Athletics kept a mule as a mascot at the ballpark in Oakland, a symbol of the owner's stubborn personality they say. Finley's teams were the first to wear white shoes and lobby for orange baseballs, which never happened thank the good lord lollipop.

David Hersh was 23 years-old when he came to Portland, at the time the youngest baseball executive in the land.

Never mind his relative inexperience, Hersh had somehow managed to find a list of investors who backed his dream, for a while, of placing Major League Baseball in Portland within a few years.

Like orange baseballs, it didn't happen, and Hersh moved on, dashing the hopes of Portland's smattering of hard-core fans.

I liked Hersh for his brashness and early willfulness to get it done and bring real ball to Portland. The Triple-A Beavers were good, but there is a considerable fall-off between the second highest level of baseball and the pinnacle league Babe Ruth helped build while nailing the grandstands together in Yankee Stadium. Anyone who knows baseball understands this, so the excitement Hersh brought to town was tangible.

I met Hersh at the stadium, where I'd been summoned by his Director of Communications, a Rick somebody (I've managed to inconveniently forget his last name; perhaps because he was somewhat of a dweeb). The organization was interested in my baseball history. I let them use whatever text they wanted to promote the team in their program, and in return they issued me a press pass, which I used sporadically for the next couple of seasons. I had asked for money, and Rick had said, "We're not that interested!"

The pass gave me access to the press box behind home plate, where I sat and daydreamed throughout the few games I attended. I may have even fallen asleep on occasion, to tell you how interested I was in the proceedings. I didn't write any more baseball stories that year.

Hersh walked up and down press row at times, doling out free food to the writers, which must have included me because when I was there I ate really well. Big, tasty sandwiches and all the pizza I wanted. Plus salads and savory desserts, cakes, trays of donuts, veggie plates--damn, I'm getting hungry recalling it all.

Hersh was a hand-shaker of course, moving around the ballpark in an effort to meet as many paying customers as he could. He was a back-slapper, touchy-feely, spreading his warm dreams to the writers and fans in the sincerest terms, with a perfect white smile, billowing cigar smoke as he laughed needlessly hard at poor quips--an honest to God salesman.

Hersh the promoter had worked out an affiliate's agreement with the Pirates, the team he brought to town for an exhibition at mid-season his first year. He held a home run contest, and the sight of Willie Stargell hitting the ball over 500 ft. to a balcony overlooking the ballpark in right field was an unforgettable sight, it really was. Hersh, smoking his cigar, stood near the on-deck circle with a wad of hundreds in his fist, and every time Stargell or the other derby contestants hit one out the kid would make a show of giving the batter a hundred. Two hours of this during pre-game, and the tab ran into the thousands.

A year or two later, Hersh brought Mickey Mantle and Henry Aaron to town for a special promotion. I heard later that Mick had been in Joe's Cellar on 21st Ave. with other baseball-types the night before and had drank a few and made an ass out of himself, which might explain why I didn't see him at the park the next night.

But I'm not absolutely sure he wasn't there, all I know is he didn't make it down to the press box, or I didn't see him at any rate.

I ran into Aaron after the game. The stadium offices were under the grandstands and I was down there, had just turned a corner out of the press box and I practically walk into Hammerin' Hank.

You know, Aaron wasn't a very large man, which was surprising given the number of homers he hit— 705. They say his power came from his wrists. When I saw Hank I naturally looked at those wrists, and I said, "Hello, Mr. Aaron."

He nodded and kept moving, until I said, "Could you please sign this for me?" I was holding a scrap of paper I'd just ripped from my notebook.

Hank looked at me with curious discernment and said, "Aren't you a little old to be asking for an autograph?"

Perhaps I was at 29. After that I don't remember what else I said, or how I justified myself, but Hank signed.

I owned that autograph for 20 years before losing it in a move. I should have given it to someone more responsible than I.


TS