Changes

Sometimes you know. And, sometimes you don’t know. But, in either case, it happens, sometimes suddenly. Things change. And, they’re never, ever the same again. They might be better. They might be worse. But, what they’ll never be is the same.

Sometimes you know. The last day of a school year in grade school, for example, we knew. Not that we were thinking about it much, especially those of the male persuasion. The only thing we were thinking about that day was how quickly the clock could move so that we could race out the doors and start our summer. But, we also knew something was ending. Oh, we’d be back at dear old South Central the next fall (which seemed as far away at that point as the day the sun would supernova and melt the Earth) and our routine would be pretty similar. But, not the same. Different grade. Different room. Maybe a different subject or two. And, most importantly, different teacher.

How teachers handle that, I have no idea. And, by that…well. Let me explain. I didn’t think of this back then. Again, we were concerned with moving on. We wanted to get on with our summer and then move on to our next school year. Yeah, we’d miss our teacher (most of them, anyway), but, we weren’t thinking much about it. Or about the fact that it was different for the teacher.

My nephews played rec football. Early in his career, the older of the two was on a team that, frankly, wasn’t very good. But. He had fun and he learned football, and that was because of his coach, who was a fantastic teacher. I was at the team’s final game and noticed, one last time, the way the coach interacted with the kids. It was clear he had great affection for them, and, they for him. Not long after that game, they team had its banquet. I was told later that the coach was in tears. And, I understood why. It was the end. All those boys he’d become so close to during a late summer and fall of football would be moving on next year. They wouldn’t be his team anymore. Something was over. And, he was going to miss it.

That’s when I realized what our teachers, especially the ones in elementary school, had to feel like at the end of a school year. They weren’t losing one person from their daily lives, but a room of 25 or 30 people, people they’d spent the better part of a year with every day, people they’d watched do some growing and some learning and some maturing. There’d be more of that, but the teacher wouldn’t be around to see it. Oh, I’m sure there were a few of us those teachers didn’t miss too much (and there were a few teachers, like one I mentioned earlier, who didn’t miss anyone because they couldn’t have cared less about any of us), but, bonds were fashioned. And, all of a sudden, those bonds were broken. We were going.

Next year, those teachers would have a new group of kids, and the bonding would take place again. Through the fall and into the holiday season, through winter and into spring. And, then summer would come and it would happen all over again. Another group gone. I have no idea how teachers handle it. None. But, I digress.

Sometimes you know and sometimes you don’t. At the end of our elementary school days, we knew. We’d been told by all our older friends what junior high was like. Changing classes every period. “Home room is just a place to keep your books.” No more parties. Etc. Etc. Of course, those older friends made it out to be worse than it was, but it was definitely a change and a big one, far bigger than the ones we made moving on to high school. Far smaller than those we made when high school ended, when all of the familiar would be gone. Everything you’d gotten used to for 13 years, well over two thirds of your life, had come to an end. What came next was different for all of us, but for each and every one of us it was different, period. Again, though, we knew.

It’s the ones you don’t know that get you. You’ve all seen the meme. “One day you and your friends went out to play for the last time. And, you didn’t even know it.” No. We did not. We did not know when we were playing the last of our myriad whiffle ball games (another blog). We did not know when we were playing the last of our thousands of football games (also another blog). We did not know when we were playing our last table hockey tournament (yes, another blog). We didn’t know. It was the last time, but we didn’t know.

Thing is, unless you know, you don’t know, so you always assume there will be another one. Maybe not fifty more. Maybe not a hundred. But, at least one more, right? Surely, we’d all get together over in Cecil for one more afternoon playing basketball on the outdoor courts. Surely, we’d all sit down either at someone’s house, on their porch, or on the storm sewer cover and have one more euchre or poker marathon. Surely. Better we didn’t know. Because “used to” happens. And, when it does, a page turns to a new “we always” or “we like to”.

