I have a Long and Personal History with the Newspaper

The Newspaper and I
by Charlie Leck

My old man sold newspapers. I never saw the numbers laid out before me, but it was a big part of his livelihood. Of course, we didn’t have Excel spreadsheets back in those days either.

Selling the Sunday morning newspapers was quite a process that began sometime on Saturday afternoon. I was deeply involved in that process from early on in childhood. It was something I could count on every single weekend. Other activities, like the Saturday matinee movie at the Borough Hall or the high school football game, had to be fitted around the preparation of the Sunday newspapers.

I’m talking about a lot of newspapers. Sixty years ago, the newspaper was a really big deal. To understand, you need to imagine a world without CNN, MSNBC and FOX News. As a matter of fact, for that period at the beginning of my history with the Sunday newspapers, you need to imagine a world without TV. Really!

We sold a lot of different newspapers on Sunday morning – the New York Daily News, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Daily Mirror, the New York Times and the Newark Star Ledger. Mountainous piles of each were waiting for our customers on Sunday morning, when we opened the doors at 8:00 A.M..

I’ve tried my best to describe my old man’s store in the past. It’s not an easy thing to do. A friend of mine, in an email to another friend, did his best in trying to describe it.

“The Leck general store [was] on the square with the Chester House Hotel and Post Office. The store was a kind of Norman Rockwell building with a broad wood porch and one big room with a long counter on one side and an ice cream fountain on another. The front and the other side were windows so you could see the traffic, if it ever came by. Then there were tables and chairs for the fountain customers and a big stove in winter. Charlie’s mother and father served customers from behind the long counter, taking down the cans from the tall shelves against the wall as they asked for them. It was our favorite place for ice cream and candy if we could get some. In fact, the only place! There were always kids you knew there when you went in or hung out on the porch….” [John Hopper]

That’s not a bad description, but the old place looked very different on a Sunday morning because the newspapers were stacked in tall piles in front of that long counter. As a small boy I wondered at how all those newspapers could possibly be sold. Even more, I wondered at how anyone could possibly read any newspaper as thick as the New York Times; yet, some customers would come in and purchase three different papers for their Sunday reading.

The pre-printed sections of all the papers began arriving on Saturday afternoon. Big bundles of the advertising sections, and the magazine sections, and ‘the comics’ were all dropped off by big trucks that pulled up to the long porch in front of the store. We had to haul the big bundles inside and tuck them out of sight.

On Saturday evening, when business slowed to a trickle, we began pulling out the big bundles of the advanced sections of each of the papers. Piles were created on all the dining tables around the store with each table representing a different paper. My old man was always in charge of the NY Times table. The advance sections were all slid together so that there would be only one compiled section to fold into the “hot” news sections that would arrive in the early morning. These were left sitting on the table or on the chairs next to each of the tables.

Early on Sunday morning, long before the rising of the sun, from my bedroom above the store, I could hear the big, heavy bundles of the newspapers landing on the porch down below. The whole building seemed to shake as each bundle crash on the old, wooden landing area. One truck would arrive with some of the papers and another would arrive with the others.

“All hands on deck!”

My father would pop in and alert my brothers and sister. In those early years, before my sister and brothers moved away, there was always plenty of help. Even in the later years of the store’s history, though my brothers lived in their own homes with their own wives, they would show up faithfully on Sunday morning for the massive assembly line.

Each of us had our assigned duties. In the early years, when I was but a little tike, my main job was taking finished papers in small piles and stacking them in front of the counter as high as I was able. When they reached the height of my eyes, one of my brothers would take over my task.

As I grew older and taller, I migrated into the assembly line and had my own table and my own papers to assemble. Three, four or five sections, depending on the newspaper, had to be assembled and then Saturday’s advance section needed to be folded into each of Sunday’s packet to make a final Sunday newspaper.

