A True Role Model

My admiration for anyone resembling a sports idol dropped to near zero when Lance Armstrong, that “clean-cut American boy” with the heroic sounding name, admitted his international cycling victories were aided by more than tailwinds. He told the world on national TV that he depended on numerous infusions of performance-enhancing drugs. And he didn’t seem especially contrite when he confessed.

But then along came news of the death of a sports star worthy of admiration. “Stan the Man” died at 92. He was nothing like “da man,” a title bestowed nowadays on all sorts of people. He was the real thing--Stan the Man Musial, one of the finest baseball players in the history of the game and probably one of the finest men in the history of anything.

The Man

As a boy, I had many baseball heroes. Before the Braves moved from Boston to win the hearts of Wisconsinites, the Chicago White Sox were “my” team. I cheered for Minnie Minoso, Billy Pierce, and Luke Appling while listening to radio broadcasts of Sox games. Like many other kids, however, I followed all aspects of Major League Baseball to some extent, and had multiple heroes.  When Dad gave me my first catcher’s mitt, a nearly worn out hand-me-down, I carefully wrote on the back of the glove the names of the first-string catchers playing for all teams in the big leagues.

I didn’t know a lot of details about Stan Musial at the time. I did know that he was a terrific hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cards had a radio network in the Midwest. Several of my friends who were St. Louis fans listened to games whenever they could, and I often was present when they did. The Cardinals won a lot of games, and their zany announcer “Dizzy” Dean would break into a spirited rendition of “The Wabash Cannonball” when a St. Louis victory seemed assured.

The usually irrepressible Dean played it straight when Musial grabbed a bat in a crucial situation. He simply announced with a tinge of awe in his voice, “And Stan the Man is coming to the plate.” As I recall, Dean never offered up any funny stories involving Musial as he frequently did for other players.

Other baseball experts seemed to talk about Musial with a measure of respect that went a bit beyond what might usually be accorded a man with superior athletic ability. I didn't understand why, although I heard parts of those Cardinal game broadcasts and read the Chicago Tribune regularly for sports news. Now, reading a sampling of the many tributes issued after Musial’s death, I think I get it.

Unlike today’s “heroes,” some of whom have more penalties for bad behavior than awards for achievement, Musial played for 22 years without so much as berating an umpire. In all that time, he never was ejected from a game.  When The Man retired, the commissioner of baseball referred to him as “baseball’s perfect warrior, baseball’s perfect knight.”

Unlike some of today’s athletes who move in and out of “meaningful relationships” with the ease of Hollywood stars, Musial married his high school sweetheart and stayed with her for 71 years.

Unlike today’s prima donnas who refuse to give a helping hand to younger players, Musial was known to go to great lengths to make rookies feel comfortable in St. Louis. When it was unpopular to do so, he welcomed the first black player, Jackie Robinson, to the major leagues and pleaded with fellow white players to accept other blacks.

Musial’s good will apparently was returned. Willie Mays, a black super-star, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “I never heard anybody say a bad word about him.”

Unlike today’s jocks who seem intent on setting world records for being arrested after drunken brawls outside night clubs, Musial was a model of decorum off the field as well as on. Asked about keys to success, he advised walking a mile every day for exercise and getting eight hours of sleep every night.

Another super-star during Musial’s career, Ted Williams, refused to tip his cap to fans after hitting home runs, and had a reputation for other self-centered and arrogant behavior. Musial signed autographs for everyone, everywhere. When demands on his time became excessive in later years, he carried a supply of presigned baseball cards so he could give one to any admirer who approached him.

After Musial retired from baseball, the son of a steelworker built a business empire. That might have been enough activity for many, but The Man found time to chair the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports for three years. He also contributed time and money to many causes, including the USO, the Senior Olympics, and the Boy Scouts.

Despite his successes, people who knew The Man well said he had a sort of “down home” manner about him. He carried a harmonica, and often played “The Wabash Cannonball,” perhaps inspired by the antics of Dizzy Dean. Musial also did harmonica performances of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at a number of baseball ceremonies, including opening day events in St. Louis, after his playing career had ended.

Musial was named to the league All-Star Team during every one of his 22 years as a player. If there is an All-Star team for role models, he should be on it as the Most Valuable Player.

R.I.P. Stan the Man Musial. If I ever grow up I want to be like you.

