The Cincinnati Red Stalkings (2 page)

“Yes, and Spalding didn’t start making baseballs until 1876. And once he did, he used black stitches, too, up until about ten years ago. My guess is this ball was probably just used by kids, and they restitched it after the cover came off.”

“A fake . . .”

Perriman shrugged. “Got to expect some chaff with the wheat, I suppose.” He put the ball back on the table. “See, the other reason it was tough to acquire Red Stocking relics was because the club got rid of them all after the team broke up. Once the winning streak ended in 1870, people stopped going to the games. Two years later, the club was bankrupt and had to auction off everything from the balls to the bleacher seats—even the groundskeepers’ scythes and shovels. No record of who bought what. So I cast a wide net and offered a lot of money—too much, according to my wife and Tinsley.” He paced around the center table, looking over the walls packed with memorabilia. “Some took advantage. A lot of this is just old junk that people unloaded on me after clearing out their drawers and attics. I figured I’d keep some of the better material and expand the museum later. The rest I’m going to try to sell back. Kept an account of everything I bought.”

“How much did this ball cost you?”

He answered promptly. “Not a penny. It was donated. By Ambrose Whitaker. I’m happy to say that some of the more civic-minded citizens, like Mr. Whitaker, preferred to share what they had rather than try to make a buck off it.”

“You gonna give the ball back?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Don’t want to offend him. Mr. Whitaker seemed to think it was an important item. He was the bookkeeper for the ’69 club, so I had my hopes up that he’d be a good source for material.”

“But he wasn’t?”

“For the most part he was. Gave me some letters written by Harry Wright, and a marvelous photograph of the Red Stockings on the Forest City grounds in Cleveland——only photo I know of that shows the team on a playing field. Those were all real. But not the ball.” Perriman swabbed his throat with the handkerchief. “At least that was an honest mistake. There was one fellow tried to sell me shin guards he swore were worn by Doug Allison—I told him that must have been some trick since they weren’t invented till thirty years later.” He chuckled at the recollection.

“When did you start collecting all this?” I asked.

“Two years ago. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the old team, and I wanted to make a display to honor them. That’s when I found out everything they had was long gone.”

“Well, you did a great job getting it together again. This room is going to be packed with visitors.”

“Oh, this is just for storage until I get everything sorted out. Then we’ll set it up in one of the concession stands downstairs. I wanted the exhibit in the library or someplace—a public area where anyone could see it. But Tinsley insisted that it be inside the park so folks will have to buy a ticket for a game. Never misses a chance to make a dime, that man.”

“That’s why he’s the club’s business manager, I expect.”

“I suppose. But it’s frustrating to deal with him sometimes. To me, these things are part of our heritage; to him, they’re merely an attraction to get people through the turnstiles.” He turned to me and smiled. “Not everybody feels the way you and I do about baseball’s history.”

“Yeah, I know.” There were even some people who didn’t care about baseball at all, past or present.

Perriman waved his hand at the discard table. “Say, these things that I’m getting rid of ... They’re nothing special—mostly duplicates of standard publications. Would you like some of them?”

“Sure!”

“Just give me a minute to mark them down.” While he went to the desk I looked over the pile. It was a treasure trove of old baseball cards, programs, guides, and magazines.

He came back with a small green ledger. From under the table, he pulled out an empty wooden crate stamped
Hauck’s Lager
and started filling it from the pile, periodically making notations in the ledger.

When it was filled almost to the top, Perriman said, “Here you go,” and handed me the box.

“Thanks!”

He then tossed in the ball that had first caught my attention. “Might as well take this, too. I’d only be throwing it away.”

I thanked him again, shifted the box under one arm to shake his hand, and started toward the door. “Oh, when is the opening going to be?”

