Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (2 page)

Chapter 2

Harry Never Walked

T
HE RIVER there was narrower than it is today, maybe 500 feet across, and much shallower too. In the height of every summer the channel shrank further still, drying up to but a few feet deep, becoming little more than a lazy creek. Native Americans would cross the water there, following after herds of buffalo and elk. Even in the spring and fall, when the river rose full again, the natives would leave their hillside dwellings and paddle across in their bull boats to pick up the trail on the southern bank, passing through the groves of water maples and osiers and entering into chest-high grasses and fertile hunting grounds.

When white men came to this part of Ohio and Kentucky in the late 1700s, they saw the trail and began to use it too, not only for hunting but also as a way across what they had named the Ohio River. The town of Cincinnati was established just up the northern bank. The settlers grew in number and the Native Americans swiftly dwindled and the river widened over the years. In 1817 a businessman named George Anderson got it into his mind to run a ferry service at the crossing, and that service, the Anderson Ferry, has been making trips just about every day for the nearly two centuries since.

At first, the men powered the ferry with long poles and pulleys and then later they deployed horses, blindfolded and made to run on a treadmill that spun the waterwheel that churned the boat across. The vessel carried men with their wagons and women with their pushcarts, and it was this way right through the Civil War and even after the great suspension bridge was built to span the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Kentucky. The bridge was seen as a symbolic as well as a practical connecting of North and South. Some people, the Whig writer and sociologist Harriet Martineau among them, believed that Cincinnati could make a worthy capital for the entire Union, because it was in a sense a truly American city, not so influenced by the motherland as those on the East Coast were, and being Western and still new. By war’s end the population in Cincinnati had grown to near 200,000.

The stone ferryhouse on the Kentucky side of the Anderson crossing stood in the small town of Constance and it was in this town that a man named Zachary Taylor Fox lived with his wife, Annie. Fox earned his way as a tanker, transporting fresh water, and a few years after the Civil War he moved his family from Constance and across the river to live on the Ohio side, near the Anderson Ferry road. The Foxes had a daughter they named Laura, and she married Edward Bloebaum, whose parents, like many others, had come to Cincinnati from Germany and Prussia.

The Bloebaum family owned a small house on a short dead-end, Brad-dock Street, just up from River Road. Laura and Edward had a daughter, LaVerne, and LaVerne in the 1930s married a man named Harry Francis Rose. Together LaVerne and Harry had four children, the third of which— and the first boy—they gave the name Peter Edward Rose. All through the years and generations, from Zachary to Pete, the Foxes and then the Bloebaums lived here on the northern bank, on the West Side of Cincinnati, and all along the family used the Anderson Ferry to go over to Kentucky for one thing or another, for some transporting business or to fish off the far bank or just to take the children on a Sunday ride.

Back in 1867 when the ferryboats had converted to steam power, the new owner of the Anderson route, Charles Kottmyer, began using a line of wooden boats that he named after Daniel Boone. In the 1700s Boone had laid his stake in the nearby tangle of northern Kentucky, traveling northward on the Licking River into the Ohio as he fought spectacularly with the Shawnees and led epic hunts for big game, fashioning as he did so an American legend in buckskin. Every 15 years or so the Kottmyers built a new ferryboat:
Boone No. 1
was replaced by
Boone No. 2
and so on up until
Boone No. 7
, the first steel boat in the line, 64-feet-by-22-feet and diesel-powered, upon whose red-and-white trimmed deck Pete Rose worked as a teenager in the 1950s, collecting fares and parking cars. The river had been locked and dammed repeatedly over the decades and by the time the ’50s ended, the banks were close to 600 yards apart at the Anderson Ferry crossing, and the water was 10 fathoms deep. Pete held the deck job only briefly, being as he didn’t much like the leisurely pace of the work.