It all had to be completed by eight o’clock when there would be a dozen or more people standing out on the porch waiting for my old man to unlock the door and allow them in. Often, someone who thought he was a special friend would signal that he would like early entrance. Some people even tapped on the glass windows from the porch. My father pretended not to see or hear a thing and instructed us to do the same. To interrupt the assembly process would mean we wouldn’t be ready for the opening at eight o’clock.

The dining tables were nearly black with printer’s ink when the last paper was assembled. My mother was on the job by this time and she went from table to table, scrubbing each of them and wiping down their chairs as well.

I watched in amazed wonder when the doors were finally opened. People strode in rapidly and grabbed their favorite newspaper, or even a couple of them, and then asked for a quart of milk, bacon and a dozen eggs to take along home. Some fellows took their paper to a table and spread out, telling my mother they’d like a hot cup of coffee and, perhaps, an English muffin with marmalade. All the tables would be taken within 10 minutes and, sometimes, one old-timer would join another local at his table.

The big piles of newspapers began to diminish. For some of the papers there were reserves that had been stacked in the store room in the back of the store and my job was to refresh the piles when they began to get near the bottom.

“Come on! Make it snappy,” my old man would call out to me.

There were other commands as well.

“Fetch me a pound of Maxwell House!”

“Bring a pint of heavy cream!”

“Get me down a box of Corn Flakes!”

“Gotta have four bottles of cold Coke!”

Things seemed to fly off the shelves, out of the big refrigerator box and from the soda cooler.

Every customer seemed to know my old man personally. They’d call him Hank, or Hennie or Henry, depending on how personally they knew him.

I remember making judgments about the sophistication of our townspeople depending on which newspapers they purchased. Of course, those who picked up the NY Times were the learned, reading folks in town. The guy who picked up the Daily Mirror was tagged as a less complex person.

All kinds of items moved off the shelves on a Sunday morning. No one seemed to purchase just the paper. Work gloves sold like crazy during the gardening months. Magazines could be chosen from a long, low counter in the front of the store, and there were dozens and dozens from which to choose – all the way from Popular Mechanics to Look Magazine. Candy bars, in the display cases right above the stacks of newspapers, sold swiftly too. So did chewing gum and packs of Chesterfields and Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Things would calm down after an hour or so, but then the pre-church and after-church rushes would begin. By one o’clock, nearly all the papers were gone. We’d shut the store down for an hour and my old man would hang out a sign, telling folks we were having our Sunday dinner and would open again at two.

My mom would have something special for us all to eat. The dining room table, pulled out into the middle of our living room, would have her best china all set out on it. We’d enjoy Yankee Pot Roast, or leg of lamb, or Virginia Baked Ham. Sundays were never fish days. That was Friday.

The old man would finish dinner and have time for a half-hour nap before he had to open up again. He’d lie down on the sofa that paralleled the dining room table and drift off, snoring loudly. Most times we’d try to let him sleep and my brothers and I, or Blanche, the neighbor lady who worked for us on Sunday afternoons, would open the place up.

My mother might offer specials to luncheonette customers, depending on what was left over from our Sunday dinner. A nice Virginia baked ham sandwich on a home-made dinner roll was always popular. So, was a hot, Yankee pot roast sandwich smothered in thick gravy, with mashed potatoes on the side. Top it off with a chocolate milk shake and our customers would have a spectacular Sunday afternoon meal with no reason to worry about dinner on that night.

The last few, scattered newspapers would be gone by evening. If there were any left, they’d be bundled and marked for return to the truckers on the following Saturday. We’d never have anything more than a small bundle to put out for return.

I’ve known the feel and smell of printer’s ink for nearly all my life. When I’ve worked my way through the paper on a Sunday morning, I look down at the blackness on my fingers and I’m reminded of those days in that little town and in that general store where we mixed assembling the newspapers with jerking behind the soda fountain.

