Looking for Tige

I thought his name was “Tide.” A dog named “Tide” didn’t make any sense to me, but I was only nine years old and I didn’t know any other word that sounded like “Tide.”

I’d never heard a name like “Tige.” So “Tide” it was.

And what was he doing in the shoe?

Every Saturday morning at 11:30 I turned on the radio in the sun parlor, lay down on the bed that served as the sofa, and listened to "Smilin' Ed's Buster Brown Gang."

The show opened with a short dog bark: “Arf,” and then a small boy’s excited voice: “Hey, kids. It’s the Buster Brown Show!”

For me, the program was memorable because of the “characters” that Smilin’ Ed McConnell featured each week. My favorite was Froggy the Gremlin who, true to his name, spoke with a croaky voice. There was a cat named Midnight who meowed in response to Smilin’ Ed’s questions. And there was Ed himself, who bubbled with enthusiasm and had an infectious laugh that set off hysterical laughter and screaming among the kids in his studio audience.

Froggy was invisible—apparently that was a characteristic of Gremlins—but Ed could get him to “appear” by instructing Froggy to “Pluck your magic twanger.” I did not know what a “twanger” was, but the sound effect that followed Froggy’s action in response to Ed’s request convinced me that a twanger must be a huge, tightly stretched rubber band. Imagination was a big factor in “seeing” what was happening in a radio show.

Smilin’ Ed read an adventure story each program, usually set in the jungles of India. I no longer remember any of these stories. What does remain though, I suppose because it was repeated throughout the show, and then week after week, was the commercial for the sponsor: Buster Brown Shoes. Whatever the commercial message was, it was always introduced in the same way, in the voice of a young boy.

“That’s my dog, Tige; He lives  in a shoe.

I’m Buster Brown. Look for me in there too.”

Buster Brown did not appear as a character in the radio show. By the 1940s he was just a name on a shoe, and a cartoon-like caricature in some of the display ads in the stores. Tige was usually next to him.

                

         

Buster Brown began as a character in a newspaper comic strip in 1902. Later, the rights to his name were bought by a shoe company, and the shoes were named for him. Even later, but still long before Smilin’ Ed’s show, Buster Brown appeared in short movies in the Twenties. So there was a real Tige. He was “played” by an American Pit Bull Terrier, the same dog that appeared in later films as “Petey” or “Pete the Pup” in the Our Gang comedies— the dog with the ring around one eye.

As I said, I converted Tige to the only word I knew that sounded the same: Tide.

I didn’t think a lot about why a dog would have a name like Tide (much less Tige). What interested me, what aroused my curiosity, was what was a dog doing in somebody’s shoe? I had Buster Brown shoes. I couldn’t see any dog in them. Was he invisible, like Froggy?

There was a way to find out. The shoe store on Liberty Heights Avenue, Wyman’s—the one that carried Buster Brown shoes—had a fluoroscope machine. It was, in fact, an X-ray machine. Its purpose was to permit the shoe salesman to demonstrate how well the shoe fit.

 

The Fluoroscope

Here’s how it worked. After selecting a pair of shoes, your mother and you accompanied the salesman to the machine. You stepped up onto a low platform and slid your feet into a slot cut out of the bottom of the machine. At eye level (for a child) there was an opening that you could look into. The salesman pushed a button, and suddenly you saw the outline of the shoes, within which were the bones of your feet. You knew it was your feet because you could wiggle your toes, and the bones would wiggle back at you. And it was all in a foggy green glow. The machine was designed in such a way that the X-ray beam turned off after about ten or twenty seconds. If your mother was skeptical about the fit, the salesman would give you another shot of X-rays. I don’t recall that anyone thought this might be dangerous. That’s why we figured it would be OK to check out other things in the fluoroscope.

Fortunately, you could not get your head through the slot. Of course, you could not see your own head, since you had to be looking through the viewer at the top. But you could see a friend’s head—if it fit into the slot, and if he were really stupid! I’m pretty sure some of my friends were dumb enough to stick their heads in; happily their heads were too large.

You could get a hand in the slot. Again, not your own if you wanted to see it. But you could get a friend to stick his hand in when a salesman was not keeping an eye on the machine. Hand bones were not very interesting, so you only did this once.

If you go back today and read the old Buster Brown comic strips from a hundred years ago, you quickly learn that Buster was a mischievous boy. He had very bad judgment. Tige tried to exercise some control over him, to be a good influence, but how much could a dog (even a Pit Bull) do? I guess that’s why we got mischievous ideas in the Buster Brown shoe store.

