Lefty, page 4
3.
“PICK A SPOT, MAKE A DIAMOND”
While flying and music became Vernon Gomez’s passions, baseball would be his life.
“No car, no phone, no money … and if the battery ran down in the radio, no news,” Lefty observed. “The kids played the one game in town. Baseball. America’s pastime for barefoot boys.”
“Vernon had a burning desire to be a big league pitcher, even in grammar school,” his friend Harry Lakeman recalled. “Just one of those things you’re born with. He stood across the street pitching to the center of a tire he had hung on a rope in front of the Gomezes’ buggy shed. Hour after hour, day after day, he practiced his location. His fastball exploded right through the center of the tire, boring a hole in the buggy shed door. His brothers gave him hell for that.”
There was no organized baseball for young boys in those days, so they made do. “We all started out playing sandlot,” said Lefty. “Get a ball, a bat, a couple of kids … girls and boys gathered all over Rodeo to choose up sides.” The lack of regulation and the absence of adults allowed Vernon to immerse himself in baseball for the sheer joy of it. “Sandlot ball was a bunch of kids working out a relationship amongst themselves. No one coached us from the sidelines. If a player whiffed at the plate, his parents didn’t care, and the family mutt still wagged his tail. The player bounced back through his own desire to excel.”
The players made the rules. “With twenty kids in the lineup, the games weren’t limited to nine innings. We played till we went home or someone called for you and you had to go home. You forgot about lunch, sometimes even dinner. Two kids from down the road, Ditty Shearer and her brother Tokus, played outfield until way after sundown. Most nights, their mother was out on the foul lines waving a wooden spoon over her head. ‘Come home for supper or I’ll hang your guts on the clothesline.’ ”
Little concern was given to equipment or facilities. “Pick a spot, make a diamond. We walked down into the raw land in bib overalls, a hoe in one hand, a rake in the other. If there were rocks to cart away, someone ran home for a wheelbarrow. Empty land, open spaces. Home run territory. No floor-to-ceiling windows to break. The town was a big backyard to play in … a nice setup for growin’‑up kids.”
Anyone who wanted to play could. No one was cut out and no one was better than anyone else. “Fair play was a given. Try being a wise guy. You were pounded by your own teammates. They broke from the bench like the zing of a slingshot.”
As with the chores at home, everyone pitched in. “Once we cut the dust from the infield with a bucket of spring water, home plate was somebody’s mother’s roasting pan turned upside down. We got rid of the cow plop, unless of course it was stiff and dry, hardened by the sun. Then we used the cow patties for bases.” On the few occasions there was no dry cow manure to be had, the kids snuck off with their parents’ burlap sacks.
The games did feature one means of establishing hierarchy. “We always had one ball and one bat. The kid who owned the ball played any position he wanted. The kid who owned the bat played any position except the one chosen by the kid who owned the ball.”
Balls received special treatment. “If the ball was brand-new, we covered it with black tape. We knocked the tape off the ball seven or eight times, until it was worn-out. Then we still had the original horsehide cover. It’s a wonder anyone had an arm left after throwing that heavy ball all day. A home run meant the ball was lost. The game was stopped while both sides ran out and found it.”
Vernon always wanted to be a pitcher. His skill at keeping the hitters from parking the ball where no one could find it made him a natural for the position. When a hitter with power was hunched over the home plate roasting pan, “even my own teammates yelled, ‘Gomez, strike him out.’ ”
Gloves were a luxury. Some lucky kids had them, but most wrapped strips of leather around their fingers and across their palms. Some, like Vernon, played bare-handed.
He finally got his first glove not from his parents but from a resident old-timer named Norman Kuhn, a first baseman who had knocked around the minors, never getting any higher than a brief stint in the Pacific Coast League. Retired and with time on his hands, Kuhn took to watching the kids scuffle at sandlot ball. He picked out Vernon, even at this early age, as a player with potential. But he noticed the boy’s palms were raw and bleeding from stopping line drives. Kuhn brought his own glove to the sandlot and tossed it to the kid. It was a first baseman’s mitt, a prized remembrance of the glory days of Kuhn’s youth. “You should’ve seen the smile on Gomez that day,” recalled Taft Prairo, a childhood friend. “Now he had a glove. It was the wrong type for pitching, but it was that or no glove at all.”
