One Shot at Forever (13 page)

Throughout the proceedings, McClard likely didn't say much but he didn't need to. Sweet knew who was behind the meeting. All summer, the baseball parents had continued to look for someone to blame for the disqualification, and Sweet suspected that McClard viewed him as the instigator. This no doubt only added to McClard's lingering anger over countless slights, perceived and real, as well as his clear disapproval of the company Sweet kept.

In particular, McClard
wasn't fond of Ernie Miller
, Mark's dad. Ernie worked at the state employment office and could be a funny, charming man, but he turned dark when he drank. He wore a leather brace where his left hand had been, the result of a shotgun accident when he was young, but his right hand could inflict some serious damage. A hulking man at six-foot-two and 240 pounds, he gained a reputation as the best fighter in Macon, and tough guys from neighboring towns sometimes showed up in the taverns hoping to take a crack at Ernie. Most left nursing a busted nose, wounded pride, or both. As much as McClard disliked Miller, the feeling was mutual, and Sweet was pretty sure that if Ernie believed he could get away with it, he would have kicked McClard's ass.

Now Sweet sat in his chair, incredulous. Finally given a chance to answer for himself, he stood up. “What's the charge here?” Sweet asked. “What have I done wrong?”

And on it went, for half an hour, Sweet alternately defending himself, listening to new charges, and cracking jokes at what he saw as the absurdity of the situation. If enjoying life was a crime, he was guilty, but how did that make him a bad teacher or coach? When the meeting was over, the minutes read as follows: “Mr. Sweet talked with the Board at length about the past and future status of his association with the Macon Schools. The Board in turn discussed with Mr. Sweet their reaction to his conduct and association with the school during past years. Upon conclusion of the discussion Mr. Sweet retired from the meeting.”

With Sweet gone, the board went into its executive session, the off-the-record portion of the meeting where the real dirt went down. The topic: whether or not to relieve the young English teacher of his duties.

Meanwhile, Sweet jumped into the red Scout that irritated Roy Roush so much and drove to Jack Stringer's. He needed some whiskey, and fast. After all, tomorrow was his wedding day.

At noon the following day, the Friday of Labor Day weekend, Sweet left work early, still not sure if he'd have a job or not come Monday but determined not to let it ruin his weekend. He picked up Jeanne in Decatur, where she was student teaching at Lakeview High School, and two hours later the pair appeared in front of a judge in Charleston, Illinois. The bride wore a short, red, white, and blue sailor print dress, the groom a white shirt and black tie. At the end of the ceremony, Sweet kissed Jeanne, after which the two newlyweds began to walk away. They didn't get fifteen feet before they heard a voice behind them.

“Excuse me,” the judge said. “That'll be ten dollars.”

The couple spent their wedding night at the US Grant Motel in Mattoon, the only honeymoon they could afford. The next morning they arrived at Lynn's parents' house in Champaign. When Sweet's mother appeared at the door, her son held up his ring finger. “Hey, Mom, I'm married!” Sweet announced. “Can we spend the weekend?”

Lillian Sweet was elated, as she tended to be whenever her son was happy. In some ways she was the opposite of Lynn's father: emotional, outgoing, available. A lover of music and literature, she was smart and tough and regretted to her last day that she didn't have the opportunity to further her education. Her father had three children but only the money to send two to college. Lillian had the misfortune of being the only girl.

She'd met Lynn's father one night in 1936 when he was hitchhiking through town on his way to an air base. He moved on but regularly wrote her long, eloquent letters. Later, he sent her books from overseas, including a thick copy of
War and Peace
with gilded edges. To the distress of Lillian's parents, who'd never approved of Lynn Senior, the couple married in 1938. Lynn was born two years later, his sister, Libbie, six years after that.

The family's life had been dictated by Lynn Senior's career. Since he was away for months and sometimes years at a time, it fell to Lillian to raise Lynn and his younger sister. The Sweets had little money, and each subsequent move promised a new life that never materialized as they hoped. The family bounced from Crew, Virginia, to Newport News, from Hopewell, Arizona, to Yuma. For a while, they lived in a state park in Illinois. By the time they moved to Champaign, Lynn Junior had experienced far more than most Midwest children his age. He remembers showering with black kids on military bases, and watching as his father coached a black semipro football team. He remembers money being tight enough that his mom saved the tin foil from a pack of cigarettes.

He also remembers the day his mother found that letter, the one addressed to his father and written by a girl in Germany, and the way his mom looked at his father after that.

Now she welcomed her son, ecstatic at the development. When Lynn Senior returned home later that night and learned the news, he was also pleased, for he considered anything resembling stability to be a positive for his son. Then again, he had no idea that his son was on the brink of getting fired from the only real job he'd ever had.

The following Monday, Sweet got the news when he returned to school. The school board's official decision, after some debate, was to take no action. He still had a job at Macon High.