“Not sure. I was shooting for the Fourth of July, but with all the fuss about”—his voice faded to a whisper—“you know, the scandal . . .” Back at normal volume, he concluded, “I might wait till that’s all settled. And I do hope you’ll be there.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

As I walked downstairs to the exit gate, I was thinking that it was a relief to have something to look forward to again. Recent events in baseball had been totally disheartening. The “scandal” that Perriman couldn’t voice aloud had been the subject of heated debate in barbershops and hotel lobbies and Pullman cars for months. And the arguments were about to intensify: Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven of his White Sox teammates were scheduled to go on trial tomorrow in Chicago. The formal charge was conspiracy to defraud the public. What they were accused of doing was selling out to gamblers during the 1919 World Series and giving Cincinnati a tainted championship.

Some baseball people thought the trial would be healthy for the game—the accusations and evidence would all be aired in open court, and a jury would evaluate the case against the players and determine their guilt or innocence. The owners were hoping that a verdict would remove the dark cloud that hung over the game.

Myself, I wasn’t so optimistic.

B
y the time I’d trudged the three blocks south from Redland Field to Liberty Street, I was sweating more than Ollie Perriman. Cincinnati, like the rest of the Midwest, was suffering through a stubborn heat wave that showed no sign of ever lifting. My Palm Beach suit was getting damp, and the trousers starting to bind. The straw boater tilted low over my face kept the late-afternoon sun out of my eyes, but salty rivulets escaped the sweatband and trickled down my cheeks.

At Liberty, I set the crate on the ground while I waited for the next streetcar. Itching from the heat, I dug a finger behind my celluloid collar, tried to pull it a little looser, and promised myself that one of these days I would make the switch to soft-collar shirts.

In a matter of minutes, an eastbound trolley pulled up, and I paid the nickel fare. Fortunately, there were few other passengers; I was able to take a double seat for me and my load of baseball treasures.

A ruddy-faced man with a gray walrus mustache leaned toward me, and whispered, “What I wouldn’t do for a drink of that.”

“Me, too,” I answered, tilting the
Hauck’s Lager
box enough so that he could see there were no bottles in it. Prohibition had been in effect for more than two years, and the only beer available was either home brew, bootleg, or near beer.

“Ah, that’s a shame,” the man said sadly, settling back in his seat. “Had my hopes up for a minute there.”

I returned an apologetic smile. The thought of a cold brew stayed with me, and I soon developed an intense thirst. There’s simply nothing better than a beer on a hot summer day after a ballgame. And near beer was no substitute—in my opinion, whoever gave it that name was a poor judge of distance.

I tried not to think about how parched I was, and settled back for the mile and a half journey home. Liberty Street ran all the way from Cincinnati’s West End, where Redland Field was located, to Mount Adams in the East. The homes along the street ranged from neat row houses of brick and stucco to spacious wood-frame dwellings painted quiet hues of blue and yellow. Interspersed among them were modest churches and a few grocery stores and clothing shops.

Above the broad avenue, it looked as if a colossal game of cat’s cradle was being played with electric wires as twine. Cincinnati had more trolley wires stretched over its streets than any city I’d ever seen. I knew that it was partly due to the Queen City’s historic fondness for that mode of transportation; there were streetcars everywhere, with routes to just about any destination worth visiting. Also, someone explained to me, the trolley companies had to string double lines because residents wouldn’t let the rails be used as electrical grounds—they feared electricity would contaminate the water supply.

The squealing wheels of the trolley carried us into the predominantly German community known as Over-the-Rhine, so dubbed because the area was north of where the Miami Canal used to flow. A few years ago, the canal was drained; now, some sections of it were filled in and other sections excavated, as city politicians battled over whether to construct a subway or a highway in its place. Also gone, killed by Prohibition, were the beer gardens and saloons for which the neighborhood was famous. The breweries remained, but they now produced only unpalatable near beer and kits for making home brew.

After passing through Over-the-Rhine, we reached Liberty Hill, a quiet area between Mount Adams and Mount Auburn, overlooking downtown. I hopped off the trolley at Highland Avenue and began walking in the welcome shade of the maples and locust trees that grew on the hillside. Two blocks from Liberty was home. And Margie.

