Why Go on Book Tour?

I recently completed a somewhat grueling book tour for The Pats, a heavily illustrated (200 plus images selected by my collaborator Richard Johnson) but equally comprehensive narrative history (150,000 words) that treats the history of a team and sport as a real subject, rather than writing an extended valentine intended to pander to sycophants. Over the course of about two weeks, I drove some 2,200 miles all over New England, signed nearly 2,000 books in libraries, bookstores and historical societies, did a couple dozen radio interviews and spoke before or met hundreds and hundreds of readers.  It was exhausting – you have to be “on” far more than is comfortable, and soon fall into the same patter at each appearance, even delivering the same laugh lines. There were times, in between sleepovers at Comfort Inns and spare beds in the homes of relatives and friends, that itallrantogether and I occasionally lost track of where I was (Hello, Detroit!).

I am not complaining.  Book tours are sometimes a necessary part of the deal, one that has made the book a regional bestseller behind Michelle Obama, currently wedged between Lin-Manuel Miranda and Nathaniel Philbrick on the hardback nonfiction list. Come Christmas morning, and the book is finally read, I’m reasonably confident it will also enjoy some surprising success outside New England. But the real takeaway, the one I can’t stop thinking about, was a total surprise.

Along the way I made guerilla stops at more than a dozen Barnes and Nobles, offering to sign books, which each was eager to have me do. I stop at the customer service desk, pull out my Sharpie, explain who I am, and, since they’re doing me a favor,  ask that they steer me toward the stacks of my books so I can sign them in place so they don’t have to lug them all over the store. I even offer to place the “signed copy” sticker in the upper corner, telling them “I’m a full service writer.”

In one store in Rhode Island on a Saturday morning, as I sat on the floor at the end of an aisle before a pile of some 40 books, I noticed someone to my side. I turned and saw a young girl about age 10, long brown hair and cute, black-framed, nerd girl glasses, staring at me furtively, serious beyond her years. I smiled, said “Hello,” and explained what I was doing. Then her father, standing nearby, said she wanted to ask me a question.  She looked panicked at first, and looked at him as if to say “Noooo, Dad, don’t…” but I smiled and told her to go ahead, she could ask me anything. I assumed she’d want to know if Tom Brady was my favorite player (he’s not) or what Gronk is really like (I suspect he’s well aware of how lucrative his shtick really is).

Wrong.  She was interested in me. I was something she’d never seen before, but dreamed of.  I was an “author” with a book in a bookstore, and it didn’t matter what it was about.

She set aside her shyness, looked down at me, her eyes peeking out over the top of her glasses and asked a question I suspect has been keeping her up at night and occupying her ten-year old dreams for quite some time.

“How can I become an author?”

This is a question both easy to answer and hard to explain, but I did my best, and for the next ten minutes we had an increasingly breezy conversation as I first told her to ReadReadRead  EverythingEverythingEverything, and she asked more questions of me, and I of her, and I told her she reminded me of me, and soon I was making her laugh, and she told me she had just finished the “million word reading challenge” at her school, and I told her I hadn’t read that much at age ten, that she was WAY ahead of me, and that even though this book is about sports, I write about all sorts of other things, that I studied poetry in college, and that I even have a book that looks like it will be made into a move (Young Woman & the Sea, a biography of Trudy Ederle) and I even whispered the name of the famous actress who will play her, and told her she had to promise not to tell anyone because it was a big, big secret, which it is. 

So by the end she wasn’t shy and was laughing and bubbly and talking a mile a minute and her eyes were shining behind those nerd girl glasses and then I could see it click: authors weren’t “other” people to her anymore, faceless names on the spine of a book, as far away as Mars. They were someone who, when they were ten years old, was a lot like her.

I wrote another book, sure, but sitting on the floor of that bookstore, I’m pretty sure I helped make another writer.

And that makes it all worthwhile.

 

The Pats: An Illustrated History of the New England Patriots, Text by Glenn Stout with Illustrations curated by Richard Johnson, is available at booksellers everywhere, with signed copies at store all over New England.

 

The Other Team

(originally appeared in Boston baseball July 2018)

 

Has a women ever hit a ball over the Green Monster? 