A few doors down from Wyman’s Shoes was McCrory’s Five and Dime store. You could buy a turtle, about the size of a small hamburger, for about ten cents. We had the idea that we could place a turtle through the foot slot and turn on the machine and watch it crawl around. We developed an elaborate plan.

If one of the girls in our class were there with her Mom, trying on shoes, we would wait for an opportune moment. When it appeared that they were ready to step up onto the fluoroscope, one of us would insert a turtle through the slot. As the trio looked through the viewers to admire the “fit,” and as the turtle began to crawl about her feet, the girl would begin screaming. The salesman would jerk his head up and look toward the front door, but all he would see would be our backs as we raced out onto Liberty Heights Avenue and dashed down to the corner of Garrison Boulevard, where we would catch the streetcar that would take us safely home.

We thought about that idea through most of the summer, mostly arguing about who would place the turtle in the slot. When summer finally came to an end, so did our plan. We never carried it out. I guess Tige was a better influence over us than we imagined he could be.

Mathematics Lesson

Decimal Equivalents of Fractions

1/16 = 0.0625

I’m guessing that I learned about the decimal equivalents of fractions in the fifth or sixth grade. I know that I knew some of the simple decimal equivalents by then. I’m sure we started with the easy ones: the fraction ½ is equivalent to the decimal 0.5, and ¼ is equal to 0.25. We then passed on to more complex ideas. For example, 1/3 does not have a simple decimal equivalent. It is equal to 0.33333… and the threes go on forever.

There is one decimal equivalent burned into my memory in the summer of 1949 and carried in there to this day:

1/16 = 0.0625.

I was good at numbers. That’s how I got to be the “scorer” on our baseball team. This was summer vacation in Baltimore. The local schools had teams in leagues at the various playgrounds, and our neighborhood had a team in the 12-14 division, that being the age range of the players. The scorer was responsible for keeping the detailed record of each game, the results of each player’s “at-bats,” and the accumulated statistics for the season—primarily our batting averages and homeruns.

I was a better scorer than a player. At the end of each game I would sit in the dirt with my notebook and pencil, lean against the chain-link backstop behind home plate, and bring the “stats” up to date. Each week a new column would reflect my teammates’ progress.  In our second game of the season Jimmy Crossman got two hits in three at-bats, so he went from 3 for 5 (3/5=0.600) after our first game to 5 for 8 (0.625). The following week: just 1 for 4 and down his averaged plunged to 6 for 12 or 0.500. Still—a respectable batting average.

Of course we didn’t report or speak of our averages as decimals. Jimmy was “batting 500,” not “zero point five oh oh.” That same summer, real ballplayers had much lower averages. We would read The Sporting News each week to find that Jackie Robinson was batting 340. Not as good as Jimmy, but we figured Jackie faced tougher pitchers (Harry Brecheen of the St. Louis Cardinals) than Jimmy did (Ed Scoglin of the All Saints Blue Rockets.)

My stats were easier to figure, but harder to brag about. Or even mention. As the season progressed I went from 0 for 3 (0.000) the first game to 0 for 6 (0.000) after two games to 0 for 10 (still 0.000) after the third. I sat out a few games in July. I wasn’t officially “benched” since we had no bench—we just kneeled in the dirt on our side of the field, waiting for our turns at bat and calling encouragement to each teammate as he came to the plate. And I kept score.

So there I was, in the middle of August, coming to bat in the eighth inning with a continuous string of zeroes after fifteen at bats. Not that I hadn’t gotten on base. In the five games that I had played to that point, I had walked five times. As the shortest player on the field, I had a pretty small strike zone. If I just left my bat on my shoulder I could draw a walk. Our coach begged me not to swing, but what was the point of standing at the plate if you didn’t take a shot at it? (ANSWER: It was the only way I would get on base.)

I walked up to the “plate.”

There was no plate, actually. We just scratched an outline of home plate in the dirt. In view of my lack of success to that point in the season, I was not anxious to face this pitcher, or any other, so I stalled for time. I knocked the dirt out of my cleats. There wasn’t much dirt there. The dirt was between the bases. I rarely had occasion to run the bases.

The “ump,” somebody’s older brother, said “Batter up!”

I took a practice swing and stepped up to the plate. The pitcher was smirking. The first pitch was high. I swung at it anyway. I always had hopes that the pitcher would hit my bat, and I knew that would not happen if I did not swing frequently.

