May 28, 2015

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.