Someone asked me that the other day, and I had to say “I have no idea.”  As far as I can tell, the answer is “No,” but I think it’s high time someone receive that opportunity (You’re welcome, Sox PR Department. Think that would raise some money for charity and get some attention???). The Coors-sponsored, all-female Colorado Silver Bullets did play at Fenway in 1994 and had the opportunity, but were shut out 6-0 by the Boston Park League All-Stars. But as Linda Pizzuti takes on an ownership stake, it got me thinking that women have not been widely recognized for their role in the history of this team.

Oh, they’re there.  In fact they’ve been here all along.  Here’s just a start:

Lizzie Murphy didn’t play for the Red Sox, but she is likely the first woman known to play in Fenway Park, appearing in a charity All-Star game in 1922, playing first base and helping her team beat the Red Sox 3-2.  Credited by some as the first professional woman ballplayer, Murphy, a Rhode Islander, had a long career playing semi-pro ball throughout New England.

Isabella Stewart Gardiner was one of Boston’s grand dames, a philanthropist and art collector who smoked cigarettes, drove too fast and didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.  After husband Jack died in 1898, Gardiner beat the Red Sox to the Fenway by nine years, building the house-turned-museum that bears her name.  She also became a frequent and very recognizable visitor to both the Huntington Avenue Grounds and Fenway Park. After the Sox won the 1912 World Series, she created a scandal when she attended a Symphony Hall concert wearing ''a white band around her head and on it the words, 'Oh you Red Sox' in red letters.''

Marie Brenner made history in 1979, covering the Red Sox for the Boston Herald, the first woman to do so on a regular basis. Given the assignment by editor Don Forst to take an “anthropological approach” to her task and told “For God’s sake, don’t write about the game,” Brenner fulfilled her assignment, capturing the “25 cabs” atmosphere of the club as well as any male reporter at the time. Her 1980 Esquire story “Confessions of a Rookie in Pearls,” appears in my Red Sox anthology “Impossible Dreams.”

Lib Dooley taught Phys. Ed. and Health in Boston city schools for nearly four decades and was mainstay in the box seats at Fenway Park for 55 years, watching more than 4,000 games. A self-described “friend of the Red Sox,” she passed out cookies and candies to her favorite players.  Her father was famously a member of Nuf Ced McGreevey’s Royal Rooters and Dooley herself was a member of the BoSox club. She was also known to be a special friend of Ted Williams.

Speaking of Ted, he’s the reason I’ve chosen to include only one player’s wife, Ted’s first partner, Doris Soule. In January of 1954 she filed for divorce, alleging among other things that Ted had struck her.  When the couple failed to settle over the next year, Ted decided to retire from baseball after the 1954 season rather than share a new contract with his Ex. Two days after the divorce became final, on May 13, 1955, Ted unretired and signed a contract for $98,000, stiffing Doris out of the new contract and the Red Sox out of a month of play. All because of money.  I wonder if this story will make that “American Masters” documentary that’s in the works?

Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, aka “The Spaceman” always credited his aunt, Annabelle Lee, of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, with teaching him how to pitch.  She played seven years in the AAGPBL, even twirling a perfect game. A self-described “junkball pitcher,” Ms. Lee was not, however, responsible for teaching her nephew the infamous eephus pitch that Tony Perez sent into orbit in the 1975 World Series.

Elaine Weddington Steward was a pioneer in several capacities. Named Boston’s assistant GM in 1990, primarily performing legal and contract work, at the time Steward was first black woman and only the second minority to hold an executive position of any kind in major league baseball, something that is both hard to believe today, and well, not so hard to believe. She now serves as an attorney for MLB.

Jean Yawkey is one of only a handful of women to own a major league team, taking over the Red Sox after her husband died in 1975. While the Sox mostly remained competitive for much of her tenure, she made the same mistake her husband did, turning over most day-to-day management of the team to others, namely men like Heywood Sullivan and John Harrington.

Ms. Pizzuti, take note: Maybe she should have done it herself.

Glenn Stout’s next book with Richard Johnson, The PATS: An Illustrated History, is due out in November. See glennstout.net. He is also the author of  Young Woman & the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World, soon to be a major motion picture.

