A NEAT WHITE SQUARE
By Dick Meister
Bernard Regan looks as if he's going to burst. He grinds his teeth,
scrunches up his eyes and twists his face as he teeters on a low curb, a
most determined eight-yearold. Up and down he bounces, one-two, one-two,
one-two.
Bernard bites his tongue, leans back, all stiff, and raises a pudgy hand.
He's gripping a baseball protectively wrapped in black electrician's tape.
He takes a deep breath and, finally, he pushes the misshapen ball toward a
concrete wall directly across the narrow brick street.
A white square is painted on the bluish gray wall, at precisely the height
of a first baseman's outstretched mitt. Well, not a real first baseman, not
one of those real big guys like the San Francisco Seals' Ferris Fain, but as
high as Angelo Sapio's mitt, and he's over five feet tall!
The wall fronts a basement that stretches across the space below the Regans'
third-floor flat and our second-floor flat next door near the top of Rose
Street, three blocks of steep alley that run straight down to where Market
Street cuts across at an angle and heads deep into downtown San Francisco.
Thunk. Bernard's throw hits a good two feet beneath the neat white square,
and I dash over to pick up the ball as it rolls down the hill, pathump,
pathump, pathump.
"My turn, my turn!"
I back up to the curb, take squint-eyed aim and -- boy! -- the ball goes
wobbling right into the square. I leap forward to scoop up the ball as it
bounces erratically off the dusty red surface of Rose Street, make a quick
sighting and, damn, toss it way off to the right of the square.
Bernard's turn again ... then mine again ... then his and mine. We keep it
up even after the sun goes down, even after the white square has grown gray
under the dim street light, and we do it night after night, Bernard, me,
often three or four other kids.
You have to practice all the time, you know, if you're going to be a
professional.
* * *
Others delivered newspapers, helped in the backrooms of grocery stores and
did the other things kids usually did to help struggling families in those
economically-troubled times of the early 1940s. But not the kids on Rose
Street. We worked all right -- but we worked at Seals Stadium.
Those dark green wooden seats were hard, the striped cushions rented cheaply
to fans were soft, and it required whole gangs of young boys to gather them
up after the games. Dozens of us would scramble up and down the concrete
steps of the stadium and dash along the rows of seats snapping up cushions,
often out of each other's grasp, driven to a competitive frenzy by the
reward awaiting us. Ten cents each we got -- plus passes to future games --
but only if we worked hard enough and fast enough to grab off enough
cushions to satisfy a sharp-eyed supervisor in the crisp black and orange
uniform of the Seals' concessionaires.
The supervisor's name was Red Haas, who was even more than a source of dimes
and passes. He was a baseball manager!
Red operated at Big Rec, a sprawling field in Golden Gate Park that swarmed
year-round with players of all ages. Under the pecking order, the older
guys, those who played on real semi-professional teams -- some for
professional teams, even -- had full and sole command of the two baseball
diamonds. We were relegated to the far corners of the outfield, where the
master was Red -- in his twenties, but not good enough to be welcome among
the real players on the diamonds.
* * *
We stand eagerly on the grass of Big Rec -- hoping oh, how we're hoping --
as Red Haas, broad and dumpy, swaggers slowly among us, his dirty corduroy
pants going swoosh, swoosh. His arms are folded and he's chewing on his
lower lip, a man on a very serious mission. Finally, Red snaps his wrist
toward our ranks.
"You -- yeah, you in the red cap ... and you,the guy in the blue hat, get
over here ... and you...."
Red pairs off the chosen ones far a game. As usual, Red's going to catch
for one of the teams, as the cleanup batter and, of course, manager.
Some of the kids who didn't get picked stick around, looking all pouty; but
most of them go over to the diamonds where the people who hang out at Big
Rec all the time are watching the older players. The only grownup watching
us is Red's mother. She keeps yelling, like she always does. "Norman," she
hollers -- Norman, tbat's what she calls Red --"smack it good!"
* * *
Red made up for the lack of spectators at his game by getting us some
attention in the local newspapers. The city's four daily papers regularly
carried extensive coverage of sandlot and semi-pro baseball, based mainly on
reports from team managers, and Red called the papers after every game.
That almost always resulted in at least a box score, with Red invariably
listed as having gotten three, four, sometimes five hits.
Our names all there in a row, one after another, each of us with his own
position in the field and place in the batting order, each with a specified
number of times at bat, and hits, and runs scored, each with a record of his
own -- those box scores, the neat little columns of statistics, gave each of
us a history and an identity, and gave a sense of order and precision to the
games that was never evident on the field.
We'd lurch at pitches over our heads or down at our ankles, or far to the
right or far to the left of the satchel that served as home plate; we'd dash
toward a base -- a shirt or coat laid on the grass -- and find it had blown
away; we'd stumble and sometimes fall as we chased after batted balls, lucky
if we caught half of them, luckier still if we threw out a runner in less
than two bounces to first base.
But when we saw the box scores in the papers, we knew we had been real
players in a real baseball game like at Seals Stadium. We were somebody.
Copyright © Dick Meister