The best example, perhaps, is holidays. We all remember holidays as kids. I can remember how big a deal my birthday was and how I was amazed that many adults didn’t make a big deal of theirs. Hallowe’ens when we trick-or-treated changed to Hallowe’ens when we went and soaped windows (Hey, if you’ve been here before, you know we were miscreants.) and then Hallowe’ens when we went to parties and then adult Hallowe’ens. And, it all happened suddenly. All of a sudden, we were too cool to trick-or-treat (which, perhaps, is better than continuing to trick-or-treat until you’re too old to trick-or-treat, but still). All of a sudden, we weren’t hanging out soaping windows that night. Instead, some of us had better things to do. It all just stopped. And, again, we didn’t know it was the last one.

The most jarring of changes, though, involves Christmas. Everyone’s first “set” of Christmases are the most special, the ones where you still believe in Santa and all the magic. And, that last year, well. You still believe. And, the next year, you don’t. And Christmas has changed forever. But, it will change again. In my case (and, I’m sure, in the cases of the vast majority of you), there have been several “sets” of Christmases. All have been wonderful in their own way. All are great to look back on. And, all but the present “set” are gone forever. And, I have no idea when that present “set”, which is pretty great, will come to an end. In fact, it’s possible it already has.

And that not knowing , obviously, is the point of all of this. Sometimes we know. But, so often, we don’t know. Nothing is more clichéd than saying “We need to be more appreciative of what we have”, but we need to be more appreciative of what we have. Because, it can change in a moment, and we very well may not see it coming. Christmas could change forever. Your life could change forever. In a finger snap. Changed. For good and all. And, that’s how it goes. And , once the change happens, nothing is ever the same again. Oh, things may be similar. But, the same? No. Not the same.

Be present. Enjoy today. Because, someday, this will be “used to be”. And, you’re going to miss this.

A Guy You Never Heard Of

You may know where Allegheny Cemetery is. Heck, you may have even visited the place. It’s a pretty, wooded, hillside facility in Lawrenceville, and it has some history. It’s the sixth-oldest rural cemetery in the United States. (And, to be clear, a “rural cemetery” doesn’t have to be in a rural area. It’s defined as a cemetery that uses landscaping in a park-like setting and also called a “garden cemetery”. It’s distinct from the kinds of cemeteries that existed before the 19^th Century, usually small, sectarian plots in cities under control of a church. But, I digress.)

Allegheny Cemetery was incorporated in 1844, just 13 years after the very first rural cemetery in the U.S., Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, so, as you might imagine, there are lots of old graves in the place, and, among the oldest are those of soldiers who fought in the French and Indian War. (Their graves were moved from Trinity Cathedral.) Lots of other notables are amidst the more than 124, 000 people interred at Allegheny Cemetery. Beano Cook is there. So is John Baptiste Ford, founder of PPG Industries and Ford City, PA. Joseph Horne, founder of the department store chain is there as well. With Thomas Mellon, founder of Mellon Bank. The most famous residents of Allegheny Cemetery, though, are two men who couldn’t have been more different.

One is Henry K. Thaw. Thaw, heir to a multi-million dollar fortune and also mentally unstable, committed one of the most famous murders in the country’s history. On June 26, 1905, on the roof of Madison Square Garden, Thaw shot famed architect Stanford White to death as a result of a relationship White had had with Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit, when the latter was 16 years old. Thaw was tried twice for the murder. One trial ended in a hung jury (and goes down in history as the first trial in the U.S. in which a jury was sequestered). At the end of the second, Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity, meaning he was never punished for his misdeeds.

The other man in question was born poor in Georgia. His father moved the family to Pittsburgh when he was 12. By age 16, he was doing what he did best…and, what he might have done better than any man who ever lived. Playing baseball. But. Being born black in 1911 meant that Josh Gibson never got to play Major League Baseball, since the Major Leagues were segregated for his entire life. Gibson was regarded by many as the best player in the Negro Leagues for much of his career, and that included his final two seasons, 1945 and 1946, while he was battling the effects of the brain tumor that eventually killed him. In January, 1947, Gibson died in Pittsburgh. Less than three months later, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. By then, however, Gibson was a resident of the pretty Lawrenceville hillside occupied by Allegheny Cemetery, punished his entire life simply for not being white.

