Prologue
Gee. It’s comin’ the tornada, as my old Oklahoma podner, Jim Lavendusky, would say. Rain all night. Fierce thunderstorms. Tornado warnings. All this on the first day of Major League Baseball Season, no less. In the Northeast, they’re expecting a foot of snow. Maybe they should return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the season started on April 14th. We’re waiting for Dot to foal. She’s due April 1, but you know how they are. They’ll foal when they get around to it. We’ll keep you posted. Cosmic Song is finally running—sixth race at Gulfstream, tomorrow. We’re hoping for no April Foolishness. The race is shorter than we’d like, 5 furlongs on the grass, but the other races didn’t go. This is a $35,000 claimer, so there’s a chance she’ll be taken. There’s also a good chance she’ll win. The weather could be an issue—rain in Miami might move the race to the dirt, letting in a nice also-eligible horse who’s entered for main track only, but probably knocking out a couple of others and reducing the size of the field. You give a little, you get a little. Results to follow.
Bill’s Rant Of The Week—Underwear-Hating Tebow Bashers
Ex-Gator Quarterback Tim Tebow signed a contract the other day with Jockey to model their products on TV ads, etc. The Christian Right, of course, fell into paroxysms of depression.
“We thought he was one of us,” they moaned.
Waitaminnit. Does this mean the Christian Right people don’t wear underwear? I thought it was just the opposite. I thought they wore big poofy underwear that covered every inch of their bodies and then put external clothing on top of it. Maybe the Jockey underwear is too small. Or maybe the Jockey underwear is okay if nobody can actually see it. Or maybe the Jockey underwear is okay if people can see it, but not on Tim Tebow. Whew—it’s difficult to figure all this out. But I’ll bet one thing. I’ll bet if you went up to any of these religious idiots and offered them what Tebow is getting paid, they’d be out there in their mini-thongs dancing to the music.
The Banzai Pipeline
It being the beginning of baseball season and all, I think I’m entitled to a second rant. We in the good old U. S. of A. are getting ripped off by Japanese pitchers sent over here by the Evil Emperor to pay us back for dropping the Big One on him. Or, more precisely, the Big Two. Now, I wouldn’t care about this so much if they all didn’t seem to gravitate to my very own Red Sox, but there seems to be some kind of a Japanese pitcher magnet hanging over Fenway Park. Now they’ve got four of them. And they’re bums. The most expensive bum is Dice-K Matsuzaka, who they signed for a piffling FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS after gaining negotiating rights from his Japanese team for FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS! When you’ve got that much invested, you can’t just admit you made (tee hee) a tiny error and get rid of him when he can’t cut the sushi. And he’s unwatchable. Every batter that comes to the plate eventually gets a 3-2 count. Several walk. Dice-K would rather chew ground glass than actually let anybody hit the ball. Nobody ever told him there were eight other guys out there to help him out. So the beat goes on. And now they’ve got three more Japanese pitchers to add to the fun. Oops, wait a minute. I just found out they sent Hideki Okajima, a left-handed relief pitcher, down to Triple-A. They kept him around for years because he was left-handed even though he never got one single person out. Well, if he did I never saw it. And don’t think we’re racists around here, either. Siobhan’s sister-in-law, Mary, is half Japanese and we really like her. As long as she stays away from the Red Sox.
Take Me Out To The Ball Game
My father, Thomas Joseph Killeen was a pretty ornery guy. He was born in Presque Isle, Maine, his Irish family eventually gravitating to Somerville, Mass., just outside Boston. Somerville was a tough town, full of Irishmen and Italians. I remember going to a high school basketball tournament game in the old Boston Garden once and when the Somerville team came onto the court their fans dumped so much confetti (shredded newspapers) into the air you couldn’t see from one side of the Garden to the other. Turns out, the Somerville fans stole newspapers all along the way to Boston to provide themselves with ammunition. On the court, if you were somehow talented or lucky enough to beat Somerville, you came out of the adventure one bruised fellow.
My mother was in her early twenties when she married my father, who was 25 years older. He had a good job with the telephone company. He belonged to the union, the Communication Workers of America, I think. My father was a no bullshit guy. He went to Catholic church every Sunday but didn’t like it when the sainted old Monsignor Daly would litter his sermons with requests for more money. Or even when the Pope would give everybody a “special dispensation” from the Church rule against eating meat on some particular Friday.
“Who does he think he is?” my father wanted to know of Jesus Christ’s direct representative (through St. Peter) on Earth. “If you can’t eat meat on Friday, you can’t eat meat on Friday. It’s either one way or the other.”