For the Record

It’s October, and the boys of summer are jousting once again for the World Championship of Baseball. Where but in the U.S.A. could the champs be crowned?  No other nation has the same extensive professional league structure and widespread amateur interest in the sport.

In more than 100 years, baseball has caught some public fancy in Canada, Japan, and parts of Latin America, but gets little or no attention elsewhere. In the U.S., the sport gradually has lost its position as the national game to football.  Why?  Basically, baseball games are slow-paced with long intervals of nothing much happening interspersed with a few moments of furious action.  In other words, watching baseball is boring most of the time. It’s also getting expensive to go out to the old ballpark—this summer fans had to fork over $6.00 for a hotdog in the Chicago White Sox’ stadium.

Perhaps as a way to add some interest, statistics expanded in scope and depth as the baseball years rolled by.  From the start number crunchers have provided fans with batting averages and totals for such essentials as home runs, runs batted in, strikeouts, and walks.  For pitchers, they gave us won-lost records, strikeout and walk totals, innings pitched, and (relatively recently) earned-run averages.  Now the keepers of the record books seem to have gone mad.

The Geezer watched a playoff game on TV a couple of nights ago.  A pair of announcers filled every second of spare time with numbers.  There was a lot of spare time as the teams changed pitchers whenever a hitter looked threatening. Viewers learned how many pitches a hurler had thrown in every conceivable situation, how every batter fared historically against every pitcher, and the speed of fastballs in miles per hour.  We even were treated to something the announcers labeled a “productive out.”

Where there are numbers there will be records.  Someone, sometime won the most games, hit the most home runs, and drew the most walks, or was the first to do something or other.  These are significant things to baseball fans.  However, we can get along well without knowing that Justin Verlander retired an average of four left-handed hitters with an outside slider every time he lasted five innings when he started a game in 2009.

Negative records perhaps are atop the pile of unimportant baseball matters. For example, do we really care if Los Angeles Dodger infielder Eugenio Valez this season set the modern-day record for nonpitchers for consecutive times at bat without a hit?  Perhaps Mrs. Valez does, if there is a Mrs. Valez, but I don’t.  And I’m sure Mr. Valez would rather not have his performance noted in the record books for all to see.

Other types of trivial baseball records sound positive, but mean very little.  High on that list are accounts of the first person to do some obscure thing or other or the only one to perform a trivial feat. The Geezer holds that sort of baseball record—one that probably never will be equaled.

I was the only person ever to play in both the junior and senior championship games in the same Wisconsin State Amateur Baseball Tournament. Wow!

Some might be awed by this achievement.  Wisconsin has held amateur championship tournaments for 63 years. Back when I played in the 1950s every little town and many companies sponsored teams.  Today, although interest in baseball is much diminished, Wisconsin still has about 60 amateur teams concentrated in northern and western parts of the state.  So my record might be considered a biggie, but how I earned it is as bizarre as the honor is unimportant. It was a pure case of being in the right places at the right times.

Through some mysterious manipulations by the chamber of commerce, my hometown (Tomahawk, Wisconsin) was selected to host the 1953 state amateur tournament.  At that time, tournament sponsors invited teams to compete in two divisions, also by a somewhat mysterious process.

Players in the junior division could not be older than 17.  They played seven-inning contests.  The senior teams had no age restrictions, and apparently few or no requirements about who might be considered an amateur or a regular member of the team.  All the teams, junior and senior, were known to add any talented players they could find to beef up rosters for the tournament.

I don’t know if the sponsors considered it a courtesy to the host city or needed a couple of teams to fill the brackets, but that year they invited one team from Tomahawk to participate in each division.  Apparently, the invitation came somewhat unexpectedly.  Managers had to hustle to assemble the two teams.  No one expected the locals to win anything—just play one game and take a bow after the defeat.

I was working that summer in a National Tea store.  Bob Koth, a local businessman involved with American Legion baseball, showed up and convinced my boss to let me off work because he needed a catcher for the junior division team he was assembling. I had played Legion and high school ball and was 17.  The first game was the next afternoon. Our ragtag nine wore the Legion team uniforms.  We won.  We won the next day.  To the amazement of one and all we were headed into the championship game.

The performance of the senior Tomahawk team perhaps was more amazing.  Competing against teams loaded with former minor league professional players, the local all-stars also won their first two games, which were nine-inning affairs played at night, and advanced to the championship game.

