I love the Cincinnati Reds. I've tried to tell myself I don't, but I know
that isn't true. It's an addiction that
dates back to my early childhood. In my
lifetime, I've followed great teams, not so good teams, and teams that were
just plain bad. But in the past, even if
the team wasn't very good, following them was.
The Reds meant summertime, and many of the best memories of my life
happened with the game as the official soundtrack playing in the background.
The current version of my team
has frustrated me, to varying degrees over the past 6 seasons, more than any
point in my life. Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. Maybe I realize I've seen more baseball in the past, than I'm likely to see in the future. Maybe I'm not willing to say I've had my best Reds' moments yet.
The disappointment
from the playoff appearances in 2010 and 2012 was bad. The late season collapse and wild card
embarrassment of 2013 was worse. The
inept hitting and uninspired play of the 2014 team when compared with the train
wreck taking the field now, indicates a Reds organization that has been on a
downward spiral for some time. Maybe
it's the fact that social media, MLB.tv, multiple cable sports channels and the
internet keep the team's successes and failings (mostly the failings) in front
of me more than in the past. With all of
the electronic devises used for following the team, and with all of the
articles written hour upon the hour about the team, keeping up is sometimes
laborious, complicated, and often painful.
There was time when life was
simple. I had few worries. I went to school. I came home.
I loved baseball. From time to
time, during the summer months, my dad would load the over-the-cab camper onto
the bed of his 1974 Dodge pickup.
Those times normally meant a weekend trip to a nearby campground for 48
hours of summer time bliss. There were swimming pools with enough chlorine to turn your eyes bloodshot for a week. There were kids playing pickup wiffle ball games, and no one could hit my wiffle curve ball. There were charcoal grills loaded with hamburgers and hot dogs. To this day, I go immediately back to those campgrouds every time I smell lighter fluid burning on a pile of Kingsford briquettes. Then in the evening, there would be campfires in the fire rings, watermelon that had been packed in ice all day in our Coleman metal sided cooler, and
Reds baseball on the radio. Life was
good, and looking back, very, very simple.
On one unique summer evening, the camper
was on the truck. I don’t remember if
dad had loaded it a day early or if he hadn’t yet unloaded it from a weekend
trip. Regardless, we drove into town for
ice cream. It was one of the few times I
rode alone, inside the camper, with mom and dad in the cab of truck. On this evening, which would have been
somewhere between 1977 and 1979, Phil Niekro and the Atlanta Braves were facing the
Reds at Riverfront Stadium. While it would have been better sitting with 20,000 other fans inside the big round, concrete bowl that always fascinated me when we crossed the Ohio River on I-75 into Cincinnati, I was very content sitting alone, in the camper, knowing that in a few moments I would be hearing some of the best sounds of summer. Reds baseball.
I still remember the unique smell inside of
the camper. It wasn’t a particularly good smell, but it wasn't an awful smell either. I’m
not sure if it was the foam in the seat cushions, the paneling on the walls, or
some other manmade toxic substance commonplace in many products of the 1960s
and 1970s. As the truck puttered down
our country back roads, the camper rocked gently side to side as the shocks of
the Dodge struggled to keep the extra weight and height of the load upright. I sat happily at the foldable dining table
(which doubled on camping trips as a 2nd bed) tuning my AM/FM radio to our
local radio station to listen to Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall call the game.
Ice cream in our small town, when
I was a kid, was soft serve and available only in vanilla, chocolate or a
swirled combination of the two. It came
from a small family owned restaurant known as Ellis’ Dairy Dee. Originally, the small concrete block building
had a counter seating about 6 people and 2 small square tables on the
inside. Large fans swirled the heat coming
from the commercial grill, with the humid, non-airconditioned summer air, through and around the
small dining area. The majority of
business was conducted through the sliding glass windows in the front and side
of the building. Patrons sat at concrete
picnic tables waiting on orders of hamburgers, fresh cooked french fries, cherry
flavored fountain drinks, milk shakes and of course, soft serve ice cream. Herb and Betty Ellis built the business, and
they and their children ran it until well into the 1990s. It was a loved local institution and
land mark.
