It is late in the day.  From my porch, I can see the sun moving toward the horizon.  I am thinking I have spent a lot of time on this planet, more time than most who still have their wits. Equally important, I have been paying attention most of the time.  Besides having my wits and paying attention, I have gone to some good schools and read a lot of books.  I have to admit that I didn’t finish every book, once I could see where it was heading.  I used to feel guilty about this, but now I see it was part of the efficiency you gain as you get wiser.  I always wanted to get wise.  As I watch the sun, I realize that, by now, I have gotten pretty wise … but maybe I am running out of time.

In college, I had a roommate who spent a lot of time sitting in a chair and thinking.  I thought he was lazy, but he told me he was doing the most important thing in life, figuring out what to do.  He said that most people go around in circles, or follow others, that only a small group of people actually gain ground during their lives, the ones who have actually figured out what to do.

A little later, I heard a very smart woman say that beliefs and ideas determine everything.  She said that people’s actions always follow their beliefs, so their beliefs determine what they will do. Clearly, what people do is just about everything that happens on the planet, so I figure she was right.

Soon after that, I had a boss who told me that, sometimes, to figure out what to do, I would need to think “until it hurts”. 

As time went on, I kept putting what I learned into a little bag of wisdom, and carried it around with me everywhere.  Luckily, I started my bag of wisdom while I was still young.  Before I started the bag, I was learning how to eat, sleep, throw a baseball, take care of my body, get along with people, that kind of thing.  After I started carrying the bag around, I started really paying attention to what was going on. 

Once I started carrying my wisdom bag around, I noticed I could do something beyond just noticing what was going on.  I realized I could remember things from the past, reprocess them, and think about what they really meant.

If you stuck with me up to now, you may well ask if I am headed anywhere. My answer would be “yes, somewhere”.  I want to tell you some stories from my life and what they mean to me.

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I was born a few months after D Day, but before the end of WWII.  I was in a crib on VE Day and VJ Day, but I was up walking around as soldiers returned home, and returned to peaceful activity.  Everything had changed for them, but I didn’t know anything about the pre-war reality.  The post war USA was my first reality.

I can remember very well the pride and confidence people around me had in what their country had just accomplished.  The negative aspects of war were not discussed much, and, as with most wars, the people who had experienced the ugliest things were pretty silent about them.  As a little kid, I listened to the radio and at the dinner table, and listened as I went into stores with my parents.  The radio was a huge part of my early life.  Television, when it came, didn’t seem as necessary as radio had to the connection with the outside world.  For me, TV has never seemed to have as much of what they call “gravitas”. Radio seemed to have have a lot of gravitas. When I was a kid, people were still talking about radio speeches that President Roosevent and Winston Churchill made during the war.

People on the radio, and in stores, spoke freely about the nobility of the fight against the axis powers to defend “The Free World” … and the exhilaration of winning.  There was already some fear of having another war before long, probably with Russia, but people were now quietly confident in the resolve and resources of our country to deal with almost anything.  The self-confidence of ordinary Americans, thinking they could deal with any real problem seemed boundless.  It was a great feeling then. Now, it seems rare. In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan seemed to still have it … that can-do attitude. He probably listened to the radio during World War II.

I wasn’t around when Churchill and Roosevelt talked on the radio, but I heard recordings of their talks.  When their voices came out of a radio, they resonated strongly in a pre-TV world.   I heard the fictional Matt Dillon, Richard Diamond, and Johnny Dollar face down the killers and the spoilers on the radio.  I heard Harry Truman talk on the radio about the “buck stopping here”.

I saw people go to the Korean War without a clear idea of what was going on, but trusting in Ike.  Ike was the first president to be on TV all the time, though he didn’t seem to enjoy it.  Before I was born, Ike had been  Supreme Commander of all Allied Armed Forces in Europe, so being President was actually a step down. Ike had never been a Democrat or a Republican, so when he was pressured to run for office, he had to think about which party to join.  Ike made a speech in which he said he would have preferred to be a major league ballplayer. I still think that is pretty cool.

Of course, Jack Kennedy was the first President who liked being on TV.  Nobody talks about it now, but when Kennedy had his famous TV debates against Richard Nixon, they were also broadcast on the radio.  The people listening on the radio thought Nixon had won.   This tells you something about the difference between radio and TV, and the difference between Nixon and Kennedy.

