The Baseball Whisperer Page 5
Sometimes the three of them would walk five miles to the bridge at Shambaugh and back. They had nothing better to do. They spent time drinking, committing petty crimes like stealing melons, thinking about girls. Merl had a volcanic temper and got into more than his share of fights. World War II had ended and the Eisenhower Era had begun. While rural America was just starting to hum with smaller factories and larger farms, Merl was not enjoying the easygoing times of American Graffiti. His future seemed not just bleak, but blank. There were some small factory jobs in town, but most of them required a high school education. He did more menial work. His parents’ divorce had driven him from Clarinda, but his parents came to realize it would ultimately be a better place for him. Returning to Clarinda was a move that may well have saved his life.
Merl James Eberly was born in a tar-paper shack just west of Clarinda on May 13, 1935, in the crush of the Depression. The price of corn had fallen in some places to just 8¢ or 10¢ a bushel. The countryside sometimes smelled like popcorn as many families put corn rather than coal in their stoves because it was cheaper. Only about one in ten farm homes in Iowa had electricity or indoor plumbing. Saturday baths, the only baths of the week, were a family ritual in preparation for Sunday church services.
Before the Depression, most people in Iowa wouldn’t have thought of going on welfare. Newspapers used to publish the names of those on assistance as a form of public shaming. When faced with starving families, however, proud men signed up and took the aid. For many others, the weight of financial hardship was unbearable. There were incidents of mob violence at courthouses, with angry farmers protesting foreclosure proceedings. In LeMars, a mob dragged a judge from the bench, pummeled him, and threatened to lynch him. The civil disorder in rural Iowa was far greater than at any time in the 1960s. The depth of anger and despair among farmers could be seen throughout the state.
State officials tried to maintain some sense of normalcy, like holding the annual Iowa State Fair, which, in 1935, also held the first statewide amateur baseball tournament. And on the day Merl was born, the Senate Finance Committee in Washington, DC, approved President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal for a program called Social Security to help relieve poverty in old age. FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) programs were delivering some jobs and work, with an average paycheck of $6 a week, but times were still hard, particularly if you didn’t grow your own food. It would take a world war to change that.
Merl’s parents, Merl Andrew and Ada Mae, were simple people with complicated problems. His father worked at the Pearson Coal Mine just west of town, barely making enough money to support his family. They lived in their shack, and if they had any upward mobility, it seemed a very slow trajectory. A pleasant man and much smaller than his son, Merl Sr. was trying to make it in rural America. A lack of money presented constant struggle. He and Ada Mae fought often, and they could never reconcile their ample differences. So when Merl was four, they divorced, a rarity for couples in that time. Merl, along with his older sister, Martha, left for California with their father near the start of World War II. Merl Sr., like so many Americans, thought it was a place of prosperity and promise. But that didn’t work out either, and they returned to Clarinda.
After finishing eighth grade, Merl was sent to live with his mother, who had moved to Omaha; she had also remarried and had three daughters. His mother had little money, and Merl had trouble connecting in this new family, and at times he felt like a burden to her. When he was a sophomore in high school, he developed a severe kidney ailment and was forced to drop out of school after less than a month. When he had recovered, his mother’s advice was blunt: why don’t you just get a job and start contributing to the support of your family?
So he did, as a teenager with limited education and few options. He managed to get a menial job with the Vess Cola plant in Omaha and was able to start bringing some money home. Most of the other workers were older and would go out drinking after a day’s work. It wasn’t long before Merl was going along with them, to the point that he would wake up in the morning and wonder about getting enough money to buy more booze.
It was a destructive cycle. His roots in a rough rural subculture did not help him in Omaha. He received little real guidance at home, the people with whom he worked enabled his drinking, and it seemed that each successive day was a repeat of the dreadful one that had preceded it. For a young man from small-town Iowa, Omaha represented the big city, but Merl was not ready to handle it. He had tried out for the football team before he left school, but ironically, given the size to which he would ultimately grow, he was cut for being too small. While he was visiting Clarinda the summer he was sixteen, his grandparents asked him to come back and live with them. Merl’s mother agreed that he should move back to Clarinda, setting her son free before his seventeenth birthday, but perhaps knowing he would be in a better place.
Clarinda had long been a place for second chances, almost ever since the town was founded in 1853. Located twelve miles north of the Missouri border, Clarinda served as a relatively safe passageway for slaves fleeing Missouri. Some were using a “stop and start” strategy to get to Canada and stayed in Clarinda, the first town of any size they came to in free territory, only temporarily, but after the start of the Civil War in 1861, others decided to settle there and raise their families, attend the public schools, and bury their dead in the cemetery at the north edge of town. The people of Clarinda for the most part embraced the new arrivals.
Iowa was an unwavering supporter of the Union during the Civil War, and its regiments fought battles throughout the South. Page County sent 512 soldiers to the Union Army—more than 10 percent of its population—and its people were invested in the Union cause. Iowa’s governor, W. M. Stone, announced that he would award a “silken banner worth $100 to the county that made the largest contribution toward the support of families of soldiers.” Page County, with its county seat of Clarinda, won the contest.
