A Boy for all seasons

(My longtime former employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, ran this today in its Thursday editions. You can subscribe to the print or online versions here. Please do so. Do it because local journalism is important, and it's being gutted these days by hedge-fund jackals. So do your bit in telling them to bleep off.)

Outside our bedroom window the lilacs are blooming again, a splash of lavender and  whiff of perfume. The forsythia is going from yellow to green and the flowering trees from white to green. Their shedding petals dance on the April breeze like benevolent snowflakes.

Spring is at flood tide, in other words. And that means summer waits just offstage.

Which is why it was the right time, maybe, for Carl Erskine to take his leave of us.

He laid down his burden yesterday in the full measure of 97 years, and rarely has a man lived 97 years with more grace and distinction. If he was one of the Boys of Summer made famous by Roger Kahn in his book about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, he was also the living embodiment of a Hoosier gentleman, a man who went off to find fame in the big city and then came back to his hometown of Anderson to find something more enduring.

He grew to a giant's status there not because he had a curveball that made baseball's best hitters fan air when it was right, but because of his lifelong dedication to his son Jimmy, who was born with Down's syndrome. Jimmy got involved in Special Olympics -- the son of an athlete following the family legacy -- and that got Carl involved in Special Olympics, his compulsion to serve influencing both that cause and, of course, baseball.

The man was cursed, and we were blessed, by an almost pathological inability to say no. His phone would ring and off he would go to work some baseball camp or speak at some baseball function, or talk to some reporter about some aspect of his game.

Every so often -- more times than I recall, actually -- that reporter was me. I got to know Carl during my own Anderson days, and I've always counted it one of the more fortunate occurrences of my fortunate life.

You can start with the fact that Carl was one of the finer human beings who ever breathed air, which is why I never hesitated to lean on him for his unmatched perspective on some baseball current event . It wasn't just that the man pitched a dozen years for the Dodgers, or threw two no-hitters, or once struck out 14 Yankees in a World Series game, including Mickey Mantle four times.  It was that he was a ground-floor witness to a seismic period of American history, and remembered it with such clarity.

One example: Erskine was Jackie Robinson's teammate in the early, sometimes ugly, days of baseball's integration, and years later he could remember the room-service carts sitting in the hallway of the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. This was in 1954, and the carts were sitting outside the rooms of Erskine's six black teammates, who were barred from going places Erskine and Duke Snider and the rest of the white Dodgers could simply because of their pigmentation.

They were the days of Whites Only restrooms and drinking fountains and dining establishments and schools; the days of bus boycotts and Emmett Till and President Ike calling out the National Guard to protect the right of a handful of black kids to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.  And of course they were so much more.

Television forever altered both baseball and America while Erskine was confounding batters in musty old Ebbetts Field. He witnessed the expansion of the game first-hand when Walter O'Malley uprooted the Dodgers and took them west to L.A. And he served as the Dodgers player rep years before Curt Flood and free agency and baseball strikes.

Shoot. Even mass transit underwent a transformation during Erskine's time; he began his career riding the trains, and ended it flying the friendly skies. 

"I played in a specific era in the  game," is how Carl put it once. "There were a lot of historic changes that happened in that era -- and baseball always reflects those changes in society."

This was during a time when his phone would ring and it would be a reporter calling or his alma mater Anderson University (nee Anderson College) or another fantasy camp. Or the Dodgers wanting him to come down to Vero Beach for spring training. Or a local high school wanting him to attend the dedication of their new baseball facility. Or ...

Or Dale McMillen inviting him to Mr. Mac Day in the early 1960s, when Wildcat baseball was just getting off the ground in Fort Wayne.

There's a photo from that day hanging in the suite area of Parkview Field now. Mr. Mac is in it. So are Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Bob Feller -- and Carl Erskine.

"I'm cheap and I'm available," Erskine once joked about all the requests he got.

No, Carl. No, that's not it at all.

It's because you were more than just a Boy of Summer. You were, and will always remain, a Boy for all seasons.