My father walked a mile-and-a-half to work almost every day and he usually walked back. Dinner was, without fail, at five o’clock, when he would arrive home. Except on Friday, it was meat and potatoes and something else. Irishmen like their meat and, especially, their potatoes. Occasionally, he would drive to work or back home with his best friend, Jim Carney. When there was a crisis at the telephone company—usually involving bad weather—Jim would come by, pick up my father and they would be gone until the problem was resolved, often through the night. Once in a while, we would bring him dinner while he solved these great mysteries and my sister, Alice, and I would prowl down the unending corridors of wires and cables and wonder how anybody could ever figure it all out.
You did not want to get on the bad side of Tom Killeen. He had a quick temper and he also had a belt that he would strap you with if the offense was deemed bad enough. My mother stood by as Counsel for the Defense but her objections were often overruled. It took a lot for Alice to get the strap, but not so much me. (And I am not forever scarred by this; my mother was neutral and my grandmother favored me.) My father never touched my mother, but his fist did put a big dent in the pantry wall one day. My mother’s most effective weapon was tears. He didn’t know what to do about that.
The Good Old Days
Most of the time, my dad was even-tempered and we did a lot of things with him. Often, with my mother and Alice in tow, we would troop down to South Union Street to shop. There were no Wal-Marts then, not even any large grocery stores, so we would visit the fish store, the bakery, etc. The First National Store was a small grocery that was always a staple of the trip. If you lived any distance away, you could get there on the Belt Line bus. The only Jewish guy in town (no dummy, he) owned Sullivan’s Furniture Store and was the owner of the only snow globe I had ever seen. I was fascinated with this little miracle and he didn’t seem to mind. Almost at one end of the South Lawrence section of Union St. was the O’Connell Playstead, which we called “the common,” and virtually across from it a bar called Jenny’s. The bar was a family-oriented place with an awesome—in the true sense of the word—and colorful Wurlitzer Jukebox. You could play 6 records for a quarter and we did. On Sundays, at five o’clock, Super Circus came on the bar’s large television and everybody stopped what they were doing to watch Mary Hartline and her friends cavort under the big top. Almost nobody but businesses actually had television. My mother and father nursed their beers and ate sandwiches. Alice and I had potato chips and “tonic,” the New England word for soda. Bars like Jenny’s were common and each of the many nationalities in town seemed to have its own “social club.” Even my grandfather, Bill, owned a bar. Also on South Union street and in no danger of being thought a family place, it was called The Whippet Club. Some nights my grandmother and a male friend or two had to drive down to The Whippet Club to pick up my grandfather, who might have had too good a time that day. My job was to sit in the back seat and hold his hat on my lap. My grandfather was most proud of my ability, even at four years of age, to recite the entire American League Standings, not to mention most of the Red Sox’ current batting averages.
The Little League started in Lawrence when I was eight, so I had to try out. My father said all the doctors’ kids would get in since they were supporting it financially and there were only four teams, but I didn’t believe stuff like that happened. I was more optimistic when I didn’t miss a ball hit to me during my tryout, but my father, who took me, told me not to get my hopes up. He was right, of course. I ended up in some minor league version of the Little League, playing for the Braves at “the common.” On one of the few days my father went to a game, I had a rare opportunity to do something that would make him proud. The score was tied in the bottom of the sixth, the final Little League inning. There were two outs and a man on third. The batter hit a screamer to left field, just foul. It was a long distance from where I was playing in the outfield but I ran over, dived and saw it bounce off the middle finger of my glove. The kid hit the next pitch through the right side of the infield and we lost the game.
“Nobody could have caught that ball,” my father said, supportively.
“Dom Dimaggio would have had it,” I told him, referring to the Red Sox center fielder.
“Well, maybe Dom Dimaggio….” he agreed, grudgingly.
Fenway Park
When I was five, my father told me he was taking me to my first baseball game. We used to listen to all the Red Sox games on the radio and I could see what the park and the players looked like in the pictures in the Boston newspapers, but this was moving to another dimension.
On game day, we walked down Winthrop Avenue to the B&M railroad station. This was exciting enough, I had never been on a train, although I got a great view of them with a railroad yard just over our back fence on Garfield Street. Boston was only 26 miles away, so the trip was brief but no less wonderful. We detrained at the North Station, also the location of the Boston Garden, home of the Celtics and Bruins, and jumped on the subway, elevated at that point. The mostly underground train screeched, rocked and rolled its way beneath Boston’s streets, stopping at iconic stations like Haymarket (farmers’ market), Scollay Square (strip joints), Park Street (the state capitol and Boston Common) and on to Kenmore Square, closest stop to Fenway.
