The Boys of Summer (27 page)

I was to meet Labine at Sports Apparel, Inc., “that modern plant in Woonsocket,” at eleven o’clock. There was time to read the
Journal
and to cruise. The Mets had won in New York City before a “roaring throng” of fifty thousand, more persons crowded into one ball park than lived in this entire city.

Woonsocket spreads from the Blackstone River, which flows southeast and long ago cut a narrow valley. Streets called Social and Main twist away from the river. Some still are cobble-stoned.

The Sports Apparel factory, sprawling and red-brick, stands near the river on Singleton Street, with two other mills nearby. These are the kind of buildings that have been abandoned throughout New England, their old proprietors fled south where nonunionized whites and blacks hired out cheaply. But Woonsocket mills are still alive. Factory windows (Vachel Lindsay wrote) “are always broken, somebody’s always playing tricks.” As I pulled into the small crowded parking lot outside Sports Apparel, every window I could see was whole.

“Mr. Labine,” I told the receptionist.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Eleven o’clock.”

Clem appeared a few minutes later. “You’re all right?” he said. He was wearing another handsome sports ensemble. “I thought we’d have lunch with Elliott Finkelstein. Would you like to see the plant? My father worked like hell. This plant is where he was a weaver.”

On the back wall of Labine’s spare office, a map of the United States was divided into five sections. “The pins are my salesmen,” he said. Labine handed me a copy of the gold and white
Deerfoot Sportswear Catalogue.
The first page proclaimed: “Managed and Directed by Clem Labine, Former Major Leaguer.” Next to a picture in which Labine was wearing a Brooklyn cap and smiling, a caption added, “One of baseball’s pitching greats. From 1950 to 1960 a star of the fabled Brooklyn Dodgers. Still a sports enthusiast and for many years an executive of Sports Apparel, Inc., Clem is now recognized as an expert in the styling of athletic apparel. Feel free to write to him at any time.”

“Who writes you?” I said.

“Coaches. Athletic directors. We sell to teams from schools and colleges.”

Sports clothing—golf jackets and team coats, and plaid shirts, jog suits, alpine coats and blankets—hung from pipes over an iron-grated floor. The colors were purple and navy and blue and white and green. “This is an assembly line,” Labine said. “It looks confusing, but we have what we call speed-rail movement of the garments. Efficient and logical. We have quality-control check points along the way.” He led me to a room where a man was cutting patterns in leather. “How are you, Jim?”

Labine’s perfect grooming bounced against Jim’s overalls. “Jim’s trick,” Labine said, “is to get as many pieces from a given piece of leather as possible.”

“That’s right,” Jim said, “kind of a jigsaw puzzle. You want to use as much and waste as little as you can.”

“Thank you, Jim.”

The tour continued. We saw design rooms and lofts filled with flocking, nylon, Naugahyde and wool. Labine explained how materials were fed into the line and that the various processes in jacket manufacture were carried on by expert technicians.

“Hello, Marie,” he said to a woman sewing linings.

“Hi, Mr. Labine.”

“After you design the jacket and cut the basic patterns, then it’s a repeat. But the physical work goes on—the sewing and the stitching and putting on designs, like a team symbol. On wool we attach designs; with nylon we supply silk-screen printing. I think,” said Clem Labine, the smooth, assured executive, “that this is an impressive, modern plant.”

Lunch took us fifteen miles toward the main line of the New Haven Railroad, and a restaurant a world away from pattern cutters and seamstresses. The 1776 house was all wood walls and copper ladles, like a number of warm colonial restaurants in the suburbs of New York. Elliott Finkelstein, Labine’s boss and closest friend, turned out to have graduated from the City College of New York, in the 1930s, with plans to become a chemist. But to a City College Jew during the Depression, any job at all was a benediction. “So I came here,” Elliott Finkelstein said. “Part of my family had started out here in the rag business. There’s nothing glamorous about garment manufacture. And I stayed, and maybe my friendship with Clem is the finest thing that’s happened since.”