There are lots of other folks with some degree of fame at Allegheny Cemetery. If you read even an extensive list of those, however, you won’t likely find the name of Sihugo “Si” Green. But, Green, believe it or not, played an outsized role in the history of one of American’s biggest sports leagues, the NBA.

Sihugo Green was born in New York City on August 20, 1933, and his connection with Pittsburgh didn’t begin until college. He chose to enroll at Duquesne University, then a college basketball power. And, Green was a heck of a player for some very good Dukes teams. With the talent the New York native had, there wasn’t any question that he’d be an early NBA draft choice…even in the pint-sized NBA of the time. Because, the NBA of 1956 was a far cry from the 30-team behemoth the league is today. The current NBA features teams from coast to coast and, of course, in Canada. The 1955-56 version of the NBA had only eight teams and not one of them played south or west of St. Louis. Oh, and while some big cities like St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York were represented, the rest of the league’s teams sat in Minneapolis, Syracuse, Rochester, and Ft. Wayne. In fact, six of the ten most populous cities in the country, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Washington didn’t have teams. And, as, basically, a Northeastern and Upper Midwestern league, the NBA had no national profile and was a poor fifth among team sports in the country, trailing college basketball, professional and college football, and, by leaps and bounds, the dominant sport in the country, baseball.

So, this was the league into which Sihugo Green, a two-time All American, was about to be drafted. Of course, Green wasn’t the only college senior that NBA teams were excited about adding to their rosters. Nor was he the most talented or most decorated. That would have been one William Felton Russell of the University of San Francisco. Russell, upon graduation, was, by any measure, the greatest college basketball player of all time. He’d lead USF to 55 consecutive wins and two consecutive national championships. He was also named national player of the year for two consecutive years. There was no question that Russell was the most talented player in the draft. And, the team that had the first pick in that draft was the Rochester Royals.

The Royals, however, were about to make what might very well be the biggest draft mistake of all time in any sport. The team wanted an outside shooter, but, more importantly, didn’t want to pay the $25,000 bonus Russell was asking for. Sensing a chance to steal a great player, Red Auerbach, the coach of the Celtics, approached Rochester officials and offered to get ownership the Ice Capades to do a show in Rochester if the team didn’t draft Russell. Rochester took the ice show and Sihugo Green. And changed the course of the NBA forever.

Boston, after a huge draft day trade, ended up with Russell and went from a team that finished a few games over .500 the year before and flamed out in the first round of the playoffs to the team that would win eleven of the next thirteen NBA Championships. And, that could have been Rochester. Really.

See, the Royals had the worst record in the league in 1955-56, but the team was not without talent. It had two Hall of Famers, Jack Twyman and the guy who was likely the greatest power forward of all time, Maurice Stokes. (Stokes, by the by, was born in Rankin and attended Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh.) Now. Add Russell. Three Hall of Famers. And, it gets better. Rochester had the number one pick again in 1957. With Green entrenched at guard and “Hot Rod” Hundley at the top of everyone’s draft board, Rochester traded the pick. Now. I know what you’re thinking. With Russell, Rochester wouldn’t have had the top pick. Correct. It would have been picking later in the round…and, without Green on the roster, would have been looking for a guard and had a shot at another Hall of Famer, Sam Jones, who went last in the round. OK. FOUR Hall of Famers. And, with both Russell and Jones not in Boston? Dynasty.

Now, you could argue that the number of Hall of Famers would have dropped to three after Stokes’ career ended prematurely due to a brain injury suffered when he hit his head off the court in March, 1958, an injury exacerbated by a plane flight a few days later. (Tragically, Stokes ended up permanently paralyzed and Twyman, his close friend, became his legal guardian and cared for him for the rest of his life.) But. That number of Royals Hall of Famers would have quickly returned to four.