“Strike One!”

I stepped back and adjusted my cap. It was late afternoon, toward the end of summer, and the sun was low enough to be in my face. I squinted, looked down the line toward the third base “coach,” who was just one of my teammates prepared for the unlikely event that I would get on base and need his advice.

I blinked, and saw my father standing on the sideline. This was the first time he had come to see me play. He must have gotten away from work early. I was not happy that he was there. It was bad enough that I embarrassed myself in front of my teammates; actually I was used to it, and the other players regarded me as a good sport. The embarrassment was in my head, not in theirs.

But now my father would see how poor a player I was.

The ump muttered, “Batter up.”

The next pitch hit the dirt about three feet in front of the plate. I swung anyway.

“Strike two!”

My teammates were shouting encouragement.

  

 

Our team, in the Summer of ’49.  I’m in the back row, third from the left.

In the gap between Bobby Jacobs and Ward Dawson.

I think I’m kneeling.

“Good swing!” someone hollered.

It was a good swing. The ball just wasn’t anywhere near my bat. (We were beating the other team by 6 to 2. Encouragement came easily under those conditions.)

I never saw the next pitch. My eyes were closed. I just swung the bat as hard as I could. There was a loud—surprising—“Thwack.”

I opened my eyes and saw the third basemen leap to his right, toward the base, his glove hand extended, as the ball shot past him and landed just inches inside of the foul line. The umpire shouted, “Fair ball!”

That woke me up, and I started running. I rounded first base and I looked out toward left field. The ball was still rolling, well past the left fielder, who had been playing me short, not expecting me to get the ball into the outfield at all. I rounded second base as the fielder retrieved the ball. He turned and threw toward third base. I got to third, panting, just ahead of the throw.

My first hit of the season—a triple!

My teammates were shouting and laughing. I looked over at my father. He had a big grin on his face. He was hollering something, but I didn’t hear it. I didn’t need to.

A triple!

That’s how my season ended. One in sixteen.

0.0625

I rounded it up to 0.063.

My summer of ’49.

I batted “63.”

But it was a triple!

The End of June (and the World)

The End of June (and the World)

June 30, 1946

In honor of the 100^th birthday

of Dr. Abraham Kremen›

born 17 June, 1905

W

hen you are nine years old, new words enter your vocabulary with unexpected power. One such word was “atoll.”  I’m not sure when I first heard the word. Perhaps in school, or possibly in the Movietone News of the Week that played in the theaters each Saturday, separating The Durango Kid from a Three Stooges Comedy. In any event there is no question that the word arose in the context of the exotic geography of the Pacific—the battleground in our war against Japan. For the whole of my eighth year our playground “skirmishes” were marked with cries of “banzai” and “kamikaze” as we imagined ourselves battling for Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

But in my ninth year, in the summer of 1946, the war with Japan was finished—had been for nearly a year—and peace had returned to our lives in Baltimore. For me, the most welcome measure of that peace was the increased frequency with which we could go to Patapsco State Park, nearly an hour by car from our home. On the afternoon of this memory—the last day of June—on the long and hot ride home, I was not at all calm. My mind was not on the forested area that bordered the Patapsco River. It was far away, conjuring as best I could a vision of the Bikini Atoll.

The road out of the park was dusty—clouds of fine brown dirt chased after us as we headed home. We called the car, and all cars, “the machine,” as in “Get in the machine. We’re going to the park.” This machine was Uncle Abe’s big black Oldsmobile. Uncle Abe was special in our extended family. He was married to my father’s sister—my Aunt Leona. My father was one of nine children, and most of my aunts and uncles lived in Baltimore. Family get-togethers were big and boisterous. Everyone was a storyteller, and the tellings were animated with laughter. My cousins and I would sit on the edge of the crowd and pretend we were not listening. Periodically, one of the wives of my father’s brothers would notice us and caution the speaker of the moment: “Not in front of the children.” And of course that got our attention.

But, back to Uncle Abe and the machine. He was special because he was so quiet. More than that, he was educated. HE WAS A DOCTOR! My father was a salesman. Uncle Nathan drove a taxi. Uncle Alec played the horses at Pimlico, although it was rumored that he worked in the clothing business as a cutter. I never did know what Uncle Albert did. Uncle David was an engineer, but no one really knew what that was, so he got no special attention for that. But Uncle Abe was an eye surgeon, and we all held him in special respect.

