Generations and Other True Stories (29 page)

In the 1950s, the Baker advertised its baths both as a remedy—for arthritis, rheumatism, neuritis, bursitis, high blood pressure, and the like—and as a general aid in “promoting health, vitality and a more attractive personality.” Its ads suggested that a bath and a massage were just the ticket for the overworked, stressed-out executive, and about 80 percent of the Baker's nonconvention business was Dallas and Fort Worth businessmen and their families just getting away from the city for a few days. In those days when liquor-by-the-drink was illegal in Texas, a big attraction of the Baker was the private Brazos Club, where guests' room keys made them members and the Texas rich could dress to the nines and have a good martini in an elegant, pink-mirrored setting.

“Back in the early days of the Dallas Cowboys, when they would black out the games on TV in Dallas, people would rent rooms at the Baker to watch them on Channel 6, out of Wichita Falls,” remembers Charles Pool, who was in charge of the hotel's food department in those days. “They would just pile over here. It was one big party.”

But as jet travel made more distant and exotic resorts quickly accessible to the Baker's customers, Earl Baker, nephew of the founder and the hotel's owner, saw the handwriting on the wall for his big-time hotel in the small-time town. He told his manager, Vernon Daniels, that he intended to get rid of the Baker when he turned seventy. In 1963, when he was about to reach that milestone and had found no buyer, he closed its doors.

A group of Mineral Wells businessmen bought the Baker in 1965 and reopened it. But the magic was gone. And when the government shut down Fort Wolters, where it had been training helicopter pilots during the Vietnam War, the hotel's fate was sealed. The doors shut again in 1972.

Since then, a number of dreamers have bought the building and announced grandiose plans, the most interesting being a scheme to turn the Baker into a vertical theme park, with a different era of Texas history portrayed on each floor. But none of the dreams has come true.

“It hurts to look at it now, knowing how it once was,” says Charles Pool, gazing out the window of his diner. “They say they can't tear it down, it's built so strong. I wish they could. Why leave it? Its time is over.”

Motorists on U.S. 180 can see the Baker looming for eight miles before they reach Mineral Wells. So it's natural that, when they reach the town, many of them get out of their cars, climb the wide flight of steps to the main entrance, cup their hands around their eyes and peer through the windows. “What was this?” they ask. “Why is it here?”

Jayne Catrett keeps the keys for the present owner, Harlow Jones, who lives in Arizona. And she pays the bills and collects the rent for the three small shops that remain in business on the hotel's street level. If she happens to be around when the curious are poking around, she'll unlock the door and let them have a look at the lobby, which she and another volunteer, Margaret Maxwell, keep clean for the occasional wedding receptions or town meetings that still are held there. And she opened it to the public during the town's annual Crazy Festival last June. “I just do it because I enjoy it,” she says.

If Ms. Catrett's fifteen-year-old grandson, Kyle Charles, happens to be around, he'll guide a tour for two dollars a person. He knows how to operate the old elevators, and zooms the visitors up to the old rooftop ballroom, where traces of glitter still stick to the plaster behind the bandstand where Jack Amlung and his Orchestra used to play. The wooden dance floor is buckling. Water is dripping through the ceiling from last night's rain. A dead pigeon lies near a broken window.

In the Baker Suite, where the owner stayed, Kyle conducts the visitors through the three bedrooms and five baths, the living room with its hand-painted pillars and ceiling, its fireplace and Moorish arches, and the study with its bookcases, all empty now. He points out the secret door in the back of the china closet, which hides the compartment where Mr. Baker stashed his liquor during the Prohibition era.

And on the second floor, in the fabled white-tiled bath house, moving among the rows of empty doctors' offices and the bathtub and shower stalls, and the massage stalls with their thick marble slabs, he retells the old Mineral Wells story.

But all is empty and dusty and ruined beyond hope. It takes a powerful imagination to place Marlene Dietrich or Clark Gable or Judy Garland in such a place.

The Baker's smaller rival, the Crazy, has fared better. It's now the Crazy Water Retirement Hotel, a clean, well-lighted place where some 180 senior citizens are living pleasantly. It's owned and run by Ron Walker, a Dallas stockbroker who got tired of the rat race.

