Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (3 page)

“He is 41 years old, father of four, still can run 100 yards in 10.5 seconds and after 22 seasons in organized football he still lines up at right halfback every Saturday afternoon.” This appeared in a Cincinnati newspaper in 1953, alongside a photo of Harry, known as Pete. “Who is he? The only person in Cincinnati fitting this description is popular Pete Rose…now in his third year with the Trolley Tavern eleven in the Feldhaus Major League. ‘He is the eldest by at least six years,’ says Frank Feldhaus. ‘And still one of the best.’ ” Rose went on playing football until he was 42, twice the age of most guys in the league.

LITTLE PETE came to the games. He’d scurry around as a gofer or a water boy, eating up the excitement as best he could. He’d see his father get knocked to the ground, then jump up and chase down a man 20 years younger. Once Harry got back up even after breaking his hip. This, on the West Side of Cincinnati in those years, was seen as just about the noblest thing you could do. To the kids on the grass field at Bold Face Park or the baseball diamond at Sayler Park, or wherever the game was that day, it meant much more that your dad played ball like that than what he might do for a job, or even what sort of wheels your parents drove—a dinged-up old Chevy? The new ’52 Ford?

On good weekend nights if Harry had led his team to a win, had broken off a run for a touchdown or two, he would take the family out to celebrate. They’d go nearby to get a piece of fish and the tall lemonades at that Trolley Tavern maybe, or else they would all pile into the coupe and drive out to the A&W Root Beer shop in Groesbeck or Harrison. Frosty mugs and double-burgers, ice cream for dessert.

The family didn’t often celebrate this way after little Pete’s games though, not after his Little League baseball games nor later when he was at Western Hills High or playing legion ball. If Pete went 4 for 6 his father saw not four hits but two missed opportunities, and he would talk about this, harrying Pete all the way home, questioning why he hadn’t done this or that and reminding him again that he needed to work harder than the others, especially given his size. When Pete started high school he barely weighed 100 pounds. “Understand that you represent all of us out there, every Rose,” his father would say.

Why had Pete not backed up first base properly in the third inning? Why had he tried to haul off and hit that 2-and-0 pitch for a home run— and Harry from behind the plate had seen that that was exactly what Pete had tried to do—when a single was all the team really needed in that spot?

If LaVerne spoke up from the passenger’s seat, “Aw, he played O.K., honey. I think he did real good,” Harry just let the words sit there in the hushed car for a moment, and then went right on with it. Why had Pete not tried to make a play on the popup that just barely landed into the grandstand? Why hadn’t he had his catcher’s gear on, ready to go at the start of the fourth inning? Did he understand he needed to go right through the guy to get to second base if that’s what it took? What was he afraid of anyway? Throw harder, run faster, take something extra beyond what they give you.

Pete would look out the window as the car rolled down River Road, his turf-stained glove on his lap, silent save for the “yes, sirs” here and there. Maybe one of the other neighborhood boys was in the car with them, Slick Harmon or Bernie. Baby Dave might have been in LaVerne’s lap. The older sisters Caryl and Jackie sat on the bench-seat in the back of the car, glaring and sulking, despising all the sports talk all the time, hating even more the fact, as Caryl would say even six decades later, “that Pete got all this talking to about what he was doing and our dad didn’t seem to see us hardly at all.”

Pete would get out of the car as soon as it stopped on Braddock Street and before the engine had cooled he’d have that old practice bat in his hands again, working his swing against the sycamore at the side of the house. Harry would come over and watch Pete in the late afternoon light, set up a ball on a makeshift tee, and then finally he’d go over to the window and call inside to LaVerne that in just a few minutes they’d be coming in to eat, fish sticks would be fine. After dinner maybe there would be a Reds game for them to watch together on the family’s tiny TV. Some-times Harry took Pete to Reds games at Crosley Field. As Caryl puts it, “Pete and my dad, they were just as close as there is.”