THE WATERFRONT in Cincinnati is the source of the city’s birth and life and of its hard-won history and its legends besides. When those first settlers came to Cincinnati along the river from Limestone, Ky., they came not to find fortune and return to the East, but to take the land from the natives, to plant crops and to live. They arrived on crude barges, steeled for the fight ahead and knowing that because of its place along the river with its nearby tributaries, along what they took to calling the “water highways,” this was a crucial region to control. In the 1790s George Washington sent troops, thousands of them, to garrison in Cincinnati. More and more boats came—bateaux laden with livestock and a family’s furniture; single-sail pirogues to fish from; keelboats stocked with whiskey kegs. The bigger flatboats crept slowly down the river, fortified against attack by thick-cut side timber that had carved into it portholes through which muskets could be fired.

Settlers’ children were captured by natives in those years and people died of sickness and of the struggle, but the city was won—in the way much land in America was won, in a manner of perseverance familiar in the narrative of the nation—and it indeed proved a vital landing spot, situated between New Orleans and Pittsburgh. By the turn of the 20th century, or around the time that Pete Rose’s grandparents, Laura Fox and Edward Bloebaum, were marrying, Cincinnati was a thriving metropolis, a busy whiskey market, home to 43 breweries as well as to factories where, in 1901, some 49 million decks of playing cards were produced, more playing cards than were made anywhere else in the world. Some of the decks were designed for everyday games, while others were meant for casino play.

Yes, the great stories in Cincinnati all seem to involve the river: the floods of 1883 and 1907 and ’13, and then the truly great, or truly awful, flood of ’37. In the last week of January that year the Ohio River rose to nearly 80 feet—79 feet, 9 inches as the marking had it on the side of one downtown building. Homes were swept away and thousands of people were left shelterless. Horses drowned. All of Crosley Field, where the Cincinnati Reds played, was underwater, right up through the lower grandstand. You’d have had to be a crack diver to swim down and touch home plate. Days into the storm the newspapers blared out
RIVER STILL RISING
! though to see that all you had to do was look out your window, if you could open it, if your house was still safe and you still had a home. Radio WLW quit running commercials and covered the flood nonstop 24 hours a day.

The rain fell and fell and fell. On the West Side of Cincinnati the river washed over the train tracks and over River Road. The water came up into the low lying hills, overtopping cars and sheds and uprooting young trees. It reached then the sloped front yard at 4404 Braddock Street, a three-bedroom house built in 1886 by the landlord who had lived in the manor higher up on the hill, and owned by a Bloebaum just about ever since. This was the house where Pete Rose would spend his childhood and where now, in the flood of ’37, his parents Harry and LaVerne were already living and waiting out the storm with little Caryl, their one baby girl.

The river rose right to the edge of the small stone landing at the front of the house, roiling there, seeming ready to rise higher still until finally, abruptly, the rains stopped and an unnatural calm enveloped the January afternoon. There would be time yet before the water would recede and it was LaVerne, looking out off the landing, who saw and seized the opportunity. She went inside for a fishing line and found something in the cupboard for bait and then cast the line off the porch and into the risen river. The Ohio was known for its catfish and its carp and after just awhile—would you believe it?—LaVerne pulled out a fish worth eating.

Though Pete would later tell many stories about his father, this was the one story, and pretty much the only one, that he told about his mother, that saucy broad. Pete liked the fish story because it spoke of a certain can-do-ness on his mother’s part. She didn’t take what she was dealt but rather made things happen. He liked to see her in that way just as he liked to see himself. Pete enjoyed telling the story because it said something about the history of his life before he was born, about the people who begat him and about the land, and because the story spoke not only of resourcefulness, but also of ingenuity and even humor, a little winking at the gods, a measure of irreverence and wit.

WHEN HARRY FRANCIS ROSE shook your hand he did it right. Not a crushing handshake certainly, but firm enough to let you know it
could
be crushing if Harry so chose. Decisive. Authentic. Harry’s was not a large right hand, just a strong one, and for the duration of the grip he would look you right in the eye. Harry went about 5' 9" and 175 pounds and even at that size he was the kind of athlete that if you played against him you remembered it years later.