Late in the summer of 1959, I left New Jersey and ventured west. Mother had left for the stars. My brothers and sister had their own homes. It was difficult to leave Pop alone, but I had some of my own hillocks to climb and I needed to sit with someone sweet beneath the stars, examining them. I came home in the summer of 1960 and worked a few jobs to earn tuition money for college. I also helped out in the store and assembled Sunday papers for the last time. That autumn, I left for good and never again put together a newspaper or waited on another customer in Leck’s Confectionary.

The old store was played out. The old man’s heart wasn’t in it anymore. I knew that. He wouldn’t hang on much longer.

TV had arrived. Walter Cronkite talked the news nearly every evening of the week. Newspapers consolidated and changed their emphasis.

It would take another 50 years, but the newspaper industry had begun its slow decline toward extinction. As certain as death is, I still refuse to believe in it!

I close my eyes and see those towering stacks of newspapers, standing taller than I, lined up in front of the candy counter.

The Teenager Years is Life’s Most Difficult Phase

I was an astonishingly strange teenager!
by Charlie Leck

As my kids were growing up, passing through their teenage years, I had a difficult time witnessing and putting up with their teenage behavior. They did these things that were so dumb that they reminded me of myself as a teenager – and I didn’t like that. They struggled with all the same problems with which I had struggled. I had not been successful dealing with them, so I had no magical words of advice for them.

I didn’t grow up in a house. I often wondered, when I visited the lovely homes of most of my friends, what it would like to grow up in a house. I grew up in a store.

My old man called it Leck’s Luncheonette and Confectionary. I’m not too sure what that means. The words are too genteel to describe what the store really was. I remember it as a general store. The building was approximately 150 years old and hadn’t had much modernization and improvement over the years. We sold several dozen different magazines that ranged from the Saturday Evening Post to cheap cheesecake rags that were then called pornographic but would be laughable to the real pornographers of our own age. A glass enclosed counter displayed every kind of candy bar known to any sophisticated kid – from Almond Joy to Zagnut, with things like Milky-Way and Mounds Bars in between. There were stacks of penny candies, too. On shelves behind that candy counter were rows and rows of cigarettes, cigars and pipe tobacco. A customer could pick up a copy of the New York Times or the Herald Tribune or the Newark Star-Ledger and then ask for a pack of Lucky Strikes, a pound of bologna, a half dozen slices of swiss-cheese and a quart of milk that came in a glass bottle that revealed a healthy head of heavy cream. I learned to use the slicing machine before I was five years old. he same customer might also choose to buy a pair of work gloves, a new flash light and, perhaps, tickets for the donkey-baseball game that was coming into town in the next week.

There were about five luncheon tables, with chairs, scattered about, mainly surrounding a big, coal burning stove that stood in the geographic center of the old place. There was an ice cream fountain and bar where four or five patrons could sit on stools while my old man or his one employee, Blanche, made for them a root beer float or a creamy chocolate malt. They might order a cheeseburger or a Rueben sandwich that would be made from scratch, using totally wholesome and fresh ingredients in the kitchen off ‘the store’ that served also as the culinary preparation area for our home.Well, that creates the setting in which I grew from a little, runny-nose kid into a teenager with massive amounts of acne covering my face. Aren’t memories grand?

One wintry day, when school had been canceled because of the amounts of snow that had fallen, I was sitting at my father’s reserved table in the store. My back was directly behind the big stove and I was warm and cozy as I munched on a big sandwich my mother had made me. The storm had made business slow and my old man was able to sit with me and we chatted about the coming baseball season. Though he’d never come to watch me, he was proud of the way I’d swung the bat in the Babe Ruth League the previous summer. He was wishing I could go out for baseball in high school. He knew I could make the team. Yet, both of us knew that was impossible. Mother insisted that I get right home after classes so I could help around the store. My one sister and my two brothers had all grown up and moved on to their own lives. There was a lot to do around the place and my mother’s health was failing badly and I knew I was needed. I loved baseball, but I knew my days of playing it were over.