WIFFLE RULES

 

Originally appeared in Boston Baseball, August 2018

 

This is the way it was.

When I was little –four or five years old – our spare, bare backyard in Ohio was pancake flat and empty.  My dad would pitch a Wiffle ball, I would hit. If it reached the big pile of dirt at the back edge of the yard, leftover from some garden project, well, that was a home run, and so were a lot of other lesser hits as I ran the bases, slipping on vinyl-covered foam bases that didn’t last a summer.

One spring that changed.  My dad planted three silver maples in the backyard, twiggy little slips only a few feet high, held in place and marked by a stake to make sure he didn’t mow them down and I didn’t snap them off at the ground running through the yard.

They grew quickly and in a year or two were sapling height, as big around as my then-thin wrist. And over a summer… they gained names.  The tree at the side of the yard, almost at the edge of the property, became first base.  The tree in the middle became second base and the last tree, not nearly as far away as first base to leave room for the clothesline, became third.  And suddenly the back yard was a ballpark, the always worn spot in front of the steps a muddy or dusty home plate.

As the trees grew, the branches served as outfielders, snagging flies and knocking down line drives, at least until the limbs of second and third began to touch and merge with each other, meaning that if I pulled the ball, I was either out or the ball was lost, caught in some crook that left me crying.

Ah, but right field.  Right field was free, wide open, first and second so far apart they would never touch. By the time I hit Little League I was already an opposite field hitter, my swing hard-wired to shoot the gap, a place with no shade.

I got bigger, stronger and older, and a kid moved in two doors down who loved baseball almost as much as I did. We started pitching to each other and the field shrank.  We stopped using Wiffle bats to save our swings and switched to wood bats, wrapping the ball with electricians tape to mend the inevitable cracks.

Then one day we flipped the field.  First base became home, second became first, third base second, and that bare spot by the steps third.  But we grew bored with running – we wanted to hit – and recruited ghost men as baserunners.

The rules evolved.  If we caught a fly or fielded a ground ball clean before it made it past the greener grass that marked the leach field,  that was an out.  But if it found the ground or stopped in the grass past a line that stretched from first to third, it was a single.  Past second was a double, past the clothesline a triple, and over the clothesline, Hosannah! A home run!

Hanging from one end, near the house in left, a bucket full of clothespins, and a shot at immortality: an automatic grand slam.

But now right field was closed off by the tangle of branches. The real game now lived in left field, the house a not so much a Green Monster but white vinyl sided one, with an asphalt shingled roof.  Line drives could smack off the wall like Fenway, but if the ball landed on our roof, it rolled and gave the pitcher a chance.

After landing on the roof it would bounce and roll and we’d run under the eaves, Yaz-like, guessing where the ball might drop down, blind to the ball  to where it would fall. It was as if a ball hit over the Monster could bounce back and still be in play. In our left field potential doubles, triples even potential home runs all had to find the ground to count, disasters saved by diving snags. On our field, if Bucky Dent’s home run wouldn’t have made it over the crest of the roof, it could have rolled back and been caught for an out. F-7. And that bucket of clothespins? I hit that target once, a grand slam walk off.  Game over. My friend Chris, pitching to me, turned around and walked across the yard to his house without a word, Ralph Branca to my Bobby Thomson. I can see it still.

But Chris is gone now, long dead,  buried in his uniform, and this spring we finally sold the old house. In think those trees have either been cut down or trimmed now, memories lost in splinters and sawdust, I guess. I’m not quite sure.

I can’t go back, not yet. But I can go on. Next week my old friend Anthony and his wife Raquel are visiting with their son, Louie, five years old and all about baseball.

I got the bat and brand new Wiffle ball already. Time to make another backyard into a ballfield.

 

Glenn Stout’s next book, with Richard Johnson, is The Pats: An Illustrated History of the New England Patriots, available in November. For more see glennstout.net.

STREET JUSTICE

 

 

Personally, I always thought “Yawkey Way” was unintentionally appropriate, referring to the way of Tom Yawkey failed to lead the Red Sox to a championship in his 44 seasons as owner. That way remained in place for more than two championship-barren decades even after his death and “Yawkey Way” was always a kind of grim reminder of that.