The question, as he soon learned, was what that job entailed.

Jeanne was the one who first noticed the omission, early that fall.

If it took a while to notice, it was with good reason. After all, it had been a crazy few weeks. After the wedding, she and Lynn moved in with her parents, two more grown kids among all the rest tearing up and down the stairs in the Jesse house. Finally, in late September, their new home arrived.

Granted, it wasn't actually a house, but
the seventy-foot trailer
felt like one. Situated in Macon's brand-new trailer park, not far from the junior high and the Macon Speedway, it was the perfect size for a young couple. Eventually, the Sweets filled the trailer with a TV, a yellow bean-bag chair, and a coffee table made from a large, upended wooden spool, the kind wire is wrapped around. Beyond that, framing the doorway to the bedroom, hung what was undoubtedly the only bead curtain in Macon.

Since Jeanne was student teaching, and Sweet made only $533 a month, money was tight. They'd only been able to purchase the trailer after a friend cosigned the loan, and even then it was an economy model, built by Amish workers in Indiana. Buying anything else was a significant ordeal. Sears turned them down for credit on their first color TV and it wasn't until their third month together, when Jeanne picked up the beanbag chair for $35 on layaway at a Decatur furniture store, that the couple was first extended credit. Jeanne teared up when it happened.

In Macon, the news of the wedding had come as a surprise to most, as Sweet wasn't one to divulge personal details. However, far from raising eyebrows about a teacher marrying his former student, the union had actually boosted Sweet's reputation around town. At twenty-nine he'd been considered old to still be single in an era when most young men and women married by the time they were twenty-one. And by choosing to settle down with a local girl from a well-respected, cornerstone family, Sweet had given locals the first indication that perhaps he finally intended to put down roots and assimilate into Macon

Befitting his cult hero status at the school, a proper announcement was required. So in the fall issue of
The Ironmen Scene
, the Macon High newspaper, the following ran, under the heading of “Wedding Woes.” It was not difficult to divine who wrote it:

Within weeks of moving into the trailer, Lynn and Jeanne had settled into an easy routine. Sweet handled the social engagements while Jeanne took care of the business and organizational matters. Naturally, then, it fell to her to file away his teaching contract for the 1970–71 school year. As she did, she read it over again. There was his salary, listed at $6,000, and a list of his duties: English II and English IV, junior class advisor, and coordinator of the senior play.

There was one missing, however: baseball coach.

McClard may not have succeeded in firing Sweet, but he had done the next best thing.

10

Fall inched toward winter. Nixon announced he intended to pull forty thousand troops out of Vietnam by Christmas, four times his original estimate. In October, the Orioles beat the Cincinnati Reds in the first World Series played on artificial turf while the nation mourned Janis Joplin's death from a heroin overdose. Meanwhile, hopeful Americans signed up by the tens of thousands to join Pan American Airways' waiting list for the first commercial trips to the moon.

In Macon, the Ironmen football team finished 6–2, one of the best seasons in school history. In October, Mark Miller and Jane Metzger were named Homecoming King and Queen. To the cheering of onlookers, the pair rode down Front Street in an open convertible, preceded by cheerleaders, the Macon High Marching Band, and tractors pulling hay racks that students had transformed into floats by painstakingly twisting paper napkins into their chicken wire undercarriages.

As the holidays approached, Bill McClard could be seen in his office after school, working feverishly on something, though no one was quite sure what. Basketball season began and the cold weather moved in. All the while, Sweet remained unconcerned about his contract. No one at Macon High thought much about baseball until after football and basketball anyway. Sweet assumed, perhaps optimistically, that the contract was the result of a clerical error, or perhaps an oversight. At worst, it had to be a bluff by McClard. After all, who in their right mind fired a coach who went 16–2?

Then, in early February of 1971, Sweet heard the news: A new history and driver's ed teacher named Dennis Schley was slated to coach baseball that spring. The twenty-two-year-old Schley had been hired the previous summer with the expectation that he would coach junior high basketball and serve as an assistant to Burns on the football team. Though competent and energetic, Schley had never so much as run a baseball practice, let alone presided over an entire season. Now he would be the Ironmen's fourth head coach in four years.

Sweet couldn't believe it.
They'd actually done it
. He went to Sargent, then McClard, then Britton. From all, he heard the same thing: The board decided it would be best if someone else coached the team. What they really meant, though, was
someone who better represented the school
. This, Sweet thought, was ridiculous. After the disciplinary meeting, though, it was clear he didn't have much say in the matter.

When word reached the players and parents, they were incensed. Shartzer, being Shartzer, argued they should go straight to the top.
How about I just march into McClard's office
, he said. Or Britton's, or Sargent's, or whoever needed to be marched in on. Then Steve would lay it out for them: “If Sweet ain't coming back as coach, you'll need to find a new star pitcher.”