A very primly dressed, proper lady – our only customer on that wintry day – had finished her big bowl of my mother’s home-made split pea soup and paid her respects by sticking her head in the kitchen to exclaim how wonderful it had been. We served soup like that with big, puffy homemade dinner rolls that drove diners wild. People all over town knew my mother was the community’s finest cook – by far. My father rose to take the woman’s payment for lunch and to fetch change for her from the huge, clanky, manual cash register behind the candy counter.

She took her change and made to leave, but detoured by my table and slipped me a little note. Off she went – somewhere – into the snowy day.

I held some sort of wondrous mystery in my hands. An older and quite handsome lady had surreptitiously slipped me a note. My heart skipped a beat as I unfolded it.

It began with an apology and an expression of sympathy. Then it detailed a menu – or prescription – containing instructions for treating my explosive case of teenage acne. The ingredients, I remember, included lots of squeezed lemons and a fair amount of salt. The other ingredients’ have flown from my mind even as the years have flown by. The note told me that I would be quite a handsome boy if I would use the treatment.

Of course, I wanted to cry. Jesus, it was tough being a teenager and twice as tough being a teenager with a ghastly case of acne. Messy, pussie pimples riddled my face – all over my chin and cheeks and forehead. I went through many, many bottles of Caladryl lotion, dabbing, with little wads of cotton, that flesh colored lotion all over the motley, red blotches on my face.

Naturally, I remember the details of that day only vaguely, but I remember very clearly that I rose from the table and passed through the kitchen. I handed the note to my mother and turned to the little, creaky staircase that led from the kitchen to the group of five bedrooms on the floor above. I stopped in the strange bathroom at the top of the stairs and peered into the mirror above the little sink. I knew that if I had to look at myself very often, for any sustained period of time, it would make me sick!

I went to my bedroom and flopped on my low, little bed. I was too sad and too depressed to cry. I had been taught not to use any serious obscenities, so I didn’t. I just lay there, as if a character in a Turgenev novel, lost in this place as if it were a giant haystack on the Russian steppes. I heard my mother calling to me. I didn’t answer.

Then I heard her climbing the stairs and then walking down the hallway. I remained motionless in both body and mind. The sickly, weak woman came into my room and sat, with great difficulty, on the very low side of my bed. There were big, watery tears in her eyes and she looked at me sadly. Having been a parent, and having gone through such moments myself, I understand now how much she wanted to perform a miracle and wipe away the ugliness that inhabited my otherwise fairly handsome face.

Why then couldn’t she understand why it was so difficult for me to meet the school bus each morning and go to that place where all those other kids would look so strangely at me and turn away so quickly, before I could see the revulsion in their faces? I hated school so much. I hated looking at kids with soft, milky, clear complexions. I hated it that teachers couldn’t look directly at me because the army of white-headed, red pimples turned their eyes away.

Why couldn’t my mother understand why I spent so much time closed in my room, listening to the tinny, AM radio playing the day’s top popular music hits? I would fantasize that I could sing such songs about my own teenage romances. Of course, I had none.

On ‘picture days,’ when group or individual photographs were supposed to be shot at school, I would stay home by feigning some kind of stomach and intestinal illness.

“This silly woman,” my mother sulked, “is dangerous. She wants you to drink this mixture a few times a day. That’s crazy! She could give a note like this to someone to whom such a recipe would be very dangerous. No one should drink that much lemon juice in a day, with all that salt mixed into it.”

I didn’t realize it then, but one day I would. It is so difficult to be a parent. As awful as it was for me that day, and as sorry as I felt for myself, it was much more painful and difficult for her. She wept sadly and could say no more, but I understand her feelings now. She wanted so to take it all away from me and make me the pretty boy I should be, but she had not the power to do that.

She patted my leg and rose. She pulled the door closed behind her and left me alone there in the ghastly quiet of my room.