Chapter 3

West of Vine

L
ITTLE PETE played football at Western Hills High as a shifty, stutter-stepping halfback, and behind the Mustangs’ smallish offensive line—the five kids averaged 185 pounds—he made the runs that won the games. He wore number 55 and stood in the front row for the team photo, his socks to an even height above his ankles, his uniform snug. It didn’t matter that so many opposing tacklers, from Walnut Hills, say, or Newport Catholic or Taft, descended hard upon him. Little Pete (and few were littler on this team) knocked those tacklers off or swiveled past them, his legs churning so that he would be “twisting and turning his way through three defenders on his way to a score” as one yearbook caption read. Another caption noted that “after evading several Elder tacklers [Rose] was finally brought down.”

Elder High served as the Hatfield to Western Hills’s McCoy and the year that Pete carried the ball most, West Hi (as the name often appeared) scored 31 points in the rivalry game on Thanksgiving Day, winning it going away, 11,000 people in the stands. They finished 7-2-1 that season, ranked 17th in the state. The next year, without Pete, the West Hi Mustangs won three games and lost six and the result on Thanksgiving was altogether different: Elder 12, Western Hills 0.

Pete played varsity baseball too, of course. Western Hills had that rich tradition and all. He wasn’t the star on those teams though. Not like centerfielder Ronnie Flender—known as Nobbie—who lived over on Beechmeadow, well up from the river and who would later play minor league ball for the Reds. Nor did Pete have the air of a prospect like smooth Eddie Brinkman, pitcher and third baseman. Even when Brinkman was just a sophomore, everyone said he was going someplace, that someplace turning out to be 15 seasons as a major league shortstop.

Still, Pete could play. Unpolished, a little herky-jerky, sure, but coach Pappy Nohr liked his grit and his smarts. Pete pushed his way in at second base, gradually worked his way up the batting order, became the best bunter on the team. He was a switch hitter, and had been since nine years old when his dad and uncle Buddy said that he should learn the skill because it would give him a better chance to keep making teams. He could hit O.K. from both sides, a lot of sharp ground balls, and he was always getting on base. At the West Hi athletic fields on Ferguson Road, the baseball diamond and the football field shared space, with first base smack in one of the end zones—making this a small piece of North American earth on which Pete Rose in the late 1950s spent a lot of happy moments. At the early morning practices Pete’s dad, overcoat on, was most often the only dad who had come out to watch.

The boys at West Hi were one crew cut after another, and the girls all had bobs. If you drove a car with any rumble in it (Pete, until the very end of high school, did not drive any car at all) you brought it around so people could hear and see. The school board built roadblocks—speed bumps we’d call them now—into the driveways and into the parking lot out back.

Pete didn’t go much for studying. There was hardly a class he could stand, except gym, of course—which had the added bonus of being cotaught by Mrs. Cook with the dimples, the cutest teacher in the school. Pete flat-out flunked his sophomore year, putting himself, he would joke, on the Five-Year High School Plan. He might have made up the 10th grade coursework in summer school, but Harry determined that playing baseball over those months, legion ball and for local sponsored teams, would be a better use of Pete’s time.

In what would have been Pete’s senior year, the kids at Western Hills devised a class theme and a slogan that appeared on hallway posters and echoed from teachers when they addressed the students en masse, a theme of enthusiasm derived from a Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation. Pete wasn’t attending the Bandwagon variety show at the high school gym or mingling at the Hi-Y socials with the other jocks on Tuesday nights. He wasn’t hanging around the parking lot listening to Elvis and the Everly Brothers on some kid’s Bel Air radio. Yes, he wore his tie to school sometimes, but picture day, no, that wasn’t for him. Not that year or any other. Who could sit still that long, anyway?
¹
When it came to the social scene at Western Hills, in other words, Pete was not exactly conforming. And yet if there was a student who embodied West Hi’s student spirit and its proud new slogan, maybe more than any other among the hundreds in that sprawling school, it was Pete. The Emerson quote read:
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
.

“Pete was not fast and he was not strong and for a lot of years he was tiny,” says Jim Luebbert, who played ball with Pete at Sayler Park. “I mean tiny. But if you were choosing up sides for a baseball game, and you wanted to win the game, you picked Pete first. There was not any question about it. There was no, ‘Maybe I’ll take this guy or that guy.’ You picked Pete. He’d get in there at catcher and just run the game, have everyone on his team rallying together.