The team was losing money in Rochester, a small market, and ownership knew it needed to move to a bigger city if it wanted to compete with the likes of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The owners moved the team to Cincinnati in April, 1957 and kept the Royals nickname. And, being in Cincinnati meant that the team had the rights to use territorial picks on players coming out of the University of Cincinnati. In 1960, three-time college player of the year Oscar Robertson, who’d attended Cincinnati, made himself eligible for the NBA draft. The Royals took him. And, at that point, the team’s line up could have included Twyman, Jones, Robertson, and Russell. And, by 1963, another Hall of Famer, Jerry Lucas.

Now. If you’re going to argue that there’s no guarantee, even with lineups that star-studded, that Rochester/Cincinnati would have won 11 titles in 13 years like Boston did, well. You’re right. There certainly isn’t. What isn’t arguable is that the Royals, not the Celtics (who, again, would have been without Jones and Russell, the latter by far their most important player), would have been the NBA’s second great dynasty (after George Mikan’s Minneapolis Lakers, another team with a Western Pennsylvania connection…it was coached by John Kundla, who was born in Star Junction, Fayette County in 1916. Kundla lived to be 101 years old, passing on in 2017.)

As it was, the Royals got better with Robertson and Lucas, but could never match the Celtics. They won no titles in Cincinnati, and, by 1972, with both players traded (and Robertson winning NBA titles in Milwaukee), the struggling team moved again, this time to Kansas City. That’s where it changed its name to the “Kings” (to avoid confusion with the Kansas City Royals baseball team). Originally billed as the Kansas City-Omaha Kings (since the team initially played half its home games in Omaha), the franchise stayed in Kansas City until 1985. It won no titles there and was eventually driven out of town by competition for the winter spots dollar from the Kansas City Comets…an indoor soccer team. (Not kidding.)

From Kansas City, the franchise moved west again, this time to Sacramento, where it remains today. Where it has, like in Kansas City, won  no championships. In fact, since that day in 1956 when the Royals took an ice show and Sihugo Green instead of Bill Russell, the franchise has won exactly zero championships. The Celtics have won seventeen. Oh. And, when the team arrived in Sacramento, its head coach was a guy named Phil Johnson. Johnson was fired by the team (for the second time), midway through the 1986-87 season. An interim coach (Jerry Reynolds) held down the job until Kings management could decide on a permanent replacement for Johnson. The guy they eventually picked, 32 years too late, was one William Felton Russell.

As for Sihugo Green, he played only 33 games for the Royals, 13 in his rookie season, 1956-57, and then, after missing the next season due to military service, 20 more in 1958-59 before being traded to St. Louis. Green ended up playing nine seasons in the NBA with four teams and averaging 9.2 points per game. On October 4, 1980, Green, at the much-too-young age of 47, passed on from cancer, and went to join Gibson and the others on that Lawrenceville hillside, forever the answer to the trivia question, “Which former NBA player was drafted ahead of Bill Russell.”

Forever Blowing Bubbles

Baseball cards and collecting same is a subject we’ve touched on a few other times, but, not this week. No, this week, we’re talking about bubble gum and baseball, including the bubble gum that came in the packs of Topps baseball cards we all collected back in the old neighborhood.

But, before we go any further, let me stress that we collected the cards and not that nasty gum. I can still remember what would happen any time a bunch of us went down to the corner store and bought some cards. Sometimes, we’d open them right away, but, usually, we’d walk back to whichever house was our “base” for the day, sit down on the porch or in the yard, and begin opening. First, the packaging would be tossed aside, and, then we’d begin looking at the cards. And, half way through the first pack, you’d hit that piece of pink bubble gum. And, toss it onto the packaging.

Pack after pack was opened that way. And, when we were finished, we’d each have a pile of cards (and, usually, immediately commence trading), and a pile of wrappers and gum. The cards eventually went into pockets and home with us the next time we went to our own respective domiciles. The gum and wrappers? Right in the nearest trash receptacle.