In my compound with Labine, dark, stocky, bright Elliott Finkelstein was an unexpected element: not an athlete, but a fan, growing older.

“Is the game what it was?” Finkelstein said. “It doesn’t seem as exciting since Clem left. He was some pitcher.”

“I hung some curves,” Labine said. We were seated in a booth.

“You guys never knew what you had down in New York. You sportswriters were lucky to have a man like this to write about.”

“We got along.”

“Well, how does he seem to you now?” Finkelstein said.

I knew what he meant, without wanting to know, and I calculated an answer, unready to hear so soon again about the maimed boy. “Pretty good. Listening at the plant, Clem, I was thinking how different everything is with you now, even the language. Elliott, he could ream an umpire.”

“Bad language is part of being a ball player,” Labine said. “The animal is different on the field.”

“He’s very good at our business,” Finkelstein said. “He isn’t there because he was a pitcher. He knows style. He works with people. He’s a fine executive, and listen, there’s something about him you may have missed. Clem can’t stand intolerance of any kind. He never laughs at racial stories.

“Woonsocket is a kind of cradle of ball players. Napoleon Lajoie, the old second baseman, and Gabby Hartnett, the old catcher, were born here. Three major leaguers from a city this size isn’t bad. But Clem. You should have come up to see him before the tragedy.”

“It is a tragic story,” Labine said, “but there isn’t anything tragic about my son, Jay.”

“How do you feel about the Vietnam War?” I asked Labine.

“First I guess I was a hawk. Then I was a dove. Then Jay went over and I went superhawk. Atom-bomb those Northern bastards for my kid. Now that he’s back and we’re working things out, what do you think? I’m superdove.”

“Where he belongs,” Finkelstein said.

He was through at the factory by 4:30. “Let’s see more of the town,” he said. He drove the hardtop down Singleton, which runs beside the narrow Blackstone. “It flooded once,” he said. “There’s a casket factory a few miles upstream. I was in spring training and I picked up a paper and there was one headline I’ll never forget: ‘Coffins Floating in Woonsocket.’”

He turned down Social Street, then out a narrow road of frame houses. “Not much, I guess, compared to what you’re used to.” After a while, as the road bent, a great angel rose in stone, guarding an ornate cement archway. This was the Cimetière du Précieux Sang. Labine did not slow, but I could see monuments, high crosses, small angels, a prosperous imposing Catholic necropolis in this poor town.

“There are some Labines in there,” he said, not looking. “Have you been up here before?”

“Never. I didn’t know about the French colony.”

“Most people don’t.”

“You get down to New York?”

“Once in a while.
I
liked Bay Ridge okay, although it was kind of suburban, not really New York. I’m only a small-town guy, I guess. They called me from some ad agency in New York to help make a commercial for Mayor Lindsay. He seems okay, am I right? I went. I didn’t see much. In and out. But I remember that excitement of the city.”

He pulled the hardtop down a street and parked. “The Woonsocket High School field,” he said, pointing, “where I played football. I went to a skating rink in California once with a few ball players who knew I’d played high school hockey. Bam. If I fell once, I fell three times. And they looked at me like
Yup, you played hockey. Oh, sure.”
Boys were indolently kicking a football in front of us.

“Jay never cared for the sports I did,” Labine said. “I’d take you over to see him, but there’s a little tension now. I’m on him to finish accounting school and he says that I never got past high school myself.

“These days, I suppose I’d go to college. Then there were scholarship offers, but I was a weaver’s son, offered a contract by the
Dodger
organization. It’s hard for Jay to understand what that meant.

“We had fights. Clement Walter Labine Junior wanted to be
different from me and he is different from me and maybe I wanted him to be the same.