“And we were all guys who could play. We cared about baseball. All that stuff that Pete would be famous for—the way he went so hard with all that energy—he was already like that then, far back as I can remember. You know, there was always a chance you might get hurt by Pete during a game. That was just the truth of it. He wasn’t a dirty player but he was balls out. When we were eight years old playing baseball he was like that. When we were 11, when we were 16. Same way all the time. He had scrapes on his arms, you know, and if you got into a close play with him at a base, well you just didn’t want that. That was part of why a lot of guys hated playing against him—and another reason you always picked him for your team.”

OTHER KIDS liked Pete. He could joke around with anyone, make a sharp remark about a gal or someone’s wheels, or some funny comment about an incident in a game, and that was enough, more than enough to win them over, on the ballfields or even on the front steps of West Hi in the early morning before the bell. The school was a tall brick building with arched doorways and an enormous U.S. flag before it blowing in the breeze. Some of the frat-boy jocks at Western Hills, the ones who wore the good clothes and had a mind to go to college, they didn’t much like it when the river rats came up and took spots on the sports teams, but the way Pete went about it, they kept quiet. Pete would go over to the track team’s practice and bet a guy he could outrun him and, especially if there were a couple of bucks on the line, he would find an extra burst and win the race. The other athletes respected him for stuff like that, and they knew too that Pete was a fighter with an edge to him, a fearless son of a bitch.

When Pete couldn’t find a ballgame, when there weren’t even enough kids around to play Indian ball over at Bold Face Park, he’d ride to the river, glove hanging off the handlebars of a second-hand bike and slap a rubber ball against the wall at Schulte’s Fish Garden next to the Anderson Ferry landing. He’d been doing it for years, like something out of a hokey movie, a kid with bat and glove and ball, bouncing it against the wall all day when he should have been doing his long division. The kid swings his bat, 100 swings right side then 100 swings left, and coaxes some grown-up to pitch to him for a while. He swings until his arms ache and he chases the ball even after the sun drops and the light is lousy from the outside bulbs, and then that kid grows up to become that man, the alltime hits leader of Major League Baseball. Someone puts that in the movie and people watching roll their eyes and shake their heads at how terribly trite it is, just another old cliché of the supposed American life. Only this is really how it was for Pete Rose, banging that ball against the side of Schulte’s Fish Garden—the windowless concrete wall with the giant breaching walleye painted upon it. The air there smelled frankly of fish.

He wasn’t always alone of course; Slick and Bernie came and played rubberball too. It was just that Pete didn’t stop having at it, even after the others went home, and then the next day before the others showed up. At it and at it and at it on bright days or under a lid of heavy cloud, until he himself became a landmark for the folks who lived around there or who lived higher up on Price Hill, folks who might go for a drive with a brother or sister in from out of town, talk them through the scenery a little bit.
And here’s the Anderson Ferry I told you about. And that’s the fish place where we go to eat sometimes. And there’s that little pale-faced kid, some river rat, who is always playing ball against the wall.

From the Schulte’s lot you could see the riverboats floating full of lively passengers on the Ohio. Or sometimes there’d be a long line of commercial barges churning upriver, 15 or more traveling bow to aft, the entire line of them pushed by a single little tug.

IF PETE, or later his brother Dave, ever had a problem with one of the neighborhood boys—and problems certainly arose—Harry had his way of taking care of things. He’d bring out two pairs of boxing gloves and lead the boys to the one flat patch of yard in back of the house and let them settle things that way. He’d wait until things got pretty convincing, one way or the other, before he stepped in to break it up. Harry had been a hell of a boxer himself, having fought 16 Golden Gloves bouts as a featherweight mostly, and 15 times a winner. LaVerne, though, liked to say she was the real champ, undefeated by her count in the public scuffles she was given to have. Once she pulled a woman off a barstool and took her outside, miffed that the woman had said some things that LaVerne didn’t like. “I knocked the living hell out of her,” was how she described it.

Pete’s own official boxing career was brief, lowlighted by an amateur fight downtown at age 15 when he got beaten so badly in three rounds that even Harry could barely stand to watch. Beaten, yes, but unbowed; Pete was proud that though he had been battered so that his face and body stayed bruised and welted for many days, he had hung on to the end of the fight without getting knocked to the mat.