First Love

Who would want to go to a 50 year class reunion?
by Charlie Leck


My high school class of 1958 will celebrate
the 50th anniversary of our graduations
next year and, of course, a big reunion party
is in the works. The organizers have
successfully tracked me down, captured my
address and formally warned me that they
will harass me for the next 8 months, trying
to convince me to attend.

This essay is the second in a series of four about
what a dunce I was in school days and why
I would never have the courage to show my
face at any class reunion. Another series of
four will follow in two or three weeks.

Love consumed me the first time when I was 9 or 10 years old. I didn’t say I fell in love, mind you. I was totally consumed by love. It overwhelmed me and it made me dim-witted. Instead of doing my math homework assignments in the evening, as I should have, I sat in my room thinking of her, my first dear love. At baseball practice, standing out at the third base position, I would take a line drive in the thigh because I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking of her and how beautiful she was and what a perfectly wonderful smile she had.

It was unrequited love, believe me. She thought I was a jerk and she was certainly correct about that. She never looked at me and she didn’t even nod a ‘good morning’ or ‘thank you’ when I allowed her to go first in the lunch line. I’m not saying I blamed her. I didn’t. Even now, I don’t.

Had I kept this love to myself everything would have been fine. The world would never have discovered what a fool I was – how completely I had allowed ‘love’ to conquer my ‘sense and sensibilities.’

I’m not saying it was her fault, but had she not left our little, northern New Jersey township to go to Georgia every winter, none of my foolishness would ever have been discovered. Her family took her out of school around Christmas time every year and they went to Plantationville, in southern Georgia. They stayed there until springtime arrived and thoroughly settled over all of New Jersey.

It was in the fourth grade, I think, that I somehow I got hold of her Plantationville address. I must have mailed her a half dozen love letters – really mushy stuff – telling her how beautiful I thought she was, and how I could think of nothing but her, and how bleak and boring the days were without her in them. (You see, even then, I thought of myself as a writer! I’ve never stopped kidding myself.) Upon her return, it was impossible for me to look her in the eye and she, of course, was so completely embarrassed that she wouldn’t have allowed it any way.

Now, put yourself in my place. How would you feel on that day in April when she returned to the classroom in our little school? Where would you have cowered? Under which desk would you have crawled? How many consecutive days could you have feigned an illness serious enough to keep you home and in bed? Oh, my God, it was overwhelmingly awful! No human could ever have been more embarrassed. One could never feel smaller or dumber.

I sat frozen at my classroom desk, staring straight ahead, pretending to be anxious for the teacher to begin our day’s lesson. My cheeks burned with the fever of embarrassment. The palms of my hands were soaked with perspiration. My vision was blurred.

That was the year my math skills went to hell. I couldn’t deal with fractions – especially turning them upside down and dividing their denominators or whatever the heck our teacher was asking us to do. I just wanted my letters back. I wore myself out praying that, somehow, the postman had not made his appointed rounds.

In the ensuing months, however, I caught the young beauty’s mother taking peeks at me, with a silly grin on her face that told me what a little fool I was – that she had read each and every word of my barmy correspondence.

For the next nine years, until I could get out of New Jersey, I had to do everything I could – use every imaginable device and procedure to avoid allowing my eyes to collide with those of this pretty, young girl. I ruined my peripheral vision by concentrating so hard on only what was straight ahead of me. My neck and upper body became rigid; for I refused to turn casually for fear that I might encounter her full-faced.

Somehow I managed to avoid encounters for many years. It was sometime in high school that I first ‘stumbled upon’ her again. It was probably in our third year there and I came roaring down a set of stairs far too quickly, missing a final step, and nearly fell into her. She was looking intently at me, in a pleading kind of way. Her eyes tried to tell me that it was all right now – that she had forgiven me long ago for my silliness – that I could relax and limber up my neck again – that I could say hello occasionally – that I might even invite her to go have a soda.

My transgression had been too serious, however. I couldn’t ever, ever trust myself to not say again something utterly and unforgivably brainless. I gulped and turned away, graduated and got the hell out of town.