As we traveled the one lane country roads
near our home, I could see the trees through the windows of the camper. I could tell exactly where we were by
watching them go by without benefit of seeing houses or other buildings. The tree tops and the rocking of the camper,
as the truck navigated turns, were all I needed to determine where we were on
the trip. Even at that moment, I wished
the trip could last forever. But with
each passing mile and each turn onto a larger and heavier traveled road, I couldn't
help but feel a little sad knowing that the sooner we arrived at our
destination, the sooner it would be over.
Listening to a game was comfort
to me as a kid anytime and anywhere I could find it. I got dragged out of the house one cold rainy
March Saturday, so my mom and aunt could shop.
It was awful. They were wasting
my Saturday. I wanted to stand on the
sidewalk outside the stores. I wanted to
sit in the car. I wanted to go
home. Anything was better than standing
around while the adults looked aimlessly at things in which I had no
interest. But at a "junk"
store (literally, it had nothing but junk as far as I could tell), I heard
something. In the background, I could
hear the voices of the two men coming across a radio that I recognized
immediately as Reds baseball. I audibly
located the source of the sound and casually made my way toward the front near
the spot where the junk store owner sat in a folding lawn chair listening
to the game. To me at the time, this guy was
old. Really old. Probably 45 to 50 years old. But like me, he seemed to love listening to
the game.
Upon arriving at the Ellis' parking lot, my
dad had to let down the tailgate of the truck before I could exit. He always closed the tailgate while traveling
so the camper door would not accidentally fly open while traveling down the
road. Safety first! Of course, had there been an accident, not
only was it extremely unsafe (and probably illegal even then) for me to be
riding inside the camper, with the tailgate closed, there would be no way for
me to get out. Ahhh, the 1970s, and
things we didn't know we needed to worry about.
The "old" store owner
and I exchanged some simple pre-sabermetric comments about the Reds, then
quietly took in the sounds that closed the age barrier. This man and I were complete strangers, from different generations, and
had only one thing in the world in common.
And on that cold, rainy March afternoon, we enjoyed a few moments of it
together listening to the Blue Jays and the Reds play an unimportant spring training
game. Big John Mayberry slapped a double
into the gap for the Jays. In my mind, I
could see his baseball card. I could
envision a small spring training stadium, with palm trees in the sand covered
parking lot. Since I had not yet visited
the Sunshine State, my mental images were molded by what I
had seen on television, in books or on post cards sent from traveling
relatives. I could see Big John standing
at second base, smiling a big toothy grin, and looking at his teammates in the
dugout celebrating his victory over some young Cincinnati pitching prospect. I no longer had any conscious thoughts of my
mother, my aunt, the rain or the thousands of items of junk (much of which
would probably be considered vintage antiques today) that surrounded me.
At the Ellis' sliding window, I waited my
turn to order a vanilla soft serve cone.
As a kid, chocolate somehow seemed much more exciting and adventurous
than just plain vanilla. But when I was
young, vanilla was the boring and safe choice for me every time. As I aged, I guess my taste buds
changed. I've since made up for my
chocolate deprived early childhood with a vengeance.
But on this particular summer night, with the cool evening breeze rustling
the leaves of the trees along the parking lot near our camper burdened truck, I
sat at one of the round concrete picnic tables outside the little ice cream
institution of my home town and waited patiently for my creamy, sweet, safe,
soft serve vanilla treat. It had a taste
then that you just can't match today.
The few places that still have a soft serve machine, must use a chemical
packed, high fructose corn syrup product that looks similar to the original,
but falls far short of the thick cream, pure cane sugar concoction that came
through those sliding glass windows of the little block building with ELLIS
DAIRY DEE painted on the front.
John Mayberry and the Blue Jays
were a mystery to me. Playing in the
American League (that lesser collection of teams that the Reds did not face
during the regular season), with the weird Designated Hitter rule, I viewed the
expansion team from Toronto, Canada as something so foreign and strange that I
wasn't sure if they played actual major league baseball or not. Certainly,
they were not a high enough caliber of team to deserve to take the field with
my Reds. But here they were, somewhere
in Florida,
playing an exhibition game against my heroes.