He had a thick neck and a straight jawline and a wide nose and his head seemed square because of the way he cut his hair. Harry held beliefs consistent with his handshake: A man should exert himself fully in the things he did, especially when it came to athletics. He should have clarity of opinion and certainty of purpose and he should accept in himself no physical weakness. There was no tolerance for bull. You did not miss a day of work for any reason at all. This, Harry would tell his children, was the real American way. Although Harry had never made it in college football, lacking both the academics and the size, when he was in his 20s he earned a spot on the old Cincinnati Bengals, who played their home games at Crosley Field. Harry had made that team, said the folks around Anderson Ferry, because he’d been so determined to do so.

Harry did not smoke cigarettes or drink hard liquor and while you always knew clearly when Harry was angry, none of his four kids—Caryl, Jackie, Pete and Dave—ever heard him raise his voice to his wife LaVerne. Harry had a keen, ever-present and narrowly defined sense of right and wrong.

“Grab the day that’s in front of you,” Harry would say, often by “day” meaning the game or the play. He was never one to talk much about his past, about how he had spent his earliest years over in Ripley, on the northern bank of the Ohio and then, after his parents split, moved with his mother Eva and his brother William 50 miles west to Cincinnati to begin a life with Eva’s new husband, Harry Sams. After living for a while in Over-the-Rhine, an inland community on the West Side, Harry’s family had moved to a house on Southside Avenue, a couple of miles directly east of the Anderson Ferry route and closer than just about anything else to the water’s edge. The house stood on the far side—that is, the riverbank side—of River Road, tucked among industrial buildings and local land-marks: the water tower, the Standard Brands malting factory and the sheet-metal car shops. Harry Sams worked as a driver and then a brakeman and for a little extra money, like a number of people around there, he brewed and sold his own beer.

Harry Francis didn’t dwell on his past as an athlete either, although others certainly did. He was known at times as Pete—a nickname he had acquired as a child because of his fondness for a local plow horse by that name—and he was a standout champion in local leagues, especially at football. He was extraordinarily tough, hard to bring down as a runner and uncommonly fierce as a tackler. Harry understood the social currency of being this kind of athlete. He played league baseball too, and at one of his weekend games he met LaVerne Bloebaum, the sister of a very good ballplayer named Buddy Bloebaum. LaVerne was a fine softball player herself, and Harry told Buddy right away how pretty he thought she was. Harry’s manner was measured and reserved, LaVerne’s was sassy, plucky and coarse. When they got married, two years after that first meeting, LaVerne was 18 and Harry 19. Ten years later, on April 14, 1941, they had little Pete—born on the same day, and this is a coincidence impossible not to note, that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was throwing out a ceremonial first pitch, Opening Day in Washington, D.C.

Harry, or Big Pete or Pete Senior as he would now often be called around the football field, worked at the Fifth Third Bank downtown, tellering and doing some accounting work. Neighbors talked about Harry with a great respect, owing to what he did on the sports field and solidified by the way he held himself. As Pete Rose the Hit King would say throughout the years that he was coming up in baseball and will still tell you today, no one has ever stood larger in his life than his father Harry. “He is the only hero I have ever had,” Pete says. Pete and his siblings felt their father was the most important man living anywhere near Anderson Ferry. “The shit,” as Pete’s younger brother Dave puts it. “My father was the shit.”

Harry arrived home from work at just about the same time every night, stepping out of the bus onto River Road at a little before 6 p.m. Always the same thing: he would tuck the day’s newspaper under his arm and sprint hard up the steep incline of Cathcart Street and make the sharp right turn down the length of raggedy Braddock to get home. The neighborhood kids all liked to watch this. Harry never just walked.

Sometimes on a Monday or Tuesday if his team had lost its weekend tavern-league football game or if Harry had not lived up to his own expectations, he would sprint further up Cathcart, push ahead for another piece on the punishing hill and then bend left down along crudely paved Allenham Street before turning around and going hard back down the hill to home. He ran this wearing his leather work shoes and on hot days he sweat through the thighs of his slacks, sending himself a message—a reminder that the failure of the previous weekend’s game could not happen again, that next time things would be different on the field, that they would go his way.