Now, this isn’t to say no one ever chewed the gum. Folks did. But, not very often. Because, to paraphrase Chuck Noll’s opinion of one of his players, the gum’s problems were great and they were many. First, unlike just about any other kind of chewing gum you might find, the gum inside the baseball card packs was hard. Sometimes diamond hard. If you put one of those sticks in your mouth and began chewing the wrong way, you could end up with blood soaking your bubble gum. And, if you never chewed any of that gum, I am not exaggerating. Because, more than one member of the gang cut his gums or the inside of his mouth with said gum. More often, though, the stick would simply disintegrate as you began to chew, breaking into about twenty little pieces in your mouth. (In fact, sometimes it was in twenty little pieces in the pack.)

Thus, there was a method to chewing the baseball card gum. (Though, again, the best method for dealing with it was trashing it right along with the packaging.) You put it on your tongue and let it sit there, softening in your saliva. Then, when it started to have the consistency of, you know, non-nasty gum, you could start chewing, carefully, softening as you went.

Eventually, the gum would get soft, and then something else would happen that only happened with baseball card gum. You’d start rooting for the gum to lose its flavor. Because, that flavor can best be described as dirt laced with toe funk. So, while we hated when our Wrigley’s would lose its flavor (to the point where Mom would refuse to keep giving us more sticks, since we’d want to throw out the old one and start chewing a new one as soon as that happened), nobody hated it when that pink abomination became flavorless.

But, while few of us chewed the baseball card gum, most of us chewed gum and did so a lot, especially when we were playing whiffle ball (a subject for another day). Because, we always wanted to be just like our big league heroes when we were playing, up to and including imitating their batting stances and quirks like Willie Stargell windmilling his bat. And, since most big leaguers chewed in those days, so did we, even though many of them, of course, were chewing tobacco. Since we were far too young for that, we stuck to gum. (A few of the gang did graduate to tobacco in their high school years. The rest of us, seeing just how gross that was, stuck to the gum. I, myself, went right on chewing gum until college…when I joined the radio station and realized you couldn’t chew gum and talk on the air at the same time. The gum habit left right then and never returned. But. I digress…)

No matter if it was the decent gum or the nasty baseball card gum, if we were chewing gum, we eventually got around to blowing bubbles. As you might expect, some of us were better at this than others. And, if you’ve read anything about the old gang, you’ll know that the folks who fell into the “others” category got ruthlessly abused for it. “Hey, look! ___ is trying to blow a bubble! Maybe you should go get some soap and a wand like a little kid!” “Give it up, ____ the only way you’re going to blow a bubble is to fart in the tub!” And, showing exactly the level of non-Nobel-winning genius you were dealing with here, more than one of us made those jokes about a guy who was holding a bat! But, again, I digress.

We blew bubbles. Some of us did it well. Some of us did it poorly. I did it poorly. Despite the fact that Dad, who tried to teach me more than once, was a pro at it. In fact, he was so good, he could have entered a contest. Yeah. I’m going somewhere with this. There was a contest and it involved our Major League Baseball heroes. Seriously.

It all happened back in 1975, when the best baseball team I’ve ever seen, the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds, was dominating the Majors. And it involved that nasty gum we used to get in the baseball card packs. See the Bazooka Gum Company was a subsidiary of Topps, the guys who, in those days, dominated the trading card game. And, yes, it was stale, nasty Bazooka gum that sat in the middle of our packs of baseball cards. (To be fair, other versions of Bazooka gum were better…but not great, though they did come wrapped in little comic strips featuring Bazooka Joe, who, shall we say, was never going to rival Charlie Brown or anything.)

