I couldn’t believe it. Me, a kid from nowhere, standing maybe fifty yards from the only three-term chief executive in the history of our land. My nape hairs did the Wave decades before that cheer even got invented.
Know what kept rippling through my gray matter, though? He didn’t see my first hit. What if I don’t get another?
Except for the smudges under his eyes and the dents in his cheeks, Mr Roosevelt looked spiffy, a lot like Francis X. Bushman or some other silent-screen actor. Cool white linen suit, dapper straw snapbrim, fluffy polka-dot bow tie.
Someone’d rigged a microphone at chest height-for a fella in a wheelchair, that is-and the President’s primary pusher-a Secret Service agent?-slipped him up to it. Ball-players and fans alike’d started cheering. The cheering swelled until it swamped the “home of the brave” finale of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Prez met the hullabaloo with head nods, his arms in the air like those of some raptured Holy Roller, his smile as wide as Tennessee.
The President’s “private” box filled up: military guards and Secret Service men, a bigwig or two from FDR’s staff, and, to my hefty surprise, Colonel and Mrs Elshtain, Miss Giselle, and LaRaina and Phoebe Pharram. In his shirt sleeves, Mister JayMac himself climbed up on our dugout’s tarpapered roof and walked over to the Chief to shake his hand and welcome him to Highbridge.
Amid this tumult, Colonel Elshtain stood in the box rocking up and back on his toes and smirking like a Siamese with a goldfish tail showing between its lips. No wonder “The Battle Hymn of the Repugnant” hadn’t amused him.
The cheering didn’t die. Coloreds and whites alike cheered FDR, the coloreds from the bleachers seats or in their spots as groundskeepers, custodians, and snack vendors. A few people-mostly women-cried. The war’d turned FDR into a god for many folks, even conservative whites. The blacks liked him because his missus spoke out for fairness and entertained Negro leaders in the White House.
The President quieted us with some calm-down hand gestures and an attempt to use the mike: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you please…” That wide chin-up smile again. “By gosh, this is a splendid reception, and I’m delighted to be here. Indeed, my apologies for interrupting your game, coming in like the Caliph of Baghdad. Goodness knows, today we celebrate American independence, not the bondage of our national pastime to my holiday travel schedule.”
He talked on like that for a minute and then gave up the mike to Mister JayMac, who summoned Graham Jackson and the plantation singers-favorites of FDR’s from his stays at Cason Callaway’s Blue Springs -back to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” again. That made five times we’d heard it in forty minutes, but our fans shouted “Play ball!” afterwards as loudly as they had every other time.
Mr Roosevelt bumped up to the mike again: “Later today, ask your neighbors if they heard about the accident here at McKissic Field. When they say, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t,’ tell em, ‘An Opelika player leaned on his bat so long waiting for the game to resume that termites ate the handle out and he fell and broke his back.’ ” The President threw back his head and guffawed, then leaned again into the mike: “I love it! Don’t you just love it!” They surely did. We all did. Even the Orphans broke up, slapping one another on the back and catcalling Max Delaney, the hitter in the on-deck circle.
“If Delaney had an ounce of sense, he’d fall down and grab his back,” Curriden told me. “But the palooka aint got roach shit for brains.”
The Orphan manager, Lou Ed Dew, tried to convince Happy Polidori, the plate umpire, to scrap the first inning and start us over again. He seemed to think the CVL rule book forbid the playing of anything but a full nine-inning game after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I edged closer to the Orphan dugout to pick up the details of this bizarre squabble.
“I don’t recollect that rule, Lou Ed,” Polidori said.
“It’s in there,” Lou Ed Dew said. “I’m pritty shore. I’d bet money. I think I would.”
“Would you be as certain if the Orphans’d scored three runs in the first instead of the other way round?”
“Shore. Shore I would.”
“That’d be about the foolishest rule ever devised by man then,” Polidori said. “A team could hire a band to play the ‘Banner’ ever time its boys had a bad inning out to field and guv up a run or six. I mean, musicians for the Boll Weevils or the Linenmakers’d get rich.”
“Check the book, Polidori. Check the book!”
“I don’t have to.” Polidori lowered his mask and walked away from Lou Ed Dew. “Play ball! I mean, Resume play!”
Dunnagin took a fresh ball from Polidori and trotted with it over to Mr Roosevelt’s box. “Sir, would you be willing to throw out the”-he pretended to count in his head-“the sixth or seventh ball of this game?”
“Would I?” FDR said. “By gosh, Mr Dunnagin, I’d regard it as churlish-a missed opportunity-to refuse.”
Dunnagin flipped the ball to Mister JayMac and backed up about twenty paces. Mister JayMac handed the President the horsehide, and FDR rubbed it up like a New Englander shaping a snowball. He winked over one shoulder at Miss Giselle, then tossed the ball to Dunnagin, who reacted like Mr Roosevelt’d set his palm on fire. Then he thrust the ball up in the air. Our fans cheered their noggins off again. The organist cranked up a rowdy version-a really rowdy version-of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
“Thow it to your pitcher,” Polidori told Dunnagin.
“This baby’s going home with me,” Dunnagin said. “One day a kid of mine might like to have it.”
“The league’ll have to fine you for misappropriating CVL property,” Polidori said. “The league’ll-”
“Screw the league,” Dunnagin said. “Toss Mariani a fresh ball, Mr Ump.”
The game did resume. We Hellbenders played inspiredly, in the field and up to bat. I had two more hits in our opener, neither for extra bases, and fielded like FDR’s predecessor in office, a Hoover: thwup, thwup, thwup! I just sucked em up and howitzered em over to Henry.
It wasn’t close, but the President enjoyed himself. He knew Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle, he knew the Elshtains, he had field-level box seats behind the dugout. He had a Co-Cola, a bag of peanuts, and another Co-Cola. I wouldn’t swear to it, but he may’ve doctored that second Coke with a tot of something spiritous. A regular fella, for a Harvard man and a three-term president. It was pretty much a wonderwork I played as decent as I did, I spent so much time eyeing him sidelong and watching in literal dumfoundment how sprightly and pretty Miss Giselle-with her belief in, and hatred of, the so-called Eleanor Clubs-looked bantering with him.
In the bottom of the eighth, Henry, with only one hit to that point, polewhacked a curve off the fourth Orphan pitcher: a flabbergasting blast that cleared the outfield wall, the bleacher seats behind the wall, the parking lot outside, maybe even the Panhandle-Seminole Railway tracks slashing southeast to Camp Penticuff. People stood up to watch the ball soar. In the brief silence that fell over nearly every onlooker there, FDR’s high-tone tenor sounded in his open mike and vibrated in every speaker on the field:
“Swear to God, Clyde, that’s the most monsterish home run I’ve ever seen! Who is that fella?”
“Jumbo!” the crowd answered. “Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!”