Our junior team had a big problem.  We only had two pitchers and it would have been a disaster to put one of them back on the mound with inadequate rest.  Mr. Koth learned that high school pitcher Dave Lemke was returning from a trip to Chicago the day before the title game.  He met Lemke at the train station and gave him a briefing and a uniform.  We had our pitcher, a guy with a strong arm but not as much experience as the first two we used.

Lefty Lemke was superb for six innings.  He was up against a team of stars from the Wisconsin Rapids area, a hotbed of amateur baseball.  One outfielder had signed a professional contract after a tryout.  We were tied 1-1 going into the last inning. Then we broke down defensively, and the visitors wound up winning going away for the championship.

I barely got home and shed my uniform when the manager of the senior Tomahawk team phoned.  His catcher had been called up by the National Guard and he couldn’t find another one when he checked with all of the area mens teams.  Would I play in the championship game that night? I did. We took a terrible thumping from a team that competed in a Milwaukee industrial league. 

Two championship game appearances in one day—two sound defeats. Not a record to be pointed to with great pride. But my very own record, nonetheless.

Recently, two local authors published a 550-page “History of Tomahawk Sports” book that covers teams and events from 1897 to 1980.  The book includes records and noteworthy accomplishments by athletes while they played on school teams and afterward in college or elsewhere.  Yes, I’m in there.  My appearances are in those standard pictures of a bunch of kids lined up to pose for high school football and baseball team photos. 

My 1953 amateur baseball record does not appear in the book.  The authors obviously have a keen perception of the importance of things.  

  

By Which Rules?

In sports, as well as in life, there are written and unwritten rules. And sometimes, the unwritten ones take precedence.

Two incidents in major league baseball just a few days apart illustrate the point. Both involved catchers. I toiled at that position as a youth on grade school, high school, American Legion, and county league teams, so the news got my attention.

First, Buster Posey, a legitimate all-star performer with the San Francisco Giants, had a broken leg after an opponent crashed into him instead of sliding as Posey awaited a throw near the plate. Posey is out for the season. Just days later, Houston Astros’ catcher Humberto Quintero was put on the 15-day disabled list with a sprained ankle after a collision at home plate.

What’s new? Not much. Catchers have led most leagues in injuries since the game began back in the 1800s. “Muddy” Ruel knew of what he spoke when he dubbed the face mask, shin guards, and chest protector (plus a cup to protect a young man’s most important parts) as “The Tools of Ignorance.” Ruel was a catcher for the Washington Senators. The implication was that intelligent people with some semblance of ability could choose more rewarding positions with fewer hazards.

I was a very slow runner with other limited skills, so working behind the plate was my only real chance to participate in what was then, without a doubt, America’s pastime. Green Bay Packers t-shirts were rarely seen when I was a kid in Wisconsin. Chicago Cubs and White Sox and St. Louis Cardinals (and eventually Milwaukee Braves) caps were common. Every rinky-dink town had a baseball team, and, especially on Sundays, going out to the old ballpark was the thing to do. Boys wanted to be part of the action, and donning “The Tools of Ignorance” was my chance for glory.
 
My baseball career ended at age 17. By then I was smart enough to know I couldn’t hit curve balls tossed by even washed-up former minor league players. I also knew by then I had a relatively weak throwing arm to go with my poor foot speed. Before those truths dawned on me, I had played in several hundred games.

Four things remain from my days on the diamond. A deep bone bruise in my left hand still hurts if something hits there hard enough. The thumb on my right hand is noticeably larger than the one on the left, the result of being split open (it resembled an overcooked hotdog at the time) by a foul tip. All four fingers on my left hand work just fine (I can type really fast), but I can bend them at the first joint in a way few other people can. My left kneecap has a small scar over an area that serves well as a weather forecaster.

That’s what catchers do. They get hurt, whether the hurt is applied by errant balls, foul tips, flying bats, or base runners intent on scoring any way they can.

During the time I played, and to this day, the written rule in baseball said a catcher cannot impede a runner by standing in the base path without the ball. I knew that, because I made an effort to be familiar with the rules of the game.

My high school coach, who was a former minor league catcher as well as a college football star, never mentioned it. He taught the unwritten rule: “Your job as a catcher is to guard that plate. Make the opponents respect your territory. Whenever you can, make them pay a price for crossing the plate.”

My mentor pointed out that catchers have an advantage. The “Tools of Ignorance” give them some armor-plating the runners don’t have. That doesn’t always help, though. It often didn’t help in county ball.