Bazooka, looking to sell more gum, approached Major League Baseball with a promotional opportunity…a bubble blowing contest. Enter Joe Garagiola, who, along with his play-by-play duties on NBC’s Major League Baseball Game of the Week, also handled the pre-game show, called “The Baseball World of Joe Garagiola”. As part of said pre-game show, Garagiola hosted “The Bubble Gum Blowing Championships of 1975.”

Players from 22 of the then-24 Major League teams took part, with each of said teams holding their own competition to select a team representative. Said representative then moved into the official “Championships”. And, just who graced Garagiola’s show demonstrating the fine art of bubble blowing? Rick Miller, Mickey Scott, Lee Richard, Eric Raich, Walt “No Neck” Williams, Kurt Bevacqua, Glenn Abbott, Joe Lovitto, Ed Goodson, Jerry Johnson, John Stearns, Mike Sadek, Johnny Oates, Bob Forsch, Rick Rhoden, Doug DeCinces, and Mike Cosgrove among others. Yeah. Not exactly household names. Oh, there were some big stars. Batting champ Bill Madlock, and a quartet of future Hall of Famers, George Brett, Burt Blyleven, Gary Carter, and Johnny Bench. But. None of the Hall of Famers were around when the contest reached its final stages.

The last six entrants were Rhoden, Raich, Cosgrove, Scott, Bevacqua, and Oates. As the contest and the season progressed, Oates won the National League Championship, while Bevacqua won the title of American League Champion. The two would then square off for the title as part of NBC’s pregame coverage of the World Series. Umpire Dick Stello served as the “judge” for the competition, but anyone off the street could have judged the winner of the faceoff. Oates managed a 13-inch bubble. And, yeah, that’s pretty impressive. Now, let’s swing back to the old neighborhood.

We never had a 13-inch bubble. But. It’s possible we might have. Again, lots of bubbles were blown and, if we weren’t in the middle of a game, if we were just sitting around between or after the games blowing bubbles, some of those got pretty big. But. There was a line. It could only get so big before you invited another gang member to reach over and pop it, leaving gum all over your face and, likely, in your hair as well. So, yeah. Nobody tried for 13-inches. Now, back to Johnny Oates.

Oates managed a 13-inch bubble. Bevacqua’s measured (and it was measured with calipers) 18-and-a-half inches! Yeah. Nobody in the neighborhood was getting near that, even if an “on penalty of death” moratorium on bubble popping had been put in place. (Bevacqua later said the key to blowing huge bubbles was not to blow into the bubble but to breathe into it, since the act of blowing uses much more force and weakens the walls of the bubble. Hey. He won the contest. He’s probably right.)

And, um, that was it. The year-long contest featuring 22 teams (Only the Tigers and Pirates did not participate. Rhoden, Madlock, Blyleven, and champion Bevacqua would all wear the black and gold, Bevacqua on two separate occasions, but none of the four was with the team in 1975), was won by a utility infielder most casual fans couldn’t have picked out of a line up. And, there was no “Bubble Blowing Championship of 1976.”

Well. That wasn’t quite it. In 1984, Bevacqua hit a pair of home runs for the San Diego Padres in a World Series the Padres would lose in five games to the Detroit Tigers. Two homers in five games. For a player who, in 972 other Major League games, managed 27. Those World Series homers rank as two of the four highlights of Bevacqua’s career. A third came in 1976, when the utility infielder appeared on Topps Card #564 labeled “Bubble Gum Champ Kurt Bevacqua” that showed him blowing the winning bubble. The fourth highlight, and my favorite, involved LA Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda.

While Bevacqua was in San Diego, where he played the last four seasons of a fifteen year career (and, by the by, it was his second stop in San Diego, the two stretches with the Padres broken up by his second run with the Pirates), Dodgers relief pitcher Tom Niedenfuer was fined for intentionally throwing at and hitting a Padres batter. Bevacqua, clearly referring to Lasorda, said, “They ought to fine that fat little Italian, too. He ordered it.” Prompting a classic Lasorda tirade. “F**ing Bevacqua couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a f***ing boat!” But.  Man, could he blow a bubble.