Harry’s message in setting the kids up to box in the yard, and it was a message preached again and again by the other fathers in that Anderson Ferry neighborhood—men who worked at the riverside factories, or as car mechanics or postal workers, or other honest jobs, and among them former Army officers and U.S. Marines—was that you were to stand by what you did or said, or what you believed, even to the point of suffering for it physically. Away from the backyard boxing Pete still got into it just the same, and on the street (no gloves; feet and elbows fair to use) he fared well. He never minded if the guy was bigger, that was no obstacle at all. “Pete was tough, and he would never get whupped,” says Greg Staab, who grew up a few houses down on Braddock Street. “You couldn’t hurt him. He’d scrap. Pete did not take any shit.” The next day, often as not, the guys who’d fought would be friends again, more or less, and up to something.

They’d raid Mr. Stadtmiller’s vegetable garden down between the train tracks and the riverbank, sneaking over after dusk with a small blade and cutting into the sugar melons and the cantaloupe. They’d bring a salt shaker one of them had pinched from the Trolley Tavern (where LaVerne had now found work as a waitress to help out with the bills) and they’d salt Mr. Stadtmiller’s tomatoes and eat them right off the vine. There were gardens and greenhouses all over Delhi Township, a community of green thumbs.

On summer days the boys dived into the dun and rippling waters of the Ohio River and swam across to the sandsoil beaches and the low green hills of Kentucky, or they would “borrow” a johnboat from just downriver, take it for a float to nowhere in particular. When heavy rains came, the Ohio overtopped and the river rats—the real rats, some of them big as raccoons—came rushing out for dry land, and the boys went after them with their baseball bats on raucous, murderous sprees. Staaby’s father would sit on his front porch, his .22 in hand, and shoot the rats if he saw them headed across River Road.

They believed in the West Side and in the life they led along the river— “If you have to go downtown stay west of Vine!” went the half-joking caution—shaped as they were by the unflinching blue-collar view, the value of work that was real and plain. The neighborhoods were Catholic in name and ideal, unmistakably so, even if the churches weren’t full on Sundays. There was a sense of hardship in life that you accepted uncomplainingly. Maybe you were angling for a way to get up and out of there if you could, but you would never come out and say you had such a thing in mind. You might signal a kind of aspiration by laying too much down on a 10-to-1 horse at River Downs or on a ballgame with a bookie over in Covington. But you didn’t show or even feel any true ambition to change things, only, maybe, to have a little more; you were never anything but proud of the life at hand. There remained, for all the folks living down and around the Ohio River there, the simple and relevant geographic fact that to get just about anywhere you had to go uphill.

(There was a clatter too in these parts, a literal clatter, from folks working on their cars or in their yards or fixing up the siding on their houses, and from the traffic speeding by on River Road. Nowhere was noisier than Braddock Street, with the Whitcomb Riley train full of passengers barreling past at morning and night, Chicago-bound or from, and the conductor sounding the horn from far down the tracks, leaning on it sometimes for half a mile at a time just because he could. The noise of the train mixed with the honking of the barges, and with the roar of the planes taking off from the airport across the water. Loudest of all on Braddock were the trucks on River Road, U.S. 50, shifting into gear, starting up again with a great grind and a wheeze—and sometimes a long, bone-shaking hornblow of their own—after stopping at the light at the Anderson Ferry Road.)

The kids from right there around Anderson Ferry or from over on Fairbanks Avenue by Bold Face Park or from further along on Rapid Run or Twain, all shared a certain underlying conviction, passed down from their parents who shared it too. A belief that in the hardest times you would find a way to survive, that when the river rose up or work was hard to come by, you would persevere. Their conviction was tied also to the feeling that if you did really make it somehow you would make it in the manner of this community, by these same bare-knuckled rules. A certain arrogance this was, a defiance even, in the way it showed itself. You knew without saying so that you could whip any kid your age from over in Hyde Park or Linwood or one of the other places where the money lived, on the other side of town, east of Vine.