“When I saw the ad in the
Wall Street Journal
that this place was for sale, I had never been this far west,” says Mr. Walker, who grew up in Boston. “I had never heard of this town. I didn't know why anybody would call a hotel ‘the Crazy.' But I kept hearing the stories and reading the books, and I said, ‘Holy cow, man! This is history!' And I've decided that there's a lot worse things in the world I could do than own an old folks' home in Mineral Wells, Texas. This is a retirement town now. Half of Palo Pinto County is retired folks.”

A few blocks away, Charles Hickey is filling a water jug for one of his customers in the last of the great water pavilions. The Famous Water Co., which Mr. Hickey owns, is the only place in Mineral Wells where visitors still can sample the liquid that made the town renowned throughout the world, and can buy a jugful to take home.

Mr. Hickey, who keeps the place open only three days a week, says most of his customers are locals and people from Dallas and Fort Worth, but a few from as far away as Michigan still order Famous Water through the mail. They pay more in postage than they do for the water, which sells for eighty-five cents a gallon, but they don't seem to mind, he says. You can't get water like Famous Water just anywhere.

“I've got a customer that comes in, he was using a walker,” Mr. Hickey says. “And he started drinking the mineral water, and he went from a walker to a cane. Now he doesn't use anything. He swears he'd be dead without this mineral water. And I have another customer who swears that this water solved his kidney problems. He doesn't take any medications anymore. And I myself drink the mineral water all the time because it stopped my heartburn and acid indigestion. I was eating Rolaids every day. I just carried a package with me. I've always had a bad stomach. Then I got into this business, and I said, ‘This is supposed to be great stuff. I'll just try it.' So I just laid the Rolaids down and started drinking the mineral water. I probably drink a gallon a day. No more acid indigestion. No more upset stomach.”

Somewhere the ghosts of Judge Lynch and the crazy woman must be smiling. Or laughing.

November 1992

One of the great privileges of my life was getting to watch Nolan Ryan pitch for the Texas Rangers during the last years of his amazing career. That career didn't end as gloriously as Ryan and his fans hoped. His last season was cut short by injuries
.

Nevertheless, he is one for the ages—an immortal hero of America's best game. We'll not see his likes again
.

How He Played the Game

The largest crowd ever to witness a baseball game in Texas assembled in the Houston Astrodome on the evening of April 3, 1993. And it was only an exhibition game.

A record 53,557 fans streamed in, all that the stadium could hold. But it wasn't the Astros that drew them there. They went less to see one team win than to see one man play. They had come to pay tribute to the pitcher of the opposing team, Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers.

In a time when so many Americans consider winning to be the only thing in sports that matters, Ryan is living testimony to the truth in a paraphrase of Grantland Rice's trite old verse: What Nolan Ryan will be remembered for is not whether he won or lost, but how he played the game.

Ryan. A former Astro. For many Houston fans,
the
Astro, the man who lifted the team out of the mediocrity in which it had wallowed during most of its history. He was their hometown boy, born and raised just down the road in the little town of Alvin. He and his wife Ruth, who was his high school sweetheart, still lived in Alvin. They reared two sons and a daughter there, and Ryan taught the children the proper way to raise calves, as he had learned in Alvin when he was young.

Ryan loved playing in Houston for “his” people. He pitched there for nine seasons with never a thought of leaving. Even back then, everybody knew he was headed for the Hall of Fame. What team would allow such a player to get away? But at the end of the 1988 season, during which Ryan won twelve games and turned forty-one years old, his contract expired. Astros owner John McMullen, apparently thinking his star pitcher was over the hill, offered to re-sign Nolan, but at a reduced salary.

This was seen—by Houston fans, at least—as the dumbest contract move since the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Ryan, a free agent, immediately put himself on the market. He received better offers from three teams and chose the Texas Rangers, mainly because Arlington is the second-closest stadium to Alvin.

“Also,” he told the press, “I'm a die-hard Texan.”