I remember my earliest years as being mostly indoors or under cloudy skies.  Beginning in 1948, things seemed to get sunnier as I was getting out-of-doors and starting to play and watch baseball.   The trips to the lake front stadium to see the Cleveland Indians in 1948 (and later years) were intoxicating.  There was a tremendous buzz about baseball at that time, in stores, at dinner, and on the radio.

People were returning to normal peacetime activity, and what could be more normal than a fabulous pennant race featuring New York, Boston, and our Indians?   In those days, the major cities, besides New York and Boston, were Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and maybe Detroit and Baltimore/Washington.   San Francisco and Los Angeles were significant, but, we didn’t know what was going on there outside of Hollywood.  Plus, they didn’t even have major league baseball teams.

Some of the things going on in Cleveland included the appearance of young Larry Doby in 1947, the first black player in the American League, followed, in 1948, of the first major league contract signed by the aging Satchel Paige, a baseball legend after 20 years of barnstorming in every mid-sized American town.  At somewhere between 42 to 48 years of age (nobody knew exactly), Satchell was said by many to have already been the best pitcher in history.  The question was whether, after the war, he was still good enough to get Major League hitters out.  It turned out, he was.

Cleveland’s Owner and General Manager at that time was Bill Veeck, a wild and crazy promoter and innovator, later (very deservedly) named to the hall-of-fame.  I didn’t know at the time that Bill Veeck was Jewish and was pretty obsessed with civil rights.  He said he was just trying to find the best players, and that made sense to most Clevelanders.   He also said his daddy had taught him that the money in the cash register was exactly the same regardless of the skin color of the person buying the ticket.

As a kid, I don’t remember hearing fans complaining about the Indians having black players.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer and local radio stations were positive and wanted the team to succeed.  We had a few local guys from West Virginia who liked to use the N-word, but they were not really saying that black guys shouldn’t be playing. They bought it when Veeck said in the Plain Dealer that he just wanted to get better players than the Yankees.  But, they needed to use the N-word to show they were from West Virginia.  According to books Bill Veeck would later write, Satchell Paige started seven games in the second half of 1948, went 6-1 and set six major league attendance records. He also had some saves in relief.

It was said that there were some players that would not shake Larry Doby’s hand.  Under Veeck’s leadership, the non-hand-shakers found themselves on other teams within a year.   Most of the non-shakers were from the South, since, in 1948, a high percentage of ballplayers were Southern.  Player salaries were low, the South was poor, and many Northerners at that time still did not consider baseball a respectable profession for their sons.   Things have changed somewhat.

I remember from childhood (of course, I have seen it many times since) the Plain Dealer’s picture of the Tribe’s white pitcher Steve Gromek kissing Larry Doby on his black cheek after he hits a game-winning home run.  As they say, a picture can sometimes say a lot more than words.

My parents were pretty positive about the whole ball park experience, about the Indians, about having black players, and about beating the Yankees and Boston.  They took my brother and me to the ball park eight times in 1948.  My brother liked to keep a count of things … like the number of ball games we attended each year.  Of course, winning the World Series was one of those things that seemed to come naturally.  We never dreamed the Tribe would be looking for its next World Series win for the rest of our entire lives.

When I think about my childhood in those days after World War II, I remember having simple clothes, simple toys, and simple food. I remember strangers in stores being nice to my mother and me. I remember people feeling confident about Ike and saying what a great country we lived in. I remember listening to recordings of Roosevelt and Churchill’s radio speeches. I remember listening to the radio where Marshall Matt Dillon and Johny Dollar were dealing with the killers and spoilers. But, most of all, I remember baseball on the radio.

A lot has happened since I was a kid. As I alerady said, I went to good schools and I have been paying attention. In my own personal experience, most of the positive things that I was taught about the USA in grade school have proven to be true. It has turned out to be a great country, actually in more ways than I even imagined.

Here is the funny thing. People on TV, media pundits, politicians, the NY Times, The Washington Post, and other talking heads don’t seem to agree with my experience. They seem to think the USA is a lousy place, where bad things are happening, and everything needs to change. Of course, these are mostly a lot of young, inexperienced kids who went to Harvard, but never heard baseball on the radio, let alone Roosevelt, Chuirchill, Ike, Johnny Dollar, or Matt Dillon.

The rest of this book is my story about watching the USA continue to be the greatest country on the planet, while pundits, politicians, academics, and other talking heads have gone ever more negative in their descriptions.

I believe there are specific reasons for this turn of events, and the goal of my story is to reveal something about what is actually going on.

Categories: Stories