The 160-acre town was platted into a clean-cut checkerboard with straight-line streets and a “public block” in the middle. A signature design feature, the block would be bracketed by 100-foot-wide, boulevard-style roads running two blocks in every direction and forming the town’s rough boundaries, including Lincoln Street to the north. Clarinda grew incrementally as it added local businesses like the Hotel Clarinda, the Clarinda Herald-Journal, and Hawley’s store, which sold everything from “needles to cook stoves and barrels of salt.”
Clarinda’s soil was fertile, conducive to growing wheat, oats, barley, rye, corn, and potatoes “almost without effort,” according to the WPA history of Page County. There were even sandy patches, which helped in the making of cement. Iowa, the “first free child of the Missouri Compromise,” was a state primed for growth, with “95 percent of its surface capable for a high state of cultivation.”
The town built its own railway, and on July 4, 1872, N. C. Ridenour wrote in the Page County Democrat: “For the past few months our citizens have been working for a railroad almost day and night, and we are glad to announce that they have at last achieved the long-talked-of project, and on the first day of Oct. 1872, Clarinda will have railway connection with the outside world. In this work our citizens have done nobly.” Clarinda would be bypassed by the larger lines, however, and thus consigned to small-town status.
Nevertheless, other growth was coming to town. In 1884 the construction of a “state hospital for the insane” was approved for the north end of town. This structure was so massive that upon its completion it would be the largest continuous government building until the Pentagon was built. The complex, which was built in an “irregular pattern that brought sunshine into every room,” brought hundreds of jobs to Clarinda. The original structure, with multiple additions, would one day carry the more benign name of the Clarinda Treatment Complex.
City boosters also wanted to develop the public block and several times proposed construction of a county courthouse, only t
o have voters reject the issuance of bonds. The year after the hospital was approved, however, voters approved money for construction of the county courthouse and the cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1885. It had fireproof vaults to store records and was heated with steam, both rare amenities in that era. It also featured fine oil portraits of presidents like John Quincy Adams. The two-story structure, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was topped with a clock tower 150 feet high.
Just two blocks south of the county courthouse, as a curtain of rain poured down on the morning of April 28, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt became the only president to visit Clarinda. With more than twice the town’s population gathered to see their president, Roosevelt delivered a valedictory to the ethic of small-town America in a speech entitled “Now Play Hard While You Play and Do Not Play While You Work.” Roosevelt’s motivation for coming to Clarinda was to pay his respects to the district’s congressman, William Hepburn, chairman of the powerful U.S. House Commerce Committee, whose support would be critical to Roosevelt for the construction of the Panama Canal. On this day Roosevelt was in full voice as he showered the citizens with praise that no doubt rang true to the man he really needed to please. Hepburn lived at 319 West Lincoln Street, only a few blocks from where Merl and Pat would one day live.
In Roosevelt’s ode to small-town America, people were earnest and honest and neighbor helped neighbor. “Here in Iowa you have built up this great state because you had in you the stuff out of which good citizenship is made,” Roosevelt said. “. . . This is what counts in the nation—two qualities, the desire to act squarely and decently, the desire to show in practical shape that you love your brother, that you will do what you can to help him and do your duty by the State—the desire to show the belief in you in morality, in honesty and in decency is not, with you, an empty form.”
The president also spoke of the need to work hard and of parents’ responsibility to instill a work ethic in their children. “The poorest lesson that any American can be taught is the lesson of trying merely to have a good time, of trying to shirk what is hard and unpleasant.” What counts in life, Roosevelt said, is
having work to do that is worth doing, and then doing it as well as a man can. In the long run that is the greatest pleasure in life, and of all social pleasures the one which quickest turns to dust and ashes in the mouth is the love of pleasure for pleasure’s own sake . . . In bringing up your children, the lesson to teach them is not how to shirk difficulties, but how to meet them and overcome them. Here in Iowa . . . you have built up the country around you, because your people have tried to do a man’s work as a man’s work should be done.
The president closed by giving the people of Clarinda credit for having “the type of virtue that comes to the strong man who, when he sees a wrong, wishes to go out and right it, who is glad to step down into the hurly-burly of battle, in the struggle of actual life, and does his best to bring things about as they should be brought.”
Roosevelt put into sepia-toned words the folklore of small-town virtues that was just starting to take hold as many in the country were migrating to its major cities, leaving farm for factory. He was tapping into an ethos that defined Clarinda not only in the fifty years before he spoke but in all the years since.
The town’s ethic was manifested in two of its more famous citizens. Miss Jessie Field, a prominent teacher in Clarinda, would be honored as the “Mother” of the 4H movement, which was dedicated to promoting good character through agricultural life. She helped the boys in town establish the Boys Corn Club and the girls the Girls Home Club. Miss Field is credited with designing the iconic clover logo, especially the addition of the fourth leaf standing for Health, to go with Head, Hand, and Heart.