Marty and Joe were there watching the action and calling the game. There were some minor league prospects
playing for the Reds, but I recognized many of the names being called as the
events unfolded. When my mom and aunt
were finally ready to leave, I was in no particular hurry. "Are you sure you're done? We can stay a while longer if you want to
look some more." Even a wet, cold,
miserable shopping Saturday in March could be made better with a little
baseball on the radio.
We had to eat our ice cream down to the cone
while sitting at the tables before mom would let us get back in the truck for
the return trip. At that point in time,
I think the Dodge truck had air conditioning, but we never used it. My dad said it pulled the engine harder and
made the truck use more gasoline. In the
late 70s, with gas shortages and spikes in fuel costs, very few people
considered the loss of a couple of miles per gallon worth running the A/C. In my mind, even then, I couldn't see how
going from 14mpg without the air, to 12mpg with the air, made much
difference. At something near $0.70 per
gallon, gasoline seemed a valuable commodity that my dad was not willing to
waste on something as trivial as traveling comfort.
We had television, but signal
from the 3 or 4 available channels came to my remote part of the world via a funny looking antenna mounted on a tall tower beside our house. The signal was varying degrees of static and
snow, depending on the humidity in the air.
NBC's Game of the Week on Saturdays and ABC's Monday Night Baseball were
my main visual connection to the game.
Occasionally, the Reds would make an appearance on one of these weekly
televised broadcasts. But they were
always on the radio. There was something about the sounds of the game that drew me in: the crack of the ball against bat; the sound
of the crowd that was a mere murmur in the background most of the time, that
grew in both intensity and volume at that split second when the action
unfolded; and the contrasting, mellow tone voices of Marty and Joe telling a
story in such a way that I could see the players and events on the field in my
mind. All of these amazing things came
through one little speaker of an old portable radio from a signal being
transmitted from our local radio station.
With the windows rolled down, and sun
starting to set, a ride in the truck was sort of pleasant. But if you had a fast melting ice cream cone
being whipped by the summer air flowing through the cab, your interior was
going to be splattered with ice cream droplets from the head liner to the
rubberized floor mats. And no one wanted
to take the time to wipe ice cream off of their vinyl bench seat. The wind didn't affect me as much inside the
camper. But with much less air movement
coming only from the small crank-out side windows, it did get noticeably warmer
and therefore had a faster rate of ice cream "meltage".
In the summer months, with another
school year behind me, I longed for West Coast road trips by the Reds. I would hibernate to a bedroom in our
basement, turn on my old radio, fine tune the dial and listen until well past
midnight, when Joe Nuxhall signed off with his most famous line, "This is
the old lefthander, rounding third and heading for home. Good night everybody." Those were good nights. I could stay up late listening to the game,
looking at my baseball cards, listening to my heroes battling some far removed
foreign enemy like Steve Garvey and the evil Los Angeles Dodgers or Dave
Winfield and the McDonalds uniform clad San Diego Padres. All the time, I knew I could sleep late in
the morning, get up and enjoy another simple summer day, and look forward to
the next game.
I took my cone from the girl at the window
to an empty table in the parking lot, and slowly began working it down to a
more "travel friendly" and "mom approved" size. While sitting at the table, I noticed the
concrete bench seat was sort of biting into the underside of my leg as my late 1970s style basketball shorts rode up when I sat down. The more I moved to find a comfortable
position, the more the shorts seemed to go the wrong way. I would adjust and scoot forward but the
micro-shorts of the day seemed to pull farther up giving new territory for the
rough concrete to take hold. Regardless,
it didn't matter. There was ice cream
now, and baseball on the radio for the ride home. I didn't want either to end.
Baseball had consistency and
absolutes in every game. 9 innings. 9 players in the lineup for each team. 3 outs per ½ inning. 90 feet between bases. 60 feet, 6 inches from the pitching rubber to
home plate. It was exact. But, there were also variables and
unknowns. Different teams in each town
with new players on those teams to face my Reds. Slightly different lineups from game to
game. A new hero to admire each
night. Sometimes the Reds had a good
game, and they won. A Red player would
be named the "Star of the Game" and get to talk with Marty Brennaman
in a postgame interview. He would always
get a new watch from some jewelry store for appearing as a guest on the
show. George Foster must have looked
like a New York street
vendor if he wore all of his at one time.