Five years later, Ryan announced that the 1993 season would be his last. At age forty-six, older than any other active player in baseball, older than the president of the United States, he would hang up his glove and wait for an invitation to Cooperstown. But he would come to pitch in the Astrodome one last time.

Of the five thousand people who live in Alvin, three thousand were in the crowd that night.

The evening didn't turn out the way such evenings are supposed to. The hero pitched six innings, gave up ten hits and four runs, and struck out only one batter. He and the Rangers lost, 4-3. But the crowd gave him a standing ovation anyway.

That evening was an omen of Nolan Ryan's last year on the mound. In his first three outings of the regular season, he won only one game, then went on the disabled list for knee surgery. In his first inning after returning to the lineup, he gave up six runs, and two more before he was yanked from the game in the fourth. A few days later, he was on the disabled list again, this time with a hip injury. On Memorial Day, a few days before he was to return to the lineup, he cut his foot in a boating accident, took seven stitches and returned to the disabled list.

So it has gone. Ryan's last season won't go into the books as one of his best, or even as a good one. But it doesn't matter. Wherever he has made even a brief appearance on the mound, however good or bad his performance has been, the fans have risen to their feet to cheer him. And the mere rumor that he may pitch has been enough to pack old Arlington Stadium, where fathers admonish their sons, “Watch and remember. You'll never see the likes of him again.”

The fathers are probably right. In a sport now populated with whining, self-absorbed millionaires with egos larger than California, Ryan reminds us of the players of another age—of Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Stan Musial, and Hank Aaron, who wore the mantles of greatness with dignity and grace. In an era when the stories of baseball games compete on the sports pages with accounts of athletes' addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and greed, Ryan stands as the all-American boy grown into the all-American man. The shy, laid-back, small-town Texan who grew up dreaming of becoming a veterinarian just became one of history's greatest ballplayers instead.

His lifetime won-lost record won't be among the best on the plaques at Cooperstown. Neither will his earned run average. His detractors—there used to be many; they seem to have thinned out lately—claimed over the years that he's just an average pitcher with a good fastball and a career spent on average teams.

But the Hall of Fame has begun collecting Nolan Ryan memorabilia. And no one—not even his old detractors—believes he'll have to wait longer than the minimum five years to take his place among the immortals, even though the part about Ryan's teams is true.

In twenty-six years in the majors, he has pitched in the World Series only once, coming out of the bullpen to save the third game for the “Miracle Mets” of 1969, the high point of his third full season. After two more years with the Mets, he was traded to the California Angels. He labored for eight years before making the playoffs again. In 1980, he went to the Astros as the first one million dollar-per-year pitcher in baseball. He stayed for nine seasons and helped lead them into two playoffs, but never into a Series.

In December 1988, when McMullen drove Ryan to the Rangers, a team that never has appeared in a postseason game, he signed a single-year contract. Everyone thought he would play it out and retire. But every year, the Rangers were just good enough to keep alive the hope that the next year could be the one to drive North Texas crazy—their first playoff and maybe Ryan's second crack at the World Series.

He's the only member of the “Miracle Mets” still playing and one of the oldest men ever to play in the big leagues. He has endured to stay in the majors longer than any other player. But he hasn't spent these waning years of his career simply occupying an occasional spot in the Rangers' pitching rotation between ailments.

During his prime in Houston in 1981, Ryan pitched his fifth no-hitter, breaking Sandy Koufax's record of four. With the Rangers in 1990, at age forty-three, he pitched his sixth. At age forty-four, on May 1, 1991, he pitched his seventh, giving him three more no-hitters than Koufax and four more than Bob Feller, the only other pitcher to throw as many as three. Ryan's fastball averaged ninety-three miles per hour that night. He struck out sixteen batters.

Back in 1983, in Houston, Ryan broke Walter Johnson's ancient record of 3,508 strikeouts, a record that was expected never to be broken. Only two years later, he became the first pitcher to strike out four thousand batters. And on August 22, 1989, at Arlington Stadium, in the fifth inning against Oakland, Ryan threw a ninety-six-mile-per-hour fastball over the plate and fanned Rickey Henderson for his five thousandth—864 more than any other pitcher's career total at the time.