“We had lots of these fights and one day he said, ‘Fuck you, Dad, I’m joining the Marines.’ Whenever we used to have fights, three days later we’d make up. Now three days later he had enlisted.” The deep voice choked. “He couldn’t take that back.

“So Jay was gone and he went out on a patrol doing his job, he’s a good boy, and stepped on the mine and we’re lucky, he’s lucky, he’s alive. The Marines sent a car to our house. Barbara was away. I was out playing golf. My brother-in-law saw this Marine car and went over and said, ‘Is this about Jay, Clem Labine, Jr.?’ The Marine officer was very polite. He said who was he talking to and my brother-in-law said he was Jay’s uncle and the Marine said that under the rules he couldn’t say anything. Next of kin only. And my brother-in-law got excited and said couldn’t he say one thing, couldn’t he say if Jay was alive? The Marine looked at him and said, ‘I can only speak to next of kin,’ but the Marine nodded his head. So when they came and got me off the golf course, the first thing they said was, ‘Jay’s been hurt, but he’s alive.’

“He wasn’t much for baseball. But he liked to go over to Diamond Hill and ski. He got to be a fine skier. And he liked diving. Now he’s learning over again, how to be a skier and a diver with one leg.

“He wrote me a letter from the hospital. It was so calm and matter-of-fact. It wasn’t as if he was describing how his leg had been blown off. It was more like a letter from camp—he went to camp—that said, ‘Dear Dad, I fell and cut my knee.’”

For the second time in my life, seventeen years after the 1953 World Series, I saw Clem Labine’s eyes full of tears.

“If I hadn’t been a ball player, I wouldn’t have been away all the time. But the traveling cost me all of it, Jay growing up. If I hadn’t been a ball player, I could have developed a real relationship
with my son. The years, the headlines, the victories, they’re not worth what they cost us. Jay’s leg.

“Everything they told me in church and Sunday school I believed. God looks after you. God looks after me. God looks after Jay. He’s a helluva kid, but I’ve learned something out of this myself. I think things through. I’m not swallowing the church line. God in His infinite wisdom. Heaven is waiting, just beyond Cimetière du Précieux Sang. Maybe. But now I’ll have to see Him to believe it. Since this thing happened to Jay, I’ve become agnostic.”

Labine looked at his watch. “Hey. I better get you to your car. It’s a long way from here to New York, isn’t it?”

A day later, I telephoned Marine headquarters in Manhattan and asked how badly a man had to be hurt in Indochina for his family to be notified personally instead of by wire.

A sergeant named Mike Burrows called back. “In this war,” he said, as though reading, “next of kin are notified personally not only in the event of death but for any wound, however slight. We dispatch a telegram of confirmation, but an individual, frequently an officer, always precedes the telegram.”

“The luxuries of a small war,” I said.

“Did you have anyone particular in mind?”

“It’s the son of a former Dodger pitcher, Clem Labine.”

“Hey, I remember Clem. Good curve ball. How’s he holding up?”

“He’s all right. His boy has lost a leg.”

“No,” said Sergeant Mike Burrows of the Marines, no longer reading. “Isn’t that a goddamn lousy war?”

George Thomas Shuba, the second ball player who ever pinch-hit a World Series home run, had been wholly different from Clem Labine. He was a blunt, stolid athlete, a physical man mixing warmth with suspicion, a bachelor living alone and apart from most of the other players. His abiding love was hitting. All the rest was work. But touching a bat, blunt George became “The Shotgun,” spraying line drives with a swing so compact and so fluid that it appeared as natural as a smile.

“Not yet,” he said early in 1952, when I suggested a Sunday feature on his batting.

“Why not?”

“I haven’t got enough hits.”

A month later he approached and said, “Now.”

“Now what?”

“I’ve gotten enough hits. Write the feature.” It sounded like
an order, but after the story appeared George said thank you for several days.