She? She went on to marry, I learned years later, and to have children. Eventually, she made her home in Plantationville – in that little southern village with the tiny post office that had handed over the remarkable love letters of a nine-year old boy.

A fifty-year reunion is coming up. How silly are reunions? Who would go to one? Who would want to remember and relive how shatteringly unremarkable he was as a child? Who would want to look one’s classmates in the eye and say hello again?

Becoming a Ball Player

What ever happened to Tommy Pugh?
by Charlie Leck

My high school class of 1958 will celebrate the 50th
anniversary of our graduations next year and, of
course, a big reunion party is in the works. The
organizers have successfully tracked me down,
captured my address and formally warned me that they
will harass me for the next 8 months, trying to convince
me to attend.

This essay is the first in a series of four about what a
dunce I was in school days and why I would never have
the courage to show my face at any class reunion.
Another series of four will follow in two or three weeks.

My dream last night was extraordinary; however, the most extraordinary thing about it was that, when I awoke in the morning, I remembered it in detail. That doesn’t happen often.

I watched a bit of the Little League World Series last night. You got it! There wasn’t much on and I was pretty bored. Yet, it was quite intriguing to watch these kids pour so much of their souls into their ball games.

So, I went to bed. I was tired and sleep came easily. Some time during the night, the dream started. It was a replay of an actual moment in my life – approximately 55 years ago.

There was green, green grass everywhere and this wonderful fence out there in the outfield. I’d never seen anything like it. We were in Brookside, New Jersey for the first organized Little League game in which I had ever played. The League had just been organized in our county and my age qualified me by only a day or two to play for one season. I was a big kid for my age and there I was, in my dream, towering over all the other players.

Our own town had just a ball field. It certainly did not look like a “ball park.” However, there in Brookside is was really different. It felt like we were stepping on to a major league field. There was a grass infield and level outfields and an attractive fence, set at Little League standards, which ran all the way around the outfield. There were real dugouts and bleachers for spectators. A number of flags flew from bright white poles.

Our manager, Mose, threw batting practice. I easily rapped several balls over the left field fence. It was very exciting, but Mose grabbed me before the game started and warned me that the pitchers wouldn’t be throwing at batting practice speed, and I shouldn’t get too excited.
Well, as the visitors, we were up first. The dream kept playing. Buddy and Hank both rapped solid shots to the outfield. Toby went to the plate and I stood in the on-deck circle and watched him take a couple of pitches. He was always a patient guy and liked to look for a pitch in a particular spot.

This guy’s stuff looked slower than the pitches Mose threw up to me. The ball seemed to be huge coming up there. Toby banged a line drive that almost took the pitcher’s head off. Buddy raced easily across the plate. Hank pulled up at second.

I was very excited. Something was jumping around inside me and I could sense that my eyes were stretched wide open. I couldn’t relax. I grabbed handfuls of dirt in an attempt to dry my hands. This was the most extraordinary moment of my little life. I looked to that fence in left field. It was so close. A ball hit to left field in our own town would just roll and roll for hundreds of yards and the fielders could just race after it and after it.

Tommy Pugh was on the mound. Within months of this day he would become one of my best friends and I would spend plenty of time with him. He was a cool dude with a really funny walk. His arms hung straight down at his sides when he walked and they remained very still with each stride, but his hands jiggled very noticeably. We all laughed at him until we got to know him. Then I got to thinking it was the neatest walk a man ever had. I tried it and couldn’t pull it off.

Well, Tommy was a cool guy, all right; but he couldn’t throw any heat at all. He wound up (players had to hold their bases, in Little League, until the ball was released by the pitcher). No one worked from a stretch in this league.

When the ball came out of his hand it seemed like I had long moments to think about it and make my decision. It seemed slower than the pitches he had been throwing to the first three batters and the ball just grew as it got near me. It was right at the letters and over the middle of the plate. I swung as mightily as I could and just knew I’d whiff on that slow ball.