The commitment of a lifetime had begun. “To play baseball hour after hour, day after day. Thousands and thousands of innings. That’s all we cared about. Then, as we became teenagers, the boys graduated from sandlot to the town team. The thousands of innings became the regulation nine.”
Lefty’s siblings realized the passion their kid brother felt for the game and helped where they could. “My brother Lloyd loved baseball and had a good glove as a catcher. He said my fastball was my ticket to the Seals and he was going to help me make the team. When I was ten and he was twenty, he set up daily practice sessions. After our chores were done, we walked out into the pasture behind Pa’s milking barn and I pitched to Lloyd crouched down in the tall grass.” Lloyd could be hard as well. One day, during a sandlot game Lloyd was catching, Vernon got hit in the ribs by a pitch. He went down and began to cry. Lloyd yelled to stop crying and get back in the game. Vernon was later found to have two cracked ribs.1
The other Gomez siblings helped out as well. “My brothers didn’t play baseball. They never had the luxury of spare time, something I was born to as baby of the family. In school and out, they held down regular jobs in addition to buckarooing at Claeys’s and farming the Gomez land. When drought turned our crops to dust or flooding caused rot, they challenged the elements once more. Always once more. And it goes without saying, Ma and Pa worked till they couldn’t stand up, every single day. So sure, I had chores to do, but my brothers and sisters were always around to lend me a hand, and once my chores were done, I could run off to the sandlot.”
The one member of the family who did not take to Vernon’s infatuation with baseball was his father. Coyote had been denied an education and it stung him every minute of his life. Lefty never forgot watching him, seated at the kitchen table, the gas lamps casting shadows on the grammar-school primer open in front of him while Lizzie laboriously tried to teach him to read. Coyote implored for his children to do better, and Vernon was to go to college and become an electrical engineer.
What was more, for a man who toiled as long and hard as Coyote did, playing a kid’s game wasn’t an honest day’s work. He didn’t talk about baseball and didn’t want to hear about it on the days when he was home from Franklin Canyon.
One Saturday night, when Lefty was about twelve, Coyote was sitting in on a poker game at the saloon. Lefty was there watching and recounted the incident. “ ‘Eeeyah,’ a cowpoke shouted, tossing a whiskey down. ‘That kid of yours torches the plate. Vernon oughta go for a Seals tryout.’ Suddenly, across the table, there’s an icy stare from pale blue eyes on a face sun-blazed as saddle leather. Coyote Gomez, the original curmudgeon when it came to baseball.”
Coyote’s antipathy was not without justification. Most professional baseball players traveled from town to town, staying in hotels and cutting a swath through both the local liquor supply and the women. Impeccably behaved Christy Mathewson of the Giants was referred to as “The Christian Gentleman,” as if that distinction was unique among his fellows.
Jack McDonald, who began with the San Francisco Call-Bulletin in 1926 and wrote about Bay Area sports for forty years, saw many situations like this one arise between parents and children. “Many of the parents were first-generation immigrants and wanted their sons to pursue a career through education. College was the ideal, but at least high school and then a trade where a boy could make a steady income. Baseball wasn’t considered a wise career choice—one blaze of glory on the eastern diamonds and then to return home a broken-down bum. Ballplayers were looked on as roughnecks, a hard-bitten crew. Many of the ballplayers had contributed to this reputation. Not all, but many.”
Lefty’s Yankee teammate and close friend Frank Crosetti related an incident that occurred when he and Lefty were with the Seals that epitomized what kids were up against in trying to convince their parents that baseball was an upstanding way to make a living.
“We were staying at the old Imperial Hotel in Portland. I was in a room with Lefty and Jerry Donovan on the second floor that had a little balcony that looked out over the street below. So we’re in the lobby, getting ready to go to the ballpark, when one of the veterans says to me, ‘What room are you in?’ It was that rowdy bunch … Dick Moudy, Ollie Mitchell, and Junk Walters. ‘I think we’re in room 200,’ I say. Then Junk asks me, ‘Can we use your room?’