Joining such disparate people as Labine and Shuba was baseball’s persistent encouragement toward self-involvement. “What did
you
throw?” reporters asked. Or, “What did
you
hit?” “How is
your
arm,
your
knee?” And,
“You
pitched a nice game” or,
“You
really stroked that double.” Even the converse from fans—
“You’re
a bum, Clem; hey, George,
you’re
bush”—focused a man’s thinking on himself. During the prime of Clement Walter Labine and the boyhood of Clement Walter Labine, Jr., baseball was always pulling the father away on road trips and involving the father with his own right arm rather than with his son’s cates. It is the nature of the baseball business, and Shuba, through an episodic eight-year career in the major leagues, had decided privately, with no hints at all, to wait for the end of his baseball life before marrying. Now he had written:

On a long day’s journey from Manhattan to Youngstown, one follows the appalling new American way west. You escape New York through a reeking tunnel that leads to the New Jersey Turnpike, where refineries pipe stench and smoke into the yellow air above grassless flats. It is three hours to the hills along the Pennsylvania Pike and your first sense or hope that mankind will not choke to death in another fifteen years.

The country levels as Pennsylvania meets Ohio, and the first Midwestern flatlands open toward prairies. Youngstown, 170,000 people strong, produces pig iron, steel, lamps and rubber, in a dozen factories along the Mahoning River, which bisects it.
The Williams Motel, on the southern outskirts, turned out to be a brick rectangle, open on one side and comfortable but not lavish. Unlike the nearby Voyager Inn, it offers neither sauna baths nor pool. “We have your reservation,” a lady said behind the front desk, a strong-featured woman who wore glasses with colorless plastic rims. “Mr. Shuba made it for you. Are you with the Post Office?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe you were with the Post Office. Mr. Shuba puts the postal inspectors here.”

“I’m not a postal inspector.”

“Twenty-six,” she said, losing interest and handing me a key.

I telephoned the main Youngstown post office and George came on, the voice plain, pleasant and tinged with a heaviness from East Europe. I knew then that George’s father had been an immigrant. One never thought much about such things when traveling with the team. Black and white, not Slovak or Italian, was the issue.

“Is your room all right?” Shuba said.

“Fine. What are you doing?”

“Just finishing up.”

“I mean what do you do at the post office?”

“Clerk-typist,” Shuba said. “I knew the room would be good. I put all the inspectors in the Williams Motel. I’ll be by soon as I finish. We’ve got a dinner you’ll like.”

“I haven’t eaten much Slovakian food.”

“It’s lasagna,” George said, sounding very serious. “Didn’t you know? I married an Italian girl.”

Unpacking, I remembered George on the day he had joined a radio engineer and myself batting a softball in Forest Park, St. Louis, and how, taking turns pitching, we worried about upsetting George’s timing. “Just throw,” he said, “just throw.” He pulled low liners one after another in the park and that night did the same against a Cardinal pitcher called Cloyd Boyer. And
then a year later a certain quickness went from his bat, and he was not a fierce hitter, although still dangerous, and outside the Schenley Hotel I saw him carrying a lightweight portable typewriter.

“What’s that for, George?”

“Oh,” he said, and looked around, as though afraid to be overheard. He winked. He had a plan. “I’m not gonna be through at thirty-five, like some. Maybe I’ll be a reporter. Some of those guys go on working till seventy. Look at Roscoe McGowen. So I’m teaching myself how to type.”

“George,” I wanted to say, “to write, you have to read and know the language and how to organize and, damnit, spell.” Thinking that, I said, “Could be a pretty good idea.”

At the door leading into Room 26 at the Williams Motel, Shotgun Shuba, now a 46-year-old male clerk-typist in the U. S. Post Office in Youngstown, Ohio, appeared heavier. The face, a study in angles, sloping brow, pointed nose, sharp chin, looked full. The middle was thick. But the sense was of solidity, rather than fat. I hadn’t remembered him as so powerful. “You could still go nine,” I said.

“Ah.”

“Or pinch-hit.”