There was something else about Uncle Abe that was truly singular. He had served with the Army as a surgeon on the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. If the war had not ended the previous summer, he would have gone in with the troops in the invasion of Japan. But he got to come home instead. That was especially important to me that day, because I needed to ask him a question. I knew he would have the answer, because he had been on the island of Tinian, and we all knew that the Enola Gay took off from Tinian bound for Hiroshima.

With one last glance through the rear window at the road receding into the brown dust I turned and called over the tall seatback in front of me.

 “Uncle Abe?”

He looked into the rear view mirror but said nothing.

I asked, “Where’s Bikini Atoll?”

“In the Pacific. North of the Marianas,” came the reply.

“How far away is that?”

Abe answered, “It’s thousands of miles.”

I twisted around, got up on my knees and peered through the dusty rear window again. Abe pursued my silence. “You’re worried about the A-Bomb?”

It was more of a statement than a question. There had been newspaper articles all week. The fourth atomic bomb will be detonated at Bikini Atoll. It was a test, to measure its “effects.” It was not clear to me what effects were going to be measured. But the Baltimore Sun, and the neighborhood kids, were full of speculation. A scientist from Johns Hopkins said it would crack the earth open and all the molten lava would come up. Another predicted that the blast would set the earth’s atmosphere on fire.

Uncle Abe said, “I’ll put the radio on. Maybe they’ll have something about the test.”

As if on cue, an announcer was saying that the detonation of the bomb was just minutes away. No one else in the car seemed much concerned about the prospect of our instant incineration. My cousin Paula sat on one side of me, quietly reading a book. Her brother David was doing the same on my other side. Finally the announcer began a countdown, and at “Zero” we heard…nothing.

“What happened?” I asked.

Abe answered right away. “The bomb site is a few miles from the radio announcer. It takes time for the sound to get that far. And sure enough, there was the sudden crack of an explosion, followed by static for what seemed like a long time.

Again I asked, “What’s happening now?”

Abe simply said, “I don’t know. Maybe the station went off the air.”

Off the air?  Like incinerated?

The car started to feel hot inside. It looked like the dirt was blowing faster—chasing us. I remembered that when you see lightning, you count until you hear the thunder, and from that you could tell how far away the lightning is. I started to count, and I watched as the road receded from the back of the car. The ground hadn’t cracked yet, but I thought the air was beginning to glow red.

The car lurched as we pulled out of the dirt park road and turned onto the highway. Uncle Abe drove faster and the terror diminished slowly as we headed home.

I can still recall the feelings of the over-imaginative little boy. What remains, even stronger, though, is the feeling of safety in the big black Oldsmobile as Uncle Abe took us home.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Abe. Thanks for the ride.

The Enola Gay on Tinian, 1945

Fish in a Jar

It's the first warm Sunday of Spring, and we have all gone to Patapsco State Park, just outside of Baltimore. The grownups unload the "machines," their radiators hissing from the long hot ride. I run off immediately, up the Cascade Trail until I get to the big rock. Its granite surface is wet and cold, despite the heat of the day, and the ground around it is mossy, a bright green coat of fur fed by the water that seeps through the hills above and creeps out from under the huge boulder. I run my hand across a dry patch of the rough surface and scrape the sweat of the ride from my palm, which quickly turns red and alive with an itching sensation.

A sheet of spider silk fans out like a miniature trampoline across a crevice of the rock. I bend closer and peer at the spider that sits patiently in a walled-in corner, at the mouth of the silken funnel that serves as its shelter. One of its spindly legs is extended forward, resting on the surface of the web, waiting for the vibration that will telegraph the news that something alive—food—has fallen into its trap.

A large black ant comes into my view and meanders across the stone surface. It stops suddenly, frozen in place, inches from the edge of the spider's web. I realize that my heart is beating rapidly, and my hand shakes as I reach slowly toward the ant. I place a finger on the rock, behind the ant, and slide it slowly toward the unsuspecting insect. I hold my breath and then quickly flick the ant into the web. With a speed that startles me, the spider leaps out of its lair and pounces on the ant. Within seconds its victim is wrapped in silk, no longer recognizable, and the spider draws the small white package to its face and pierces the silk shroud with its fangs. I slowly relax the tension in my hunched shoulders and look around. I’m alone. No one has seen what I did.

