THE JOYOUS SEASON
By Dick Meister
Like every other baseball fan, I looked forward with great anticipation to
the new season. But I know it won't possibly match my favorite season of
all time.
It was 1950 -- the year that I, a 17-year-old shortstop not yet out of high
school in San Francisco, took the first step toward what I was certain would
be major league stardom.
You had to start somewhere, and my somewhere was Boonville, California, home
of the Loggers, one of six teams in the semi-professional Mendocino County
League.
Boonville. It sounded as if it was thousands of miles from San Francisco,
and although actually only about 120 miles north, it might as well have
been. There were only a few hundred people in town, two grocery stores, a
service station, pool hall and a combination bar and restaurant with a dozen
crumbling one-room cabins behind it -- the Boonville Lodge, our principal
source of food, lodging and entertainment for the summer.
Though small, Boonville was exceptionally well placed, in the heart of
massive forests of pine and redwood and lush farmland. Narrow towers of
dense gray smoke surrounded the town, tall aromatic sentinels rising above
lumber mills, guarding Boonville's economic well-being. In the
cricket-chirping quiet at night you could hear the soft thudding of the
perpetually moving conveyor belts that carried the scrap of the mills up
into the high mouths of rusting conical burners that spewed out the smoke.
By day, the the thudding was lost amidst the high metallic whine of whirring
circular saw blades, as tall as a man, that ripped through logs moving
constantly past them on carriages that slid back and forth, back and forth,
transforming round tree trunks into flat lumber and trimming away the bark
that fed the burners. Rolling acres of orchards under a canopy of pink apple
blossoms spread out beyond the mills, and hills of thick, heavy grass dotted
with grazing sheep and cattle.
That's why they held the county fair in Boonville. That's why they had
exhibition buildings and a baseball field there. That's why they had the
Boonville Loggers. People sat on hard folding chairs watching movies on a
more or less regular basis in one of the exhibition buildings, but the major
source of entertainment for miles around -- except, of course, for the bar
and pool hall -- was the baseball team.
The Loggers played only on weekends; their fans were overwhelmingly
preoccupied with work at other times. But, my God, those weekends!
The fans barreled into town at noontime on game days, straight down the
highway that doubled as Main Street, climbed out of dented and dusty pickup
trucks and long fish-tailed sedans and hurried into the bar and restaurant.
They jostled good-naturedly as they yelled out their orders. Beer and
chicken-fried steak, beer and hamburger steak, beer and fried chicken or,
for those feeling flush, beer and the house special, T-bone steak. All "on
the dinner": vegetable soup, cole slaw, mashed potatoes with thick white
country gravy, peas, roll and pat of butter, coffee and ice cream or jello.
Grasping bottles of beer and sheet metal tubs filled with ice and more beer,
the laughing, noisy crowd crossed the highway and jounced down a dirt road
on the other side, heading to the ball field a few hundred yards away.
The heat rose in waves. You could see it through the thick clouds of dust
kicked up by infielders warming up as the fans clambered up into the
bleachers, rattling the seats formed from sagging wooden planks, old, dry
and smelling of resin. The crowd bellowed advice and encouragement full
blast through the afternoon to the home team, clad in brilliant white
uniforms trimmed in royal blue, a bold "B" on the front of their caps, and
fans came down under the bleachers between innings to offer icy, dripping
bottles of beer that the players downed in quick, gasping gulps.
It didn't end with the games. We walked, players and fans, the sweat-soaked
lot of us, across the highway afterward, replaying the games as we made our
way to the lodge, there to continue our talk, inside and in boisterous
groups that spilled out onto the sidewalk. More beer, and the raucous,
endlessly blasting jukebox sound of country boys singing country songs.
It was like that in all the league towns, none more than an hour away by
car. Each of them had a field much like that in Boonville, a bar much like
the Boonville Lodge and fans much like those in Boonville.
We spent very little time in the dilapidated cabins that were our homes away
from home. There was work at a lumber mill, from seven in the morning until
three or four in the afternoon. Then came two to three hours on the practice
field, where the boss was the Logger manager's right-hand man, Woody, once a
first baseman in the Chicago White Sox minor league chain.
Woodrow Paul Wilson II was the "old pro" who was standard on such teams as
the Loggers, a heavy drinker in his mid-40s who'd been drifting around the
country for the past ten years, one step ahead of his third, alimony-seeking
former wife. He knew no trade except baseball and had no skills but those of
a ballplayer, skills too blunted by age and hard living for him to make it
with teams at any higher level.
Woody was just another hand at the lumber mill, but at practice he called
all the shots, a drill master with a fat stomach and a long, thin fungo bat.
He'd slap balls to our left, to our right, over our heads, balls that would
hit just in front of us and pop right up. He'd stand us up at home plate
while the pitchers fired away, reaching out to straighten our shoulders,
twist us this way and that, move our feet together, then apart, out from the
plate, then in, move us back in the batter's box, then forward.
Practice, practice, until our eyes stung with sweat dripping down our
foreheads.
Woody didn't say so, and we certainly didn't think so at the time, but we
were experiencing true joy. The moist warmth enveloping our bodies, our
muscles responding spontaneously and uncomplainingly to our every demand,
dashing across the field full tilt to catch up to a ball, sending a ball
flying far beyond us with the mere swing of a bat, our bodies doing just
what they were supposed to do, just what they had learned to do.
That's what it meant to be young. That's what it meant to be playing
baseball. That's what Woody Wilson never said, but never forgot.
Copyright © Dick Meister