“I got no time for that stuff. Come on. Dinner’s waiting. We’ll have some red wine. You like red wine? I’ll drive.”

In the car Shuba mentioned an old book I had written and a recent article. “About student rebels with long hair,” he said, “or something like that.”

“About the SDS coming apart in Chicago.”

“Yeah. That was it. Why do you waste time writing about
them?”
There was no harshness in his voice. He simply did not understand why anyone who was a writer, a craft he respected, would spend time, thought and typing on the New Left.

“I try to write about a lot of things. It keeps you fresh.”

George considered and turned into a street called Bent Willow
Lane. “Kind of like exercising your mind, isn’t it?” he said finally. “Yeah. That must be it. Move around. Do different things. Sure. Keeps up your enthusiasm.” We had entered a middle-income neighborhood, of tract homes and roads that twisted, so drivers could not speed, and hyperfertilized lawns of brilliant, competitive green.

“I thought Youngstown had mills, George,” I said.

“Over there,” he said, indicating the northeast. “You won’t see any mills around where / live.” He pulled up to a gray split-level, saying “This is it,” and parked in an attached garage. “I finished this garage myself. I’m a home guy now. Wait till you meet my wife. She’s taking courses at Youngstown University.”

As we walked into her kitchen, Katherine Shuba, nine years younger than George, said a warm hello and called Marlene, Mary Kay and Michael, nine to four, who greeted me solemnly over giggles. Mrs. Shuba turned off a large color television that dominated the living room and placed the children at a kitchen table. We sat promptly in the dinette. It was six o’clock. Old ball players pursue the pleasures of eating with lupine directness. Suddenly George bowed his head. Katherine clasped her hands. The children fell silent.

“Bless us, Lord,” George said, beginning Grace. Then, in almost apologetic explanation he said, “My father said Grace in Slovakian every day of his life. He died when I was pretty young, but I’ve never forgotten it.”

“Well, it’s something to remember.”

“Ah,” George said and we proceeded with an excellent Italian dinner, lasagna and salad, lightened, as George had promised, with red wine.

“So you don’t play any more or coach?”

“I watch the kids. Maybe umpire a little. I don’t coach small kids. It doesn’t make sense to. With small kids, up till about fifteen, let ‘em have fun. You know what’s damn dumb? A father getting on a small kid, telling him this or that, stuff he
can’t use much yet. All the father does is spoil the fun.”

“Somebody must have coached you.”

“It was a different time, and nobody coached me that much anyway. My father, from the old country, what could he teach me about baseball? What did he know?”

“Your swing was natural.”

“I worked very hard at it,” Shuba said.

Katherine guided the children back to the living room, which was carpeted and comfortably furnished, but showed no sign that Shuba had hit for pennant winners or even that he had played professionally. “Oh, I’ve got some equipment still,” he said. “Maybe after we finish the wine, if you like, we can have a catch.”

He fished a half dozen gloves from the trunk of a car and we walked to the back of the house. Shuba’s home shares three acres of greensward with other houses, framing a common play area. “If my little guy wants,” Shuba said, “he can do some hitting here.”

The dusk light held as we started to throw. Shuba did not have an outstanding major league arm. Scouts described it as uncertain, or weak. Now he cocked that arm and fired easily. The ball shot at my Adam’s apple and I knew, with a clutch of anxiety, that I was overmatched.

In
Gamesmanship,
Stephen Potter describes that clutch seizing you on a tennis court when an opponent’s service turns out to be overwhelming and you return it forty feet beyond the base line. “Cry, ‘Where was it?’ “ Potter recommends.

“ ‘Where was what?’

“ ‘My shot, of course.’

“ ‘Why, it was out. It went over the fence back there.’

“ ‘Very well. In the future please indicate clearly whether my shots are in or out.’”