As Miss Field was starting her youth club, Alton Glenn Miller was born—on March 1, 1904—in a little green wood-frame farmhouse down the road from the Goldenrod School, where she taught. Miller would become one of the most famous bandleaders of the Swing Era, with hits such as “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “Tuxedo Junction.” He remains Clarinda’s most famous son, though the town tour now also includes a stop on Tarkio Street at the former home of Johnny Carson, the legendary host of The Tonight Show, who lived in Clarinda from ages two to four.
Merl’s grandparents lived at 613 East Grant Street in Clarinda, less than a mile from Miller’s birthplace, at the edge of a neighborhood known as Guntown—named for its frequent shootings over robberies or infidelities. Merl had a bedroom on the tiny second floor of the story-and-a-half wood-frame house. The ceiling slanted so much that he had to stoop in most of the room when moving about. His bed was next to a window, and in the winter it was common for his pillow to become covered in snow because of the cracks that his grandparents could not afford to repair.
Though Clarinda was a small town, with a population that hovered around five thousand, for the better part of the twentieth century, it was also a divided one. The two primary sections were Guntown and Uptown. Guntown was where black families fleeing slavery in the South had settled—most of them having crossed over from the Missouri border twelve miles to the south—so blacks had been living in town since at least the 1860s. Nearly five hundred blacks lived in Clarinda in 1861, more than 10 percent of the population. Juanita Seeley, a white woman who lived in the neighborhood, said in a self-published memoir that Guntown’s motto was: “We are rough and tough and hard to bluff. And we come from the heart of Guntown.” She writes that their lives were simple: there was “very little food” and “no electricity,” but a “great abundance of love. So, that is how we Guntowners survived.
“We all know big cities have their ghettos, but do you know our small cities and towns also have a Ghetto? To me, that is what the southeast side of Clarinda, Iowa was, and perhaps still is. It is mine. My Ghetto: my beloved hometown, Guntown.” Of her black neighbors, Seeley said, “Color was unknown to me. We lived side-by-side, black and white. Our people were known and respected for what they were, never race. Many of the people dearest in my memory are people of color.”
There are few recorded instances of racial strife in Clarinda, and the races mixed mostly without incident. The schools had been integrated since the late nineteenth century, and so was the Clarinda cemetery. Residing just a few blocks from Merl at his grandparents’ house was a young black man, Vernon J. Baker, who had also come to live with relatives in Clarinda. After Baker’s parents had been killed in a car accident in Wyoming, he spent two years at Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home in Omaha. Then his grandfather asked him to consider living with relatives in Clarinda, and he agreed. The town opened its arms to Baker, who lived with his Aunt Elsie and thrived in both school and sports.
By 1940, blacks again made up 10 percent of Clarinda’s population. Black and white children walked side by side in school and played sports together. Black children who attended Clarinda schools were often called upon by their parents to teach them to read and write. One young black woman who was the high school valedictorian said in her address to the school: “We don’t want special favors. We just want a chance.”
Vernon Baker got a job after graduation as a railroad porter, but he hated it. With rumblings of war, he tried to enlist, but at first the Army rejected him; “we don’t have quotas for your people,” a recruitment officer told him. After he was finally accepted, he went on to win the Distinguished Service Cross for Valor in battle. After a review by the military some fifty years later found systemic discrimination in the awarding of the highest decorations, medals for Baker and six other African Americans were upgraded to the Medal of Honor, and on January 13, 1997, President Bill Clinton draped the medal around his neck in a ceremony at the White House. The other awards given that day were posthumous. Baker’s citation highlighted his “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his own life above and beyond the call of duty in action” for his valor in battle near Viareggio, Italy, on May 6, 1945. A plaque commemorating Vernon Baker’s feat sits today on the southwestern
corner of the Page County courthouse square in Clarinda.
For Merl, life improved somewhat upon his return to Clarinda, but he continued to struggle. In addition to his grandparents, he would also spend time living with different aunts and uncles in town, often helping them hunt for food. One uncle gave Merl a few shotgun shells to hunt rabbits and was not pleased if the shells were wasted on misfires. Merl became an expert shot. He and his uncle would dress the rabbits, hang them in the backyard, and trade them to other folks in town for food.
It was on the athletic field that Merl found his place. He was a natural, both as a player and as a teammate. “The thing about Merl was that he was very receptive to anything we tried to do,” Tedore said. “When he did come out for a sport, it was obvious he could be quite a leader. He was so gung-ho.” Tedore used Merl at several positions—on the line if he needed a good blocker, or as a halfback if he wanted to throw an option pass. It took watching Merl throw a football only a few times for Tedore to realize what a potential offensive weapon he had. Merl could throw the ball almost seventy yards—much farther than the Clarinda Cardinals quarterback could.
After football season, Merl played basketball, where he excelled as a center who used his left arm to block his opponent while using his right for a hook shot that was deadly from as far away as fifteen feet. The Clarinda Herald-Journal described him as “Big Merl Eberly,” and he was more often than not the team’s leading scorer. In the spring he was on the track team, competing in the “football throw,” which had replaced the javelin in Iowa high school sports. He set a school record that stood for more than a decade with a toss of 215 feet.