From the rock I follow the trail of the water until it no longer just soaks the ground, but now flows visibly in a narrow channel until it joins the stream. I look downstream, see no one, and take off my shoes and socks. I roll my pants up to my knees and go into the water, not much above my ankles but still, in the water! The wet and the chill excite me. I'm free to be wet—to jump in the water. To splash. To "make a mess." I don't care if I get wet—I want to get wet—but I need to leave time for my pants to dry in the sun before I return to the family.

The water feels so good.

And the rocks under my bare feet—like scratching a year-long itch.

There are fish in the water, just an inch or two long: thin minnows, a single lengthwise stripe black against an olive gray body. I'm going to catch one. I've brought my empty mayonnaise jar with a long string tied around its neck. I place a small piece of bread inside and carefully submerge the jar so that all the air gets out. And then I wait.

I sit patiently on a rock in the stream, and though it rises a few inches above the surface the water splashes over it periodically as the main current parts and swirls around it. After a while I can feel the wet coming through my pants, and then through my underwear. It feels good on my skin, cold and tingly.

I close my eyes and rest my forehead on my knees.

Something nibbles at my toes. I open my eyes and look into the water. A fish swims against the stream, toward the mouth of the jar, and barely pokes its head into the opening. I wait, but it does not enter and when I move my foot it quickly darts away. Two more fish approach and then a tiny one swims inside the jar and begins to pick at the bread. My heart jumps with indecision. Should I pull the jar up and trap this fish, or wait for a larger one? Will a larger one come?

I decide; I pull the string and raise the neck of the jar from the surface of the water. The fish darts frantically within, trapped by the glass walls. I hold the jar to my forehead, and my eyelashes brush against its surface. I've never been this close to a live fish before. I feel as if I am in the water with it. Sunlight reflects from the scales, scintillates as the fish moves about quickly. I watch for a while.

Then a bird cries out from an oak tree nearby. I’m startled, and when I look up I see a bluejay fly from one tree to the next. It hardly has to flap its wings. It glides so smoothly.

I wish I could fly. I wonder what it feels like to be so free.

I lower the jar into the stream and carefully tip the water out so that my captive fish can leave without injury. I return to the family. My aunts are gathered around the picnic tables, laughing and putting food away into containers. My uncles are spilling pots of water onto the embers in the fire pit below the grill, putting out the last of the fire. Helping with the cleanup.

My mother asks where I was. “No place” seems to satisfy her, but only for a moment. “Your pants are wet,” she says. I don’t respond, and she hands me a bag stuffed with garbage—paper plates, watermelon rinds—and nods toward the trashcan closest to our picnic tables. It is a big steel drum, almost as tall as I am, swarming with hornets feasting on the remains of the picnics of the day. I get as close as I dare, about three feet from the can, and hurl the bag toward the opening. I watch to make sure that it goes in, and then I run from the bees that fly up as the trash crashes down on them.

The cars are being readied for the return. The trunks are open, the packaged leftovers, the unopened soda bottles, are being stacked into every available space. I carefully place my empty jar between some bags of potato chips.

I get into the back seat of the car, end up wedged between a cousin and an aunt, and then after the long ride home I go to my room and close the door. I read some comics for a while, and when my mother calls to ask if I want something to eat I say, “No; I don't want anything.”

I just want to be alone with the memory of my day. I think about the ant, and the fish, and the bird, wondering: which one am I?

                                                          

The Candle is Flickering Low

The Candle is Flickering Low

When I think of my childhood summers in Baltimore in the 1940s I remember three things: the oppressive heat, lightning bugs, and the Baltimore Orioles. It seemed like we had all three every night.

After supper, everyone went outside. No one had air conditioning. The grownups dragged folding chairs to the sidewalk or—if they had them—to their front porches, and sat and talked, hoping for an occasional breeze as the evening moved from twilight to darkness. I played games in the street with my friends, usually stickball, until it was too dark to see well.

We had a simple method of defining when it was too dark: when the lightning bugs came out. That usually ended stickball, and set off the next game: capturing the lightning bugs and placing them in jars. When we had enough, or just enough collecting, we screwed the tops onto our jars. The tops had a bunch of holes punched in them, too small for the bugs to get out, but large enough that they could breath. Later, when we had to go inside, we would each put our jar in the refrigerator. In the morning we would take the streetcar over to Johns Hopkins University, to the Biology Lab, where we would be paid a penny a bug for that night’s catch.