Five months ago, we’d been living in Detroit with the expectation that I’d be playing another season with the Tigers. Then came the telegram informing me that I’d been traded to the Cincinnati Reds for a forty-year-old pitcher with bad knees and a dead arm—I took some consolation in the fact that there had once been a minor-league player traded for a twenty-pound turkey, so mine wasn’t the least valuable trade on record. While I reported to the Reds spring-training camp in Cisco, Texas, Margie went on to Cincinnati to set up a home for us.

The narrow, two-story house she’d selected, made of red brick like most of the others in the city, came into view. As did Margie, playing hopscotch on the sidewalk with a dozen or so children from the neighborhood.

Despite the heat, and a hip injury from her days as a moving-picture serial queen, Margie was the most active participant. She threw the stone, then hopped over the chalked squares, her white middy blouse billowing and navy skirt fluttering. Her long chestnut hair, never kept under control in the best of circumstances, cascaded about her face and shoulders. There was laughter in her dark eyes and a broad smile on her tawny face.

Margie halted the game when she saw me. “Okay,” she panted. “That’s enough for today.”

There were a few disappointed groans from the children, then all but a couple of them capered off. The two who lingered were Erin and Patrick Kelly, sister and brother twins who lived next door. They were twelve years old, and the past three of those years had been tough ones for them. Their father had been killed in the battle of St. Mihiel during the Great War, and their mother died shortly thereafter, a victim of the influenza epidemic. They now lived with a spinster aunt who worked in Procter & Gamble’s Ivorydale plant during the week and liked to have her weekends undisturbed by the presence of children. So they spent much of their time with Margie, who delighted in their company.

“You win?” Margie asked. She kissed me, delaying the answer.

“No. Lost, 6–4.”

“Did you ... ?”

I shook my head. No, I hadn’t played.

Patrick asked, “Whatcha got in the box?” His voice soared into a falsetto on “box,” and he flushed with embarrassment.

“A whole slew of stuff—books, magazines, baseball cards...”

“Baseball cards! Can I see ’em?”

“Sure.” I moved to set the box on the front porch.

“Let’s go inside,” said Margie. “There’s lemonade in the refrigerator. And cookies—if Mickey’s left any.” She gave me her crooked little half smile to show she was only teasing.

As we walked through the door, Patrick said plaintively, “I used to have baseball cards, but my mother threw them out.”

The furnishings were of Margie’s choosing, too. At the front end of the long room that served as both parlor and dining room, she’d put together something like a study for me: a white oak rolltop desk, a bookcase for my baseball guides and Mark Twain collection, and a Morris chair covered in a fake leather called Marokene. In the middle of the room, was the parlor section: a plush sofa, a pair of armchairs, and a mahogany Victrola that I’d given Margie for her last birthday. Over the fireplace were photographs, knickknacks, and a bronze mantel clock. Near the kitchen was a small round dining table covered with a lace tablecloth.

As I spread the contents of the crate on the table, I asked Erin, “Would you like to see these, too?” The coltish girl shook her blond head no. I knew she wasn’t a baseball fan, but she was a good kid anyway, so I wanted to make the offer.

Margie brought in three lemonades and a ginger ale for me. “Where’d you get all this?” she asked.

“There’s a fellow at the ballpark putting together some kind of exhibit about the 1869 Red Stockings. He was going to throw these out, but he gave ’em to me instead.” I took a long swallow of the soda pop.

“Can we look at the scrapbook?” Erin asked Margie.

“Of course. You know where it is.”

The two of them settled onto the sofa with the leather-bound scrapbook that documented Margie’s years as a movie actress. It was fuller than any book I could put together on my baseball career. As Marguerite Turner, she’d made dozens of action serials, most of them involving wild animals and impossibly dangerous situations. Although a fall from a camel put an end to her movie acting, she went on to perform in vaudeville for a few years, and remained so popular that photographs of her were still advertised in the back of
Photoplay
magazine.

As the two of them went through the scrapbook, Patrick and I started exploring the materials Ollie Perriman had given me.

Besides the red-stitched baseball, there were a couple of books—one of them a slim blue volume titled
Base Ball in Cincinnati
by Harry Ellard—and dozens of programs, guides, and magazines. Perriman had also thrown in some other mementos: felt pennants, pins, and a paper fan with
I’m a Reds Fan
printed on it.