“ ‘I’m only a kid of seventeen, and I don’t know what to do, so I gave him the key. Then Moudy asks me, ‘Do you have a pair of tweezers?’ I didn’t even know what a pair of tweezers was in those days. After a while, Lefty, Jerry, and I say to one another, ‘Let’s go and see what they’re doing in our room.’ There were six players in there and I see one of them is holding a nickel with a tweezers and another is heating it up with a cigarette lighter. Lefty, Jerry, and I are watching them wide-eyed. We don’t know what they’re up to. Then the guy holding the nickel goes out onto the balcony and I’m right behind him, lookin’ to see what’s gonna happen. He drops the hot nickel and it goes plink, plink, plink on the sidewalk below. I’m leaning over the balcony and I see someone come by, pick the nickel up and boy, he dropped it like a hot potato.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ I was that kind of a kid. I’d die if trouble came and something happened to me. Then I look across the street and see a policeman and he’s looking right at us. I run back inside and say, ‘Lefty. Jerry. We better get the hell out of here.’ After the game, we’re back in the lobby and I hear the manager, Nick Williams, and he’s mad, talkin’ to Junk Walters. ‘You better get yourself an extra shirt, Junk, because you’ll probably have to stay in jail six months.’ We soon found out that after we left, they dropped some more hot nickels down on the sidewalk, and one hit a woman on top of her head. She went to pick it off and burned her fingers. She ran and got an attorney. So the players have to pay the attorney fees and buy the woman a new hat. Fifteen bucks. A few days go by. Then the veterans corner Lefty, Jerry, and me. One of them asks, ‘Were you in that room at any time we was there?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘we were there.’ ‘Well, if you was there, give us six dollars.’ We’re rookies and have no say. So for the few minutes Lefty, Jerry, and I were in our own room, we had to cough up six dollars and we had nothing to do with it.”
As the years went by, the more immersed Vernon became in the game, the more resistant Coyote became to his becoming a ballplayer. Coyote was pure gristle, but his son matched him. It would be a source of pain to them both, but neither would back down. Coyote seemed to have forgotten that chasing a dream was something he had done himself, and that his father had been no more pleased about it than he was about Vernon.
1 Lloyd’s toughness had been steeped in war. He had recently returned from France, where he had been a motorcycle messenger and had taken to racing his Excelsior bike through the town, “weaving in and out of the Model As on their way to the Rodeo–Vallejo ferry docked at the pier,” as Lefty described it. Once, just as the ferry pulled away from the dock, “Lloyd and his Excelsior flew through the air, landing with a thud on the boat, scaring the passengers out of a year’s growth.”
4.
“I’D GO ANYWHERE TO PITCH”
For Lefty, the next step up from pickup games was the rodeo town team. He began in 1922, when he was thirteen.
“Sandlotters wore sneakers,” Lefty later said, “but there were no sneakers on the town team. We were big-time. We wore the traditional baseball shoe … kangaroo calfskin tops with steel spikes on the sole. Mine were special-order, size thirteen.”
Special-order shoes meant special-order money—which he gave to Al Erle, the area’s only sporting goods salesman. “For the love of kangaroo spikes and nine bucks in the hole,” Lefty said, “I hired out to the Union Oil refinery. My job was to clean the ponds around the crude oil stills. I sloshed around in the stuff, pushing a stringy mop, for thirty-eight cents an hour. The soles of my work shoes fell off and the leather toes curled up like Egyptian slippers. Three days later, I grabbed my spike money and split. How many ballplayers can run the bases without feet?”1
And the Rodeo team would be properly clothed. When he heard the boys couldn’t afford uniforms, S. J. Claeys bailed them out by advancing the money—and he purchased them, of course, from Al Erle. The uniforms were pinstripe flannels with rodeo across the front. But SJ hadn’t gained his station in life through charity; the team had to pay him back. They organized a benefit at the town hall at which they raffled off a slew of donated items, fifty cents a ticket—quilts, aprons, afghans, elderberry jam, baked beans, and sweet breads—with entertainment provided by that famous local band, the Syncopats.
“We opened up with ‘Barnyard Blues,’ ” said Lefty. “Town hall was filled with the honks, squeaks, and earsplitting blast of our brass section. The band’s signature was the fact that we finished a song together. There were a helluva lot of clunkers in between.”