The Lincoln County League, where I played two summers, was made up mostly of men in their 20s and 30s with only a smattering of high school boys. It was a man’s game, no question.

In one contest at Tug Lake, a community consisting almost entirely of a tavern and a rudimentary baseball field with no fences, the going got rough. Early in the game, a runner charged in from third base after tagging up on a fly ball. I took the throw and had plenty of time to block the path between him and the plate. He chose to slide with one foot high enough in the air to rake a spike across my leg above my shin guard. There is no written rule against that kind of high-spiking; there is an unwritten rule.

He was the third out, so the father of one of our players had time to give me medical attention between innings. That consisted of pulling a piece of sod out of my wound, dousing the cut with beer, and applying a bandage brought by a lady who had been watching the game from a window in the tavern. I continued to play. We had no subs.

A bit later, one of my teammates, Joe Obey, retaliated. Obey weighed well over 200 pounds and had success as a football center and hockey goalie among his athletic credentials. He was clearly out at first base on a routine ground ball. The first baseman somewhat sloppily let his foot drag over the bag. Obey stepped on it. Howls of pain and a few choice words resulted, but there was no serious injury.

Perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, an opposing runner tried to run right over me several innings later. He was attempting to score on an infield ground ball. I blocked the plate without the ball, assuming it had a chance of arriving about the time he did. It did.

The runner threw himself into me with a sort of clumsy cross-body block. But he missed most of me. I heard a sharp crack as I tagged him out. The middle of his shin had collided with the middle of my shin guard. He had a broken leg. The game was stopped for some time waiting for a stretcher and an ambulance. There were no further incidents, and both teams adjourned to the bar after the contest.

In the wake of the major league collisions, some are proposing rules changes to make it illegal for runners to try to level catchers and to keep catchers from impeding a runner’s path to the plate. The latter already is the rule. Neither of the two injured big league catchers had the ball when they were bashed. They were the ones violating the rule, not the runners.

The better player of the two, Posey, made somewhat conflicting statements. “I don’t think he did anything illegal,” he said of the runner who broke his leg. Later, he suggested that runners might be required to slide if “a lane presented itself.” Why should they have to slide when they could score by just running straight ahead?

Traditionalists yowled that just because an all-star was seriously hurt doesn’t mean the rules should be changed, and that injuries in the battleground around home plate are inevitable. I’m pretty much of an anti-violence guy, but in this case I’m with the traditionalists.

And, it’s not all bad to have a left knee that throbs a little to warn you when a storm is coming.

Buckets of Buds


Sure signs of spring have arrived. Golfers are out in droves, advertisers are extolling the virtues of the latest gardening gadgets and products, and the “Boys of Summer” are back at it doing their best to whack baseballs out of the park or prevent the other guys from hitting them “where they ain’t.”


For me, spring always sets off a bit of reflection back to the days when I served as Sports Editor of the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune. Spring meant a new crop of young pro baseball players would arrive to start a 124-game schedule in the Midwest League. Covering the team, a farm club of the Minnesota Twins, was my primary task until falling leaves signaled the end of summer. The local club played home games at Witter Field.


Witter Field was a nice ballpark, but no one would mistake it for Yankee Stadium. The press box perched atop the roof over the stands directly behind home plate resembled an enlarged chicken coop.


The box was clean, but far from fancy. It included a counter across the area beneath the two open windows and a few folding chairs. Bill Nobles and Dave Van Wormer joined me there on many summer evenings. They served as public address announcers, and broadcast most of the Class A minor league games for radio station WFHR. They occasionally asked me to fill in some dead time with a statistical report. Those moments probably set radio announcing back quite a few years.


Equipment perhaps unique to our press box occupied one corner. A pail tied to a lengthy coil of rope stood ready for a midway point in the game when one or all of us usually got thirsty. The beer stand was directly below the press box.


We would put two dollars in the bucket, lower it to the beer dispenser, and wait until he tugged on the rope. We then reeled up three Buds and our change.


Our radio broadcasts and newspaper reports didn't suffer. We almost always confined ourselves to one Bud per game. For young Wisconsin men, that hardly amounted to anything. Fans near the beer stand often greeted the appearance of our bucket with a cheer, so we thought we were making a worthy contribution to fan entertainment in addition to slaking our thirst.


Ah, springtime at the old ballpark.