But it was the cards that caught Patrick’s attention. “Are there any of the ’69 Reds?” he asked.

“Don’t think they had baseball cards back then.” I quickly sorted through the pile; there were at least a hundred of them. “This looks like the oldest,” I said, pointing to a faded pasteboard image of Tony Mullane. The card advertised Old Judge cigarettes, and had a copyright date of 1888.

“Who was he?”

A pitcher for Cincinnati, according to the caption, which I repeated to Patrick. “That’s when the Reds were in the American Association, not the National League,” I added. “The Association was a major league in the eighties.”

“Did you play against him?”

I laughed. “I’m not
that
old. I wasn’t born until 1891.” I looked closer at the photo of the pitcher and some memories started to flicker. Maybe from stories my uncle told me when I was a boy, or tales spun by old coaches around the clubhouse stove, or from articles I’d read in
Baseball Magazine.
“I’m glad I
didn’t
have to face him,” I said. “Tony Mullane was the reason they put in the rule giving a hit batter first base. He was always plunking batters—and he enjoyed doing it.” Mullane was an ornery cuss, from all I’d heard, the Ty Cobb of his day. A few more tidbits came to mind. “He could pitch with either arm. Sometimes he’d change from one batter to the next. Oh—and he was supposed to be the best-looking player in the game. Cincinnati held the first Ladies Day because Mullane had so many female admirers.”

“This I have to see,” said Margie. She came over and took a look at the darkly handsome man pictured on the card. Wrinkling her nose, she said, “Not my type. Mustaches tickle. Oh! I forgot the cookies.”

She went to the kitchen, and I pulled out a couple more cards. “I knew
him,
” I said, pointing to a Mayo’s Cut Plug Tobacco card of Arlie Latham. “He was a coach when I played for the Giants.” The card showed him as a player, probably in the late 1890s. “There was a song written about him called
‘The Freshest Man on Earth.’
Don’t ask me why.” I knew how the uninhibited Latham had earned that title, but it wasn’t something I wanted to explain to a twelve-year-old. So I proceeded to another card from the same series. “Buck Ewing here was one of the best ballplayers ever. A catcher mostly, but he could play anywhere. Good manager, too.”

Margie looked at the pictures of Latham and Ewing as she put a plate of oatmeal cookies on the table. “Aren’t you glad you don’t have to wear a tie when you play?” The Cincinnati uniforms shown on the cards included bulky neckties and long collars.

“Sure am,” I said. I would never wear the things at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that a major league ballplayer has to maintain a certain image.

She returned to the sofa with a second plate of cookies for her and Erin. Patrick and I moved on to the new century, looking at cards of former Cincinnati stars like Hans Lobert and Clark Griffith, as well as those of my current teammates Edd Roush, Heinie Groh, Eppa Rixey, and Greasy Neale.

I shared much of what I knew or believed with the boy. On a number of points, I wasn’t entirely certain what was history and what was myth, but in baseball, it’s often impossible to distinguish between fact and fable—and there’s usually no reason to do so. As my uncle used to say when I’d questioned the veracity of one of his yarns, “Well, if it didn’t happen exactly that way, it should have.”

The bogus 1869 baseball Perriman had given me caught my eye. Suddenly I didn’t feel cheated anymore. It wasn’t the inherent value of relics that mattered, but their ability to kindle memories.

I slid the entire pile of cards over to Patrick. “You can keep these,” I said. “And I’ll see if I can get any more for you.”

“Thanks!” He squirmed in his chair like an excited puppy. There were a million boys whose mother had thrown out their baseball cards, but few ever got them replaced.

As Patrick shuffled through his new collection, I looked through some of the other materials. I came to a single page from
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
dated July 17, 1869. “Here’s some pictures of the Red Stockings,” I said. They were drawings, actually, an array of individual cameo portraits.

The man in the center was identified as
Henry Wright.
“His name was really ‘Harry,’ ” I said to Patrick. “He was the manager. And centerfielder.”