Town teams and industrial league teams were the backbone of baseball in the early 1920s, where virtually every young player got started on the road to the minor leagues and, they all hoped, eventually the majors. And the towns supported the teams with the sort of passion currently reserved for high-school football in places such as Texas. “Men got into heated discussions down at the barbershops,” Lefty recalled. “All the thrilling moments of last Sunday’s game were recounted … the shoestring catches, the stolen bases, the last strikeout with the winning run on third. Baseball tapped into the kids’ spirits and the spirit of the towns.”
Moral support, however, was all the players got from townsfolk. “Rodeo’s fabulous nine pulled their flannels on at home. Then we walked the railroad tracks to the town ball fields … past cornfields and grazing cows and clapboard houses with shady porches. You had to love the game to hike so far to play nine innings.”
In the ad hoc world of town team baseball, Vernon, since he was possessed of a first baseman’s glove, was initially assigned to play first base and Pokey Grisham, originally slated for first, was put on the mound. Vernon raised a squawk but was told by Taft Prairo, the shortstop, “This here is the Rodeo town team, and we play it like the big leagues.”
But big league pitchers could actually get batters out and Pokey Grisham could not. Rodeo’s fabulous nine lost one game after another. Lefty seethed. “He jumped out of the cradle wantin’ to win,” Taft Prairo observed. Vernon got so mad one day that he ran to the mound and grabbed the ball, only to be shunted back to first by Prairo.
As the losing streak lengthened, the seeds of rebellion were sown. “The team’s buzzing around my head like a swarm of angry hornets,” said Prairo. “They told me to hell with the big leagues, to put Gomez on the hill. I wasn’t dumb … I could see my days at short were numbered. ‘Gomez,’ I yelled, tossin’ him the ball, ‘stick to pitchin’.’ We won after that.”
While the fortunes of the local team occupied much of the conversation, another topic, alcohol, was always close to the lips of Rodeo’s adult community.
Prohibition came to Rodeo in a big way. The West Coast was crawling with both federal agents and bootleggers, and sleepy bay towns such as Rodeo became favored stopovers for smugglers on the run. “The action took place down on the bay,” Lefty recounted. “Canadian ships stood three miles offshore, carrying a cargo of liquor packed in boxes pasted with shoe advertisements. Rodeo’s thirteen saloon keepers unloaded the ‘shoes’ onto the beach, then hauled them up the steep bluffs to town. If the men dropped a box, they wept.”
Rodeo and other small towns on the bay were often a better market for the bootleggers than San Francisco, where enforcement tended to be more robust. Not that Rodeo was immune to some hot pursuit. “With the feds hot on their trail, the bootleggers hid out where nothing earth-shattering happened,” Lefty recounted. “In Rodeo, they cooled their heels and their passions at the local bordello. Karen’s Kalico Kittens danced round the cathouse in rhinestone-studded satins and served Jackass Brandy to the love-hungry crowd—160-proof alcohol sweetened with apricot nectar. A half dozen jolts and you got a free snake. That’s when the floozies raked in the dough.
“Occasionally a bootlegger arrested by the feds turned stoolie and fingered our little community. Getting wind of the sting, Rodeo barmen stashed the rotgut under the floorboards of Mrs. Woods’s ice-cream parlor. Cowboys rode the brass rails at saloons, sipping sarsaparilla.”
To supplement the imports, many families made their own. “Pa’s foot juice was red wine, no bouquet, no vintage. During the crush, my sister Gladys and I jumped on grapes in a dank, windowless shack.” But purple feet could be dangerous. “When the feds came to town, they frisked and cuffed anyone who looked suspicious. Those days, Gladys and I made ourselves scarce down by the old swimming hole. We were wine-purple clear up to our belly buttons.”
The gangsters occasionally ventured out into the town. “I made the mistake of running home and telling Ma I saw a gun-twirling thug at Cardoza’s barbershop,” Lefty lamented. “A week later, she sat me down on a kitchen stool, put a bowl upside down over my mop, and with blunt shears hacked whatever lay between the rim and my ears.” He further observed, “It doesn’t pay to pass the time of day with your ma.”