We were paid—in cash, of course—by the secretary of the Biology Department who told us that the bugs were part of a research program being carried out by a Dr. McElroy. We never saw him—it didn’t matter—we were interested in the pennies. I did meet him forty years later, when I joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, and he was the Chancellor. I introduced myself to him and told him that this was the second time that he was my “boss.” In response to his quizzical look, I explained that I was one of hundreds of kids in Baltimore who had supplied him with lightning bugs.

Lightning bugs are a pretty dim memory now. It’s not just the memory that’s going—the bugs themselves have all but disappeared. The recollection of another flicker remains though—a candle, and an imaginary one at that. The flame flutters and that visual image creates sounds—names—that dance across my memory.

Howitzer Howie Moss

Fireman Johnnie Podgajny

Sherm Lollar

They were the Baltimore Orioles of 1944. They were the best team in the International League—the gateway to the Major Leagues for most players at that time.

But I’m off the track. It’s the candle. Its creator was the radio announcer for the Orioles: Bill Dyer. In the forties, Dyer managed the Baltimore Bullets professional basketball team. At the same time, he was doing Orioles games on WITH Radio. In the summer, when the Orioles had a game at night, every radio in the neighborhood was on. And on the usually hot and humid nights, the grownups were in their chairs on the sidewalks, or on their porches. The radios were in windows facing the outside, and the men listened to the game. CBS Newsman Charles Osgood says that as a nine year old, he would walk through his Baltimore neighborhood and all the houses had their windows open, the Orioles game was on, and you could walk from place to place and not miss the game.

We didn’t walk. We sat on the steps, cheering the team to victory.

It did not matter to us that the Orioles were not a major league team. They were “our” team—“dem Birds.” And we got to see players a year or two before they “went up” to the Majors. I can still remember the names of the other teams in the International league at that time: the Newark Bears, the Jersey City Giants, the Syracuse Chiefs, the Rochester Redwings and the Buffalo Bisons. And since it was called the International League, there were the two Canadian teams: the Montreal Royals and the Toronto Mapleleafs.

Some nights, the game progressed very slowly. So much so, that when our bedtime came around, the game was only in the seventh or eighth inning. That did not prevent me from hearing the rest of the game, however, because I had a radio at the side of my bed. It was an old Philco model, with a wooden cabinet about two feet tall, and shaped like a bullet. 

I would get in bed, turn out the lights, turn on the radio and listen to Bill Dyer “call” the game. My radio was old, and the reception of the radio signal was not very strong. To compensate for that, the radio had an antenna—a long copper wire that snaked out from the back of the cabinet. Normally, you would attach the free end of the antenna to a nail banged into the wall somewhere near the ceiling of the room. Mom didn’t allow nail banging in my room. But Dad had taught me that I could transform myself into a human antenna. All I had to do was wrap the uninsulated end of the wire around one finger, and I became the radio antenna. I imagined the radio waves channeling through my body. They tingled—or at least I thought I felt something.

Regardless of what I felt, I heard Bill Dyer “calling” the game. He was a master at baseball radio, and especially when the game was not played in Baltimore, but in one of the other International League cities. Years later I learned that when the team played out of town he was not at the field with them. He was in Baltimore, in the WITH radio studio, at the receiving end of a teletype machine. Someone paid by WITH was at the game, say in Buffalo, and he would type the results of each “at bat” as the progressed. For example, he might type: Lollar at bat. Called strike one. Ball one, LOW. Ball two, INSIDE. Swinging strike two. Fly out to deep left field.

These words were transmitted over a telephone connection, and they then appeared in Baltimore, at the WITH studio, typed in a line on a long, continuous ribbon of narrow paper tape that issued from a kind of a typewriter (the receiving end of the teletype machine). With that tape in hand, Dyer would report the action. But his genius lay in how he embellished the bare facts.

What we heard was:

“Lollar steps up to the plate. He knocks the dirt out of his cleats. Here’s the first pitch.” (Dyer’s voice would rise in excitement.) “It’s called a strike! Lollar didn’t like that call very much.” There would be a short pause. “The pitcher takes the signal. Here’s the windup. The pitch. Ball one.”

Dyer had a selection of recorded crowd noises. When appropriate you would hear fans cheering or booing. You could hear someone selling hot dogs in the aisles. And finally, at least for Sherm Lollar that inning:

“The count is two and two. Here’s the pitch. Lollar hits one to deep left field. It may be out of here. Vitelli is racing to the wall. He leaps. He’s got it. Lollar kicks the dirt in disgust. This inning is over for the Birds.”

