By Stuart Mitchner

Midway through the last week of August, in the aftermath of a Democratic National Convention about saving America, baseball fans are looking ahead to the do-or-die last month of the regular season, while the jazz world celebrates Lester Young, born August 27, 1909, and Charlie Parker, born August 29, 1920.

August 28

My father had just turned 40 when he took me to see Stan Musial’s St. Louis Cardinals play Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers on August 28, 1950. This was a big deal since we lived 250 miles east of St. Louis. I took it for granted that my English professor father, who had absolutely no interest in baseball, would write to the Cardinals front office for good seats near the St. Louis dugout; reserve a hotel room; and make the drive at a time when interstate highways were not even a gleam in Eisenhower’s eye. No wonder, since this was the summer of 1950, two years before Ike scored the Republican nomination.

On August 28, 1951, during a week-long road trip devised for a 12-year-old whose fascination with American cities, tall buildings, hotels, and movie theaters exceeded even his passion for baseball, my father took me to a night game between Cleveland and Philadelphia in Cleveland’s vast Memorial Stadium. That both of my first two big-league games happened on August 28 is merely coincidental. What makes the date significant isn’t baseball, it’s my father, who taught Chaucer and English Grammar for Teachers at Indiana University.

As I write, I’m looking at a bound copy of his 248-page dissertation in which he edited (“Englished” is the operative word) a Medieval encyclopedia from the original manuscript. Typed by my mother on a Royal portable with special keys, the volume is open to the title page: “Bartholomaeus Anglicus: De Proprietatibus Rerum: The First Three Books Which Treat of Incorporeal Substances.”

The question I never asked myself until now is how could a scholar who spent years of his life working on a Medieval manuscript possibly sit through two hours-plus of a slow-moving game he knows nothing about and has no interest in? The Cleveland game would have been the severest test of his patience since it was a 1-0 complete game shutout by Early Wynn.

Republican Roots

The big cities road trip of 1951 began when my father picked me up at my Republican grandparents’ home in Topeka, Kansas, where I’d spent the first half of the summer. Our car, a bright blue 1947 Chevy convertible, looked like something out of a Donald Duck comic next to the grandparents’ big, shiny new Packard sedan. My father was fond of the Chevy, which came with a cord under the dash that sent forth a loud wolf whistle when pulled. Five years later when I was entering my senior year in high school, the scholar who edited Bartholomaeus Anglicus brought home a fire-engine-red Buick Special convertible, even though he must have known that my friends and I would take total possession of it on the weekends and especially at night.

If you’re wondering about my father’s taste in cars, not to mention the dissertation, consider where he was coming from: a boyhood of strict piano lessons conducted by his mother, who played the organ at the Methodist church. Besides leading the choir there, my father’s father was a Republican elector who attended the national conventions and whose mother was president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, in her prime the most powerful woman in the state, renowned for having helped Carrie Nation storm the saloons of Wichita. Thus copies of Esquire magazine containing a story by my father had to be hidden from her because it was teeming with liquor ads and racy imagery, and not least because she was the model for the story’s eccentric central character.

The Gashouse Gang

On the long drive to the first game in St. Louis, my father occasionally let me pull the wolf whistle, but only when we were on the open road with no other cars in sight. I still have no idea what he made of the game, which the Cardinals won. I remember him teasing me, rubbing his hands together and saying “Oh boy! Oh boy!” when I told him how excited I was to actually be in Sportsman’s Park, where Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang had played back in the 1930s. He made a polite effort to take me seriously when I described Ducky Medwick’s feats with the bat and the no-holds-barred base-running of Pepper Martin, the “Wild Horse of the Osage.” When I quoted Dizzy Dean’s famous line from his career as a broadcaster (“Al Zarilla slud into third”), the grammarian gave me the anticipated grimace and replayed the family joke about how my mother didn’t know “right base from left base.” Although he understood my excitement when Stan Musial sealed the victory for the Cardinals with a homerun, the mild-mannered professor couldn’t help making embarrassed “down-boy” gestures when I jumped up yelling and hollering along with everyone else.

Watching Early Wynn

The big cities trip a year later, with overnight stops in Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Columbus, was a once in a lifetime father-son event. We went to penny arcades in every city, drove the little car down the rolling highway and played Skee Ball, went to movies, took long walks, bought postcards, went up to the top of skyscrapers, and watched Early Wynn pitch that complete game shutout. For two hours my father sat by my side attending to that 1-0 gem but did he appreciate it? For that matter, did I, given how little I knew about the nuances of the game? At least I could see Wynn as a warrior valiantly holding off the enemy, the high point of the drama being a scary eighth inning (two consecutive doubles), but what about the Medieval scholar sitting next to me who seemed to be reading the game as if the floodlit diamond and emerald green outfield formed the page of an illuminated manuscript like the one he’d labored over years before.

I found a clue on page 175 of the dissertation, about vision, in which “three codeterminous pyramids or cones are formed with the apex of each in the pupil of the eye” and how the third pyramid contains a distinct substance of light by which other bodies are illuminated.” Could it be that my father was contending with the tedium of a shut-out by summoning up memories of the most demanding optical endeavor of his life?

Probably not. Probably it was all about Early Wynn. “Quite a name for a pitcher,” he said. Of course! After all these years I’ve taken “Early Wynn” as much for granted as I have my father. A pitcher named Early Wynn? Nor was it a mere nickname, since Early’s father was also named Early Wynn. And my father would have been well aware that Early was the family name of his WCTU grandmother and, in fact, had been his middle name until he rebelled and changed it to one of his choosing.

Stan the Man

What it all comes down to, really, is that my father drove me to St. Louis, 250 miles and back, so that I could see my idol Stan Musial hit a home run. Right now I’m picturing Stan the Man coiled in the batter’s box, the most picturesque stance in baseball, then the crack of the bat as he uncoils, sending the ball soaring toward deep right and into the right field stands of Sportsman’s Park.

A year ago, Landon Jones, who died at 80 on August 17, admitted in an email that he too was “a lifelong Cardinals fan — which was a certain kind of misery.” After we shared commiserations about the dismal year the 2023 Cardinals were having, he referred me to a passage about Stan Musial, “our Galahad,” in his new book Celebrity Nation (Beacon Press 2023). Having just flashed back to August 28, 1950, what particularly interests me is what he says about Sportsman’s Park, “the brooding, gothic pile of steel on St. Louis’ North Side. As you walked toward it on a dark night, the ballpark loomed like a cathedral, a study in hooded arches.” Jones describes how it was when Musial played and the crowd was white, “with one exception.” As he stood coiled in the batter’s box, “a phalanx of Black faces looked back at him from the right-field pavilion. In those days, Black people were limited first by law and then by custom to sitting only in the right field stands.”

The passage ends with Jones expressing regret that the one time he had a chance to meet Musial, he’d “hesitated to ask him about the ballpark or the integration of baseball teams he had witnessed when Jackie Robinson arrived.” Jones concludes that “the culture feels recycled, mired in the same nostalgia I felt when I met Musial. We’ll need to look elsewhere for people who help us bridge the gap between who we are and who we want to be.”