But that’s over now, so I’m fine with Jersey Street. The most discussed address in recent memory pre-dates Fenway Park by some 25 years, to 1887, when the name was first proposed to the Laying Out Department of the City of Boston. At the time, the Fenway neighborhood was little more than mud and a few lines scratched out on paper by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead. 

All this got me thinking.  Why “Jersey Street” anyway?  Or for that matter, why Lansdowne or Van Ness or Ipswich (which was what that stretch of road that is now Van Ness was once called)? Although I’ve been going to Fenway Park for almost forty years, I knew almost nothing about how the surrounding streets got their names… or even much about how the decision came about to rename a portion of Jersey Street after Yawkey.

Brookline Avenue is a gimme, as that was simply the name of the road that connected Boston to Brookline. The rest is more complicated.

The filling of the Fenway, which was completed by about 1900, was an extension of the earlier filling of the Back Bay, which turned tidal mud flats into developable land. The architect behind the Back Bay, Arthur Gilman, was eager to give the former swamp an aura of class, so he named each cross street after an English Lord. This explains the alphabetic pattern which begins with Arlington and ends with Hereford. 

Olmstead, the Fenway architect, took his cue from Gilman and decided to continue the alphabetic pattern of the Back Bay cross streets honoring English lords. Hence the naming of Ipswich, Jersey, Kilmarnock (originally Kenyon) and Lansdowne Streets. 

Specifically, Lansdowne was named after the Marquis of Lansdowne, a peerage held by the held by the head of the Petty-FitzMaurice family. Jersey Street memorialized the Earl of Jersey, a title held by the Child-Villiers family.  

Yet another powerful family, the Boston Globe Taylors, owners of the Red Sox, bought the land for Fenway Park in 1911, and the parcel was originally bounded by Brookline Ave., Lansdowne, Jersey and Ipswich Streets. Ballpark construction necessitated an extension of Ipswich Street to border the park to the south, but club president John I. Taylor balked at naming the extension Ipswich Street.  In 1906, during a trip to Europe, he had met and later married Cornelia Van Ness of San Francisco, a high society girl whose family had roots in Vermont. Ever the romantic, John I. named the extension Van Ness Street after his bride, thus breaking the stranglehold of British Lords. A year later, when Fenway Park opened in 1912, the official address of the new ball club became 24 Jersey Street.

And so it stayed until Tom Yawkey, who bought the team in 1933, died on July 9, 1976. A short time later a Boston City Councilman, variously reported as either Christopher Ianella or Fred Langone, proposed the name change.  It was passed by the nine-member council unanimously and was in effect by the time the Red Sox opened the 1977 season. The clubs official address became 4 Yawkey Way, the #4 numeral likely a subtle homage to Joe Cronin, a Yawkey favorite.

It was not controversial at the time, but it’s also important to note that despite the fact that Boston was 25% black and Hispanic in 1976/77, the city council was all-white.  Louise Day Hicks, the Southie attorney known for her staunch opposition to desegregation, served as council president in 1976 and remained on the council in 1977. In fact, she was at her political peak, having recently founded an organization known as ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights), which advocated organized resistance to busing. They not only held mass marches, but pelted school buses from black neighborhoods arriving in white neighborhoods and burned a wooden school bus in effigy.

Pretty subtle, huh?

This is not to suggest that Tom Yawkey was in any way responsible for that, but it does indicate that the initial name change took place with no input or consideration whatsoever from Boston’s minority communities. 

And isn’t that the lasting lesson of all this? Only the rich and powerful, like John I. Taylor and Frederick Law Olmstead, the City Council or John Henry get to name the streets. And only the rich and powerful, like the Earl of Jersey, the Marquis of Lansdowne, Cornelia Van Ness or Tom Yawkey, get to have streets named after them.

That’s the way of this world.

Glenn Stout’s next book, with Richard Johnson, will appear in November. The Pats: An Illustrated History of the Patriots will be the first complete narrative history of the team. For more see www.glennstout.net