Baseball radio announcers were known by their voices, but they also had distinctive phrases that they would use for certain actions of the game. For example, if the batter hit a long drive toward the bleachers, one announcer might say “That one’s headed for the pastures!” while another would shout “It’s going, going, GONE! A home run!”

When the Orioles played “at home,” in Baltimore, then Bill Dyer was at the game in the “announcers booth.” This was no more than a crude wooden shack behind home plate, at the top of the stands. There was no window—just a wooden board that was hinged at the top, swung up by a rope, to make an opening through which Dyer watched and called the game.

If the Orioles were behind in the late innings, and would get a man or two on base, the crowd would hope for a few runs to move them ahead. Dyer had a small red wooden chair in the booth. He would lean out through the opening holding the chair in one hand, shake it in the air, and arouse the fans to chant for a rally. The “little red chair” was Dyer’s trademark as an announcer.

For the “away” games, since he was in the WITH studio, he did not have his red chair with him. There was no need for it, since he had no live audience on hand. For those games, Dyer had another method for fomenting a “come from behind” victory for the Orioles. He would announce that it was time for some runs, that the Birds needed a rally, and tell the listeners that he was walking in a circle around his red chair. Of course we could “see” this as we listened to his running commentary on the game. We thought the chair was magic, because every time Dyer performed this ritual of the chair, the Orioles would score several runs and move ahead in the game. It never failed!

Years later, as an adult, I learned that Dyer simply looked at the teletyped summary of the game coming off of the machine, peeked ahead at the section of the game that had already occurred but that he had not yet announced, saw that there was going to be a rally, and then “predicted” it—we thought he made it happen—for his excited radio fans.

And what if the Orioles were not able to come from behind and win the game? Then Dyer primed us for the loss. In dramatic, somber, tones he prepared us for the end of the game and its sad outcome.

“It doesn’t look good for the Birds tonight, folks. The candle is flickering low.”

To a young boy alone in bed in the dark, the room lit only by the dull orange glow from the station dial on the front of the radio, the image of the failing, flickering candle was very strong.

“The candle is flickering low.”

And when it was extinguished for the night, when the game had ended with disappointment, I unwrapped the copper wire from my “antenna finger,” turned off the radio, and went to sleep.

Oakford at War

Oakford at War

We knew about the war. We were old enough to read and make some sense out of the newspaper. The comic books were certainly full of it—at least the ones I read.

 The radio serials—Hop Harrigan, Captain Midnight, and even Tom Mix—simply incorporated the war into the neighborhood, the city, the ranch. My friends and I chased each other with toy pistols, making guttural gun noises (not BANG! like our little brothers did) and arguing and fighting about whether we were shot. When it rained we sat on each other's porches and built models of P47 Thunderbolts and P38 Lightnings, stretching the delicate thin tissue paper over fragile balsa wood ribs. Our tongues tripped uncomfortably and self-consciously over words like dihedral angle and bulkhead. 

We were able to identify enemy aircraft from the silhouette sheets included in the model kits.  Our vocabularies expanded to even more uncomfortable words. We knew the German divebomber, the Junkers Stuka; the Japanese fighter plane, the Mitsubishi Zero—the “Zeke.”

 

Messerscmitt ME 109

Junkers JU 87 “Stuka”

Mitsubishi Zero

Each of our homes had "blackout" shades, ours on the big windows in our sun parlor that faced Oakford Avenue, and every few weeks there was an air raid practice. I asked my father why the shades were green if they were for "blackout." He taught me the word "opaque." Sometimes the air raid practice would come after I had gone to bed, and I would lie there wondering if the plane flying over our house was a Messerschmitt ME 109. I looked at the empty bed next to mine. My big brother was in the Army Air Force. I could draw a Boeing B17 without looking at a picture.

The war movies and the newsreels filled us with the images and sounds of bombing raids, and of men running—half-crouched—through woods and fields. Some of these men were our fathers, or our uncles, or our older brothers. We could never recognize their faces on the screen. Everything was too grainy, too fast, too scary. We talked about the war in school, on the playground, at Cub Scouts. But we learned to avoid “war talk” around Johnny Frazier—at least for a while—after his father's submarine disappeared in the Pacific.

Playing at war didn't seem quite substantial enough to me. There was no blood. We fell to the ground, clutching our stomachs, shouting lines heard at the movies, but making sure not to scrape our faces in the dirt. And then, in June and July of 1945, in that last summer of the war, we learned to become authentic—methodical—killers. We destroyed the Japanese in our own version of the War of the Roses.