If you’re not a big sports fan, it’s hard to describe the scene. A little less than 35,000 people converging on a modest-sized ballpark, all totally devoted to the Red Sox, all nonetheless critical of some aspect of the team (the manager, the relief pitchers, etc.). They exulted over every win and anguished at each loss. In the northern half of New England, you could go anywhere and there would be a radio with the Red Sox game on. I’ve been around and there’s no place like it. And we’re talking every day for 162 games, not a 12-game football season. And the fans never leave, whatever the score. Oh, a few tourists may drift off, but the bulk of the Boston fandom is sitting through nine. Hell, it’s so hard to get in nobody wants to leave early.
I was a little disappointed when we reached the park. I could see the big light towers, so I knew it was the right place, but it didn’t seem possible this modest red-brick building could contain the spectacular Fenway Park I had heard so much about. Gee, I was only five years old.
When we finally went through the gate and up to the aisleway, I stopped dead in my tracks. The inside of the park was perfect, better even than The Beach. The field was impossibly green. The left-field wall (which nobody called “The Green Monster” and which didn’t have those silly seats that sit atop it now) looked exactly like it was supposed to. The chalk lines were very white and very straight, unlike our shabby crooked and lumpy imitations at the B&M field in South Lawrence. The Red Sox home uniforms were blindingly white (they still are). They looked like they had been laundered in Heaven and carried down by Angels. The hotdogs tasted better than any hotdogs in the world (where did they get that mustard, anyway?). It was like being transported to some unanticipated eden, overwhelming all your five-year-old senses.
Nonetheless, the Red Sox fell behind the Cleveland Indians 12-1 by the fifth inning. “It looks like we picked the wrong day to come to your first game,” my father said, ruefully.
“But Dad,” countered Bill, even then ever the optimist, “it’s only the fifth inning….we can catch up.” Tom Killeen managed a sad smile at his son’s foolish naiveté. But the Red Sox, laden with hitters like Dom Dimaggio, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and the redoubtable Ted Williams, did catch up and won the game 15-14. Cleveland brought in practically every pitcher they had, including Bob Feller, Bob Lemon and Gene Bearden (no “specialists” in that era), all to no avail. Leaving the ballpark, I was about the only one who wasn’t stunned. It all seemed perfectly logical to me.
I didn’t get my Red Sox pennant, though. On the way in, I saw a beautiful white pennant with red letters, unlike any I had seen before. I asked my dad if we could get it. He said we’d get one after the game so we wouldn’t have to carry it around. But after the game, there were none. Oh, there were pennants of every description, but no beautiful white ones with red letters. My father felt bad about my disappointment. When we got back to Lawrence, he walked us over the bridge to downtown Lawrence and over to Louis Pearl’s novelty store on Broadway in a vain search for the lost pennant. The following year’s trip to the game, we bought the first white pennant we saw and nobody minded a bit carrying it around all damn day.
End Of An Era
My father died at 63 of congestive heart failure, which none of us kids even knew he had. It happened in the middle of the night. Being a hardass, but a considerate hardass, nonetheless, he wouldn’t let my mother bother his doctor. By the time somebody finally rounded up an ambulance, it was too late. They closed the doors around his bedroom and kept the kids out so we wouldn’t freak out, I guess. It was shocking to think something like this could kill Tom Killeen. I thought they would need to hit him with a bus.
His wake was at our house. Most wakes were in homes, then. I did a good job of not crying until the funeral at St. Patrick’s. There, leaving the church, I encountered my entire high school home room class and teacher from Central Catholic and I was overwhelmed by the gesture. As I sat in the funeral car on the way to the cemetery, I thought again about that first Red Sox game. I thought about dropping that ball in the one game my father came to see. But mostly I remembered being in Church, where our grade-school graduation was held. Before they handed out the diplomas, they would announce who had won the academic scholarship to Central Catholic. I figured I was about the third smartest kid in the class, so it never occurred to me that I would have a chance. But the two smartest, John Barry and David Kiernan, had received scholarships to neighboring Phillips Academy, known to the rest of the world as Andover, the finest prep school in the country.
Monsignor Daly, the besainted old relic, looked up from the altar, from which he presided.
“And the Central Catholic scholarship,” he intoned in his own inimitable fashion, “goes to William Thomas Killeen!”
Oh, shit! Now I have to walk all the way down there and get it, I thought. All by myself.
“Congratulations, William,” smiled the monsignor.
“Thank you, Monsignor,” I said, by now almost giddy with my unexpected accomplishment. And I turned and walked back up the middle aisle of St. Patrick’s church, self-confidently, all by myself. By the time I reached the pew I was to turn in, I could see my family a few rows behind. My father was on the aisle, and, if I didn’t know better, it almost looked like he was smiling. I didn’t worry about dropping that ball any more.
That’s all, folks….