Sometimes things didn't go well, and they lost. A rival team player would be given the watch
for being the "Star". I always
wondered if a new watch would mean enough to a professional baseball player for
them to spend the time and effort needed to go by the store and pick the thing
up. Did visiting team players have to
leave their hotel, walk across town or take a taxi to a jewelry store and
explain to the clerk, "Hi, I'm Mike Schmidt and I won a watch from here." Did they just mail them a watch without
benefit of the player picking out the style he wanted? Would Pete Rose or Johnny Bench be mobbed by adoring
fans walking the downtown streets of Cincinnati
to claim yet another watch to add to their collection? In those summer months of my youth, there was
baseball, and regardless of whether the Reds won or not, the anticipation of
tomorrow and a new game brought a little joy into my life almost every day.
After I was secured into the camper for the
ride home with my half eaten cone and radio, I again watched the tree line
through the side windows and felt the curves of the roads below to determine
our location. Even in the twilight of
evening, as head lights from approaching cars flashed rays of light into the
camper interior through its various windows, I knew exactly where we were and
how much longer it would take for the trip to end. Marty and Joe continued to call the action on
the radio, but the ice cream cone had been devoured and was gone.
As the years went by, many things
changed. My parents divorced and the
camper was sold. I'm not sure, even
years before that happened, if I somehow knew something was wrong between them. It's not like they had many fights or
arguments in front of me. But maybe, as
a kid, I somehow sensed the tension between them and realized the uncertainty
of all of our futures together. Those
tensions seemed to disappear on the weekends of camping, swimming pools,
campfires and wiffle ball games. I
remember the day the camper left. It had
been unused for several years by then.
But when a stranger loaded it onto a short-bed Chevy pickup, it just felt
wrong. He had to leave his tailgate down
to accommodate the shorter bed length of his truck. His Chevy was red while the Dodge was
green. The camper didn't look right
sitting on it. As it left down our
driveway, I watched it gently rock the Chevy from side to side, and could feel
myself sitting at the table, holding the radio and enjoying the sway. With the tailgate down on the short bed
truck, I couldn't help but ask myself, "What if the camper door comes
open?"
I don't remember much about the remainder of
the details of that summer evening. I
assume they were mostly non-eventful. I
don't remember if the Reds won the game or not.
It's not important now. But the fact that they were playing meaningful baseball was at that time. I do remember
holding on to my radio with my left hand as I jumped off the tailgate to the
ground, so I wouldn't touch it with my ice cream sticky right hand. I'm sure I went back to the basement with my
radio, and my baseball cards, to enjoy the remainder of the game - after I
washed my hand of course.
Somewhere in the late 1980s or
early 1990s, our local radio station stopped carrying the Reds games. I talked with the station owners' son (also a
baseball fan), and he said the Reds games had become so expensive for the small
town station and with few local businesses willing to sponsor the games, they
just could not afford to continue justifying the expense. My portable radio had been long ago
discarded. It was probably sold or just
thrown away during the divorce and property settlement. While other stations in nearby communities
did continue to carry the Reds games, their weak signals refused to come in clearly
at our house. Listening to a baseball
game had changed forever too.
Herb and Betty Ellis sold the
little Dairy Dee and retired. For a
while, the first new owner maintained the name. Things remained recognizable at the small eatery initially, but gradually, changes started happening. By then, I
was older and changing too. I married and finished college. I relocated back to the same small town where I grew
up, but I didn't go to Ellis' very often.
It wasn't quite the same. The
business sold several more times, and at some point, the dining room was
expanded and the exterior bricked. Each new owner felt the need
to put their own personal touch on the little concrete block institution, both in its appearance and menu. Rarely were any of these
changes an improvement, in my opinion.
The original soft serve machine was replaced with some new contraption
that boasted about its 30+ flavors. It
was still a vanilla base of some kind, but infused whatever flavor you wanted
into the ice cream with a syrupy flavored goo.