Give Yourself a Proper Sendoff

A badly overused joke among mature adults is that they read death notices in newspapers just to make sure they're not among the deceased that day. Having reached a ripe old age, I'm certain the real reason oldsters read the obits so religiously is because their contemporaries are dropping like flies, and the readers are very curious to see what is written about the dearly departeds they knew. I maintain that obituaries prepared by funeral directors or newspaper staffers with information provided by family members are not first rate, an unfortunate situation that could be corrected with a bit of advance work.

Everyone should write his or her own obituary.

An elderly writer who I supervised in the early 1980s convinced me of the truth of this. The guy wasn't extremely productive, but he could be creative. When he began telling me of the virtues of writing one's own swan song, I expected some of the usual fiddle faddle about how it would help the family in a time of great emotional stress. Nope. The principal reason was entirely self serving--you can portray yourself in a highly favorable way and not say a single thing that is untrue. And you'll be doing the readers a favor because you can leave out all those unfounded, irritating laudatory statements, such as "he was beloved by all who knew him" or "she was a true friend in times of need" or "he will be sorely missed" or similar banal nonsense.

Another virtue of the do-it-yourself approach is it gives you one last chance to say before a large audience a few nice things about the people you love or admire.

The secret to successful, yet honest, self-aggrandizement starts with the realization that all obituaries are written in the past tense. Thus, you can mention every positive activity you ever engaged in without regard to how long you did it or how effective you were. You know more of the little positive things in your life than anyone else, so you should do the job or work with another to prepare the final salute to yourself.

The obituary I wrote in preparation for my demise follows. Every word in it is the truth. But you will find several instances of making myself look more impressive than I was by simply stating an unqualified fact. An example is in the second paragraph. I was a class president in high school. Sounds pretty grand. However, I was the freshman class president, and the frosh came from several different grade schools. They hadn't been together long enough to get to know each other before elections were held. Most who voted for me didn't know a thing about me. And there were only 80 kids in the class, anyway.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Richard J. Klade left us on ___________ after __ years of living well, laughing often, and loving much.

Dick was born Jan. 1, 1936 at Tomahawk, WI, to wonderful parents, Fred and Margaret Klade. As a youth, his passion was playing baseball on youth league, high school, American Legion, and county league teams. He also was a high school class president, saxophonist in the band, and a football player.

He started working at age 10 as a shoeshine boy and later was a waiter, farm and canning factory laborer, supermarket butcher, and printing shop helper. His savings and two small scholarships financed study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a journalism degree in 1957. At UW, he was a member of Sigma Delta Chi, professional journalism fraternity, and was elected president of Sigma Nu social fraternity.

He served with pride in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960, primarily as a troop information specialist at Fort Sill, OK.

Dick's professional work included stints as City Editor of the De Pere (WI) Journal-Democrat and Sports Editor of the Daily Tribune in Wisconsin Rapids. He also worked in public relations and sales promotion at The West Bend Company, Allis-Chalmers, and the McCoy Job Corps Center as an RCA employee. His writing occasionally appeared in the Sporting News and other national media. Dick achieved his two minutes of fame in 1973 when he presented a report on the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite."

He joined a great outfit, the U.S. Forest Service, in 1968. He served as a writer-editor at the Forest Products Laboratory, Public Information Officer for the Boise National Forest and Eastern and Intermountain Regions, and Director of Research Information for the Intermountain Station in Ogden where he retired in 1994. He was awarded 11 Certificates of Merit for outstanding performance during his Forest Service career.

Along the way he was a charter member of the De Pere Junior Chamber of Commerce, a Kiwanis Club member in Boise, and for several years volunteered as a Greek Awards applications judge for Weber State University. He devoted more than 16 years to serving his neighbors in various capacities with the White Barn Homeowners Association in Pleasant View, UT.

Dick married the love of his life and best friend, Sandy, in West Bend, WI in 1961. Their son Lee, a stained glass artist in Plainwell, MI, was raised to be an honest man with good values by Sandy while his father pursued less important activities. Sandy and Lee remain with us, along with five nieces and nephews.

Dick loved his family, people of integrity, trying to hit golf balls (he got four holes-in-one, but said all were accidental), the Green Bay Packers, and Dixieland jazz, in about that order. He was a member of People's Church, a Unitarian-Universalist congregation in Kalamazoo, where for several years he chaired the Men's Discussion Group and met many new friends.