Instead, I felt the sweet feeling in the bat when it encountered the ball and I heard that solid sound of impaction that every batter likes. The ball was flying away toward left field. It was a high line drive that wouldn’t lose its climb for some time and it was still climbing when it flew over the fence and crashed into some trees that lined the flowing brook beyond them.

In the dream, my legs would barely carry me around the bases. I felt as if I might have to crawl. It was the same 55 years ago. It seemed to take forever to get around to home plate. It was silent. Our team had no spectators there except one or two parents who had each driven a load of players. My parents were certainly not there. They didn’t do things like that. My teammates weren’t making any noise or cheering because, given the handsomeness of Tommy’s pitches, it wasn’t any kind of significant achievement to thump on him. Yet, inside, I was screaming like crazy. It was the first time I’d hit a ball over a regulation fence for a home run. I ran down the third base line, trying to making it across the plate. My feet were in concrete. They wouldn’t move and I awoke exhausted. It was dark and quiet and I heard my wife breathing softly beside me.

For a second I’d been a kid again. Now I was back to being old, with legs that can’t run anymore and eyes that can’t see a moving ball very well.

In real life I had homered the second time up, too. It wasn’t quite as sweet, but it cleared the fence by plenty. We moved ahead by about 36 runs – really – and Mose pulled me and Toby and Buddy. Some of the second stringers gave up a run and couldn’t push anything across the plate for us.

It was not uncommon to win 30-0. We beat every team in our league that way all year, right up to the last game of the season. In that one we played Brookside at our place and Tommy Pugh was the pitcher again. Throughout the year he had been showing improvement. He was stronger now and he had some speed. He had learned to move the ball around a little bit, too. Someone had taught him about throwing the ball high and tight. That put the fear of God in a lot of little leaguers. In the last inning, during our last at bat, we were losing 4 to 3. With two outs I sliced a triple down the right field line. Hammerin’ Hank was up for us and Tommy threw one really close to him, that his catcher couldn’t get. The ball got away and rolled behind the catcher. I hesitated on the third base line and I heard Mose screaming: “Go, go, go!” I took off, but that hesitation cost me. The catcher flipped the ball to Tommy, who had rushed to cover the plate. The umpire, big Al O’Brien, screamed that I was out. To this day I don’t think I was. People were tired of us, though, and of all our bragging and of all the whippings we put on teams. I think Al just had to call me out.

From the ground I saw Tommy Pugh dancing a jig and his teammates were lifting him up and you’d have thought they’d won the World Series. We only won every game of the season; yet we lost the last one and we’d have to taste it all winter. Tommy would savor victory all through the cold and snowy season.

I was crying as I got up from the ground. The Brookside parents were streaming on to the field and hugging their kids. I was thankful, this one time, that my parents never came to ball games. Mose and the rest of our team disappeared quickly. I couldn’t stop crying. Warner Johnson, one of the big guys, a catcher who had tried out with the New York Giants, came over and put an arm on my shoulder and told me to stop crying and be, at least, the only player from our team man enough to shake Tommy’s hand. I shook my head, indicating I wouldn’t. He crashed a fist into my arm, just below my shoulder, the way my brother did when he was pissed at me. The shot really rocked me. He pushed me toward the celebration. I went and, with eyes fixed upon the ground, offered my hand to Tommy. He was my buddy by this time. He didn’t take my hand. Instead he hugged me and I could tell he was crying. It was a really happy cry and I knew that he was as jubilant that day as I was on that first day of the season, in Brookside, when the ball flew so high and far out into left field.

“Way to go!” The words didn’t come out very easily, but I said them. I pulled away and started the long, long walk into centerfield and toward the joint, a few hundred yards away, that was my house. Warner fell in step next to me and put his hand on my shoulder again.

“You’ll be glad you did that,” he said. “You just became a ball player!”