The Shubas of Youngstown live removed from English drollery and there was nothing clever or sensible to call at George.
Weak or strong, he had a major league arm, and I knew what I would have to do, and hoped I could. Aim at face height and, while appearing to work easily, throw hard by snapping the forearm as I released the ball. That way there could be a rhythm to the catch, a kind of exchange. A good catch is made of sight, sensation, sound, all balancing from one side to the other. The ball is in white flight. Red stitches turning, it whacks a glove; it is back in flight and whacks the other mitt. You can tell quickly from the sound and the speed of the throws and even from the spin what is going on, who has the better arm.

George took my throw and returned it, again hard. My glove felt small. You try to catch a ball in the pocket, so that it strikes the leather at a point slightly lower than the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of the hand within the glove. There is control there without pain. Catch a baseball farther down and it stings. Catch it farther up and you lose control. When you catch a ball in the webbing, you may not realize that you have made a catch. Each point of impact creates a different sound: thin at the webbing, dull toward the heel, resonant and profoundly right in the pocket. Sound tells when you are playing catch, how the other man is grabbing them.

Shuba delivers a heavy ball; it smarts unless caught exactly right. Mostly he threw waist-high, moving the ball from one side to the other. I caught mindlessly, ignoring slight stinging to concentrate on my throws. They sailed true, but after ten minutes a twinge raked the inside of my right elbow. We caught in silence, communicating, as it were, with ball and glove. George was studying me and I could feel his eyes and it was a warm evening and I was wondering about my arm and beginning to sweat.

“You’ve got good body control,” Shuba called.

“Hey. You’ve made my day.”

Ebullient, I relaxed. As soon as the next throw left my hand, I knew it was bad. The ball sailed low, but fairly hard to Shuba’s
backhand. Nimbly, angrily, he charged, scooped the ball on a short hop and fired at my face. The throw thwacked the small glove, low in the pocket, burning my hand.

“What are you trying to do,” Shuba said, “make me look bad?”

“No, George.” Then very slowly: “That’s the way I
throw.”

“You’re trying to make me look bad,” Shuba said, pressing his lips and shaking his head.

“George, George. Believe me.” All the years the other writers had made jokes—“Shuba fields with his bat”—had left scars.
They
should have played catch with him, I thought.

Half an hour of light remained. “Come on, George,” I said. “Show me the old neighborhood.”

“What for?”

“I want to see where you started playing ball.”

“I don’t know why you’d care about something like that,” Shuba said, but led me back to the car.

Fernwood Street was where he lived when Bent Willow Road was part of a forgotten farmer’s pasture. Wooden frame houses rise close to one another on Fernwood. Each one is painted white. “This neighborhood hasn’t changed in forty years,” Shuba said.

“Mostly Slovakians?”

“All Slovakians.”

His father, John, or Jan, Shuba, left a farm in eastern Czechoslovakia during 1912 and settled in Youngstown, where other Slovak Catholics had come, and took a job in a mill. George does not know why his father left Europe, but the reason was probably economic. Before 1930 Slovakian emigration was coincident with crop failure. Since then it has been political, to escape Hitler or Soviet Communism. Slovakians have contending symbols. The
drotar
is an itinerant tinker, never anxious to settle down, unable to make use of the resources of the soil. A cry rang through old Slovakia:
“Drotar
is here; have you something to
repair?” Slovakians say that
drotari
were the first to emigrate to America. After the long journey, nomadic longings spent,
drotari
settled into jobs in mines and mills. The old itinerants then built fixed, unchanging neighborhoods. The other symbol is based on the historic figure Janosik, who fled a Slovakian seminary in the seventeenth century. Slovakia still was feudal and any lord had power of life and death, but Janosik became a bandit, along the lines of Robin Hood. Caught at length, he was hanged. Disciples of Janosik were called
zbojnici.
When
zbojnici
and their idolators found the relative freedom of the United States, they turned against the romance of roguery and, like Shotgun Shuba, stood strong for law, obedience and the Church.