To me, no matter what you ordered, it just tasted "sugary"
with most of the heralded 30+ flavors tasting like an air freshener in your car. Even ordering an ice cream had changed and
become more complicated. The final
insult and death nail to Ellis' came when a recent owner changed the name to
"Mammy Frogs" and featured fried frog legs as the house specialty. Fonzie, meet the shark.
 |
| Herb Ellis (1933-2015) |
A week or so ago, I learned Herb
Ellis died. While I knew things could
never return to the late 1970s wonder of my childhood, somehow just knowing he
was still hanging around town enjoying his retirement made me happy. Although I suspect, in these later years, he
cringed every time he drove by the little building he constructed a over a half
century ago and saw the name "Mammy Frogs" on the front.
With the economic downturn of the
last decade, my family and I left the little community of my childhood. Better schools and more financial
opportunities finally made the move a necessity. In our new larger town, the local radio
station carries the Reds. Joe Nuxhall
has passed. Marty is still there, but he's changed too and become somewhat of a grumpy old man from time to time. Maybe, like me, he knows he's seen more baseball in the past than he will in the future, and he's just not willing to admit his best Red's memories are behind him. Time changes
everything, including ourselves. I'm no
longer the care free little kid whose biggest concern is washing off sticky ice
cream residue from his hand before touching his baseball cards. I'm a husband and a father with the pressures
of life and family.
We now live in a very nice community on a golf course. Our home owners association maintains many amenities including a basketball court, tennis court and a full exercise gym. But my favorite part is the 20' x 80' indoor
heated pool. It's really nice. Still, it's not quite the same as bounding
out the back of the camper, off the tailgate of the Dodge, and running across a
campground at full speed with grass clippings sticking to your bare feet, smelling charcoal, as you head toward a pool full of
screaming kids and a water slide.
In our new town, there is a new style Dairy Queen on the main strip. It
has lots of seating inside and even some tables out front if you want to enjoy
a summer evening. But downtown, on main
street, is a much older and much smaller Dairy Queen. It doesn't have the walkup windows, but
seating inside is very limited, like Ellis' was originally. On the outside, is a gazebo with new round
picnic tables. Unlike the concrete
tables from my youth, these benches are smooth and do not bite the underside of
your legs. Of course since the late 1970s,
my legs have also changed a lot, and thankfully with today's much longer, knee
length short styles, that isn't really a concern anymore.
Baseball isn't the same from my
youth either. The business of the game
has altered it to the point you never know who is going to be wearing the
uniform of your team from season to season.
But going to a game with my son, and smelling the food, and seeing the
crowd, and hearing the sound of the crack of a ball against a bat, is pretty
close to the way things used to be - only with a much larger price tag.
But when baseball is bad, like it
has been for the Reds lately, something seems very incomplete. I don't care to watch or listen as often. Don't misunderstand. Overall, life is still very good, regardless of what the Reds do. I am very blessed. My family is healthy and happy. Summer evenings are still nice, and a trip to
the old style Dairy Queen for some soft serve is enjoyable.
But when the sounds of the game do not fill the background of summer, there is a void. I need to need the game.
If most of us listed the top 100
memories of our lifetime, the first dozen or two would be pretty easy. For most people, the births of their
children, weddings, family outings or achievements, would quickly fill the top
of the list. But after those couple of dozen monumental, life
altering moments are listed, what comes next?
For me, it's memories like I've listed.
It's the small, insignificant moments in time that gave me great
pleasure. And somehow, baseball found a
way to saturate many of them.
My favorite uncle passed away 20
years ago this summer. Individual games
I attended at Riverfront Stadium with him would make my top 100 in several
locations. Sitting with him at his
trailer near Rocky Fork, in Hillsboro,
Ohio, talking about baseball and
watching games on his little 19" tv would make the list too. But if the Reds are horrible and their games
don't matter, and I lose interest, I don't have as much motivation
to take my son to games or watch them on our television and make similar
memories with him.
Everything changes and time can
not be stopped. But with those changes,
come the opportunity to have new experiences and hopefully fond new
memories. While I hold tightly to the
memories and loves of my youth, I want to embrace the joys of today and keep
searching for a place with good soft serve ice cream while listening to a ball
game on the radio. I'm willing to do my
part. I need the Reds to do theirs.
