It
was the only baseball they had. And now it was gone.
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It
was their only ball because in Freeport, Maine, of 1918, where boys gathered to
play baseball every afternoon between school dismissal and chore time, the town
could not afford a playing field, real bases, uniforms, or even a backup
baseball. Not with fuel shortages, food rationing, and a flu epidemic infecting
the nation. The spare change the boys could pull together totaled one baseball.
One. But because Freeport was a baseball town, one ball was enough. Boys joined
the team as soon as they were big enough to grip a bat. They played on the
empty lot between the high school and town hall, using old sweatshirts as bases
and battening down windows within range to keep the glass intact and ball in
play. If the ball landed in tall grass, the game was suspended to ferret it
out. If a batter connected hard enough to knock off the cover, the men at Dave
Longway's garage stuck it back on with friction tape. During the frozen winter
the boys painted their baseball yellow to see it in the snow.
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And
then on a lazy afternoon near the start of summer, the ball, the same one that
the Freeport fry had played with for months, was lost. It sailed off Hank
Soule's bat up over second base, cresting over the iron railroad tracks that
ran through the outfield, descending like a rocket on a brilliant harvest
night. Then it landed ¨C thwap - right in the open palm of a Pullman porter on
the Halifax-bound sleeping car. The porter was no more prepared to catch a ball
than the boys were to lose theirs. But there it was, floating through the open
vestibule of his parlor car, and he raised his open hand, instinctively, as any
good American boy would know to do. And for a moment he was as stunned as they.
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It
all seemed like a dream as the boys reflected back. The old Maine Central work
train motoring ahead on tracks just fifty feet behind second base, an empty
Pullman sleeper in tow. The porter waving with his free hand, clasping the ball
with his other. The boys were mesmerized at the hit that sent their ball
straight into the train door, and the ease with which the porter snagged it.
Then they were enraged that he had kept their only baseball, and there would be
no more games till they could scrabble together enough dimes to buy another.
Something had to be done. Perry Taylor got the number of the train from the
stationmaster, Charlie Bailey, and wrote a letter to the president of the Maine
Central. The other boys added their names. Who was that porter, they asked, and
could he bring them back their ball? Please. They mailed the missive, then
pooled their coins and bought a brand-new hardball at the sporting-goods
counter of L.L. & G.C. Bean, the local department store that would make
their town a destination.
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By
the time the sleeper came through again two weeks later, the boys had almost
forgotten about their ordeal and letter. The same porter was aboard, and he
waved from the steps of the vestibule. Then he tossed them a new ball clean of
everything except some scribbling. The boys gathered around to read what they
could see were signatures. There was Deacon Scott, the Boston Red Sox's
sure-handed shortstop who set a record for consecutive games. The catcher Wally
Schang, who during the off-season sewed covers on Pullman mattresses. And
George Herman Ruth, the "Babe," who divided his time between first
base, center and left fields, and pitching, and carried that 1918 Red Sox team
to a world championship. It would be Ruth's next-to-the-last year with Boston
and Boston's last World Series title in that still-young century, making it the
stuff of legends and curses.
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"It
had the autographs of all the first-string players," John Gould, who was
ten at the time and had just moved to Freeport, remembered eighty years later.
"We never played with that ball. It was put in a small wood box with
cotton batting, and the last I knew, Perry Taylor was its custodian." And
there were more baseballs, one nearly every time that porter passed through.
Some were autographed, others clean. Enough, in the end, to fill a bushel
basket. "I think the porter was a baseball fan. He had friends and they'd
either go to Fenway Park or Braves Field and sit in the bleachers and catch
foul balls," Gould added. "We never needed balls after that. We had
all the baseballs we wanted."
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They
also had their first encounter with a black man. Everyone was white those days
in Freeport, and in most of Maine. No one knew the name of the porter who
brought them the baseballs, where he lived, or whether he had boys of his own.
No one thought to ask. They were uncertain whether it had been his plan all
along to return a signed baseball, or if that came in response to their letter
to the railroad. Most believed the former, especially when the balls kept
coming. To those boys, a black man was a Pullman porter, and their Pullman
porter was magical. "This began an association with the only black man our
town knew anything about in those days," concluded Gould, a columnist,
historian, author, and dean of the Maine press corps. "And if nobody else
feels it has historical importance, I do."
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Larry
Tye "Rising from the Rails" (2004)