I lived in an apartment building. Sylvan Richter lived across the alley, on Ridgewood Avenue. His house had a porch, and a long yard to the street. And all along the pavement to the front steps, Sylvan's mother grew roses.

The roses were also victims of the Japanese. Japanese beetles wearing iridescent purple and brown armor had invaded Baltimore, chewing holes in the leaves and petals of every rose bush that lined the walks to our homes. And we fought back.

The beetle traps were metal cans, painted a bright yellow or green, hung from hooks at the tops of long metal rods staked into the dirt at the foot of each bush. We didn't know what was inside the cans—just that it was "poison" and we were not to touch it. Of course we did touch it. And smell it!

 A strange odor emanated from the cans—a mix of gasoline and sweet perfume. The beetles were attracted to the aroma, and they entered the traps through holes that ringed the top of each can. In the morning we would look into the bottom of the trap and see a mass of drowned, poisoned beetles. What satisfaction—we were winning the war. But for some of us it was too passive a victory. We were not content on the sidelines, counting the kill. We went on the attack.

We were capable of such cruelty. Did the war do that to us? I don't think so. It was the recognition, at a gut level, that we had no control over our lives.  We were eight and nine years old, but we knew that someone—something—was pulling our strings and we flopped helplessly at the ends.

It was easy to capture a Japanese beetle. There were two methods. With care, you could pick a beetle off of a leaf between your thumb and forefinger, gripping it by its sides. It was a delicate task. If your grasp was off just a bit, the beetle was able to turn sideways and grab on to your finger. Beetle legs were clawed and strong. You could not separate the beetle easily from its hold on the ridges of your fingerprints. There were two choices at that point. One was to transfer the beetle into the palm of your other hand and keep it trapped within a loose fist. This could lead, after a while, to a handful of scrabbling beetles, tickling and squirming to break free.

The alternative was to take the single beetle, still between two fingers, and throw it onto the cement pavement—to disable it. This was rarely successful. If the beetle's grip were strong enough it would not be flung easily to the ground. Instead, it would be released from between our fingers at a much-reduced speed, and it would fly away before it reached the walkway.

We honed our skills through the spring and into the hot Baltimore summer. We learned that the beetles were lethargic early in the morning. We belted our holsters to our waists and crept through the jungles of the neighborhood. We met under the wooden back porch of 4008 Oakford Avenue and compared prisoners.

The beetles were transferred to small cardboard cartons—usually the boxes that our mother's kitchen matches came in. In answer to the periodic question—why are all the wooden matches loose in the sink drawer?—we just shrugged without even looking up from our comic books. The beetles scrabbled, agitated, within their prison, and we prepared our "flame-throwers."

Our garages, our basements, were virtual arsenals in the war against the beetles. We had access to paint thinner, lighter fluid, gasoline—if it burned we brought it. In small quantities so that it wouldn't be missed. The boxes containing the "prisoners of war" were placed in a pile and we sat, usually three or four of us, cross-legged, surrounding them. We couldn't stand; the headroom under the porch was no more than three feet, and in places much less. If we stood we were at risk of hitting our heads on the support rafters of the porch, or worse. The underside of the wooden decking was the breeding ground for huge black and gray spiders. They sat in dusty webs waiting for ants, bees, roaches...and small boys playing at war.

We soaked the boxes with the flammable liquids. The intensity of the scrabbling rose to an easily heard frantic scratching. One of us, assigned as a lookout, gave the "all clear" signal. No mother was on the porch above. We opened our matchbooks. We did not close the cover before striking. Flaming matches were tossed into the middle of our circle. With a low "woof" the flammable vapor exploded and the small containers began to burn. We shouted obscenities at the "Japs" and elbowed each other. We were doing our job.

I don't know what the others felt, but I was scared—there was a scrabbling inside my stomach, as if a beetle was in there, clawing to get out. Our outward reactions were varied. We shared the need to be quiet so that we would not attract attention from above, but the excitement of the moment usually overtook us. I remember making bombing noises as I tossed matches into the fire. Sylvan always whined like the siren that announced the air raid practices.

 Johnny Frazier never made a sound; he stared at the pile of destruction until the last flame went out. 

And we glanced at him quickly and then away, and recorded in lasting memory his silence, and though we were just boys we understood that he was the only one among us who knew what the war was all about.