I’m just throwing this out here that the holidays are when people start dropping crazy uncle stories into conversations. It’s crazy if your uncle protested the Vietnam War and drove a VW van to Woodstock, where he dropped LSD and bootlegged some free love, but is now a Trump supporter. ”I think there’s the one person in any group of …
Something thwapped my noggin’ at a young age and told me that rooting for the New York Yankees was not the type of mistake a young feller should make. I didn’t know the half of it. In those summers, a hopscotch court was chalked on a sidewalk somewhere in the neighborhood, no one wore a helmet to ride a bike, …
Last I looked, the bid is $15 million for the baseball jersey that New York Yankee Babe Ruth wore when he supposedly “called his shot” in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series. Ruth never forecast that home run, and I’ll get to that in a minute, after the story about the Babe Ruth home run ball a colleague placed …
The Summer Olympic Games were occupying the “Jeopardy!” time slot this week, but on the bright side, two guys were fencing. I was such a big Zorro fan at age 4 that I wore a black, long-sleeved Zorro costume on 80-degree days in July. As the swordplay on TV continued, I wondered if other disappointed “Jeopardy!” viewers knew about West …
As the 1950s neared, a Southern-born baseball scout reported from Birmingham that Willie Mays was not “a Red Sox type” of player. To the Irish management in Boston, it meant Mays was not white. If any team had the best chance of signing black players in Birmingham after World War II, it was the Red Sox. The white Birmingham Barons …
A few days back, a Washington Post story on my laptop told of young fans roaming the mean streets of Albany, N.Y., after the NCAA women’s basketball semifinals. The Post quoted a smug fan lamenting to her pals that “everyone’s jumping on our … bandwagon.” A thought balloon popped over my head that Alexander the Great started out in Macedonia …
It was pure genius when the crooner who said, “I don’t really like any kind of work” created the grandfather of all golf tournaments. Bing Crosby’s golf tournament was unlike any other. In the 1960s, A-list celebrities like Bob Hope, Danny Thomas and Glen Campbell brought in television sponsorship money, which brought the “The Crosby” and the Pacific Ocean to …
Joe Mauer didn’t reject his induction to the Minnesota Twins Hall of Fame this summer, and if he gets enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame next year, he won’t turn that down, either. I’m not saying he should. It’s just that no one turns down an award. Who are you to deny your admirers if you’re to be …
You could still play catch at 9:30 as July 4 loomed the other night. Even with the crawl of time, anyone who grew up in Minnesota carries the souvenir of having wrung every glimmer from the penetrating summer sun. Nearly 16 hours of daylight made the week leading to the Fourth of July glorious in the Red River Valley, and …
The Baseball Writers Association of America will announce the results of its 2023 Hall of Fame vote Tuesday, followed once again by griping about the 1992 election. That was the first year Pete Rose was eligible but left off the ballot, which turned Pete into a cause célèbre. He was one lucky feller that day. Not being in the Hall …
There will be some chit-chat about Roger Maris this month at North Dakota coffee shops and saloons because Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees is chasing the slugger’s single-season home run record. North Dakotans still claim that Maris’ 61 homers in 1961 remain the legitimate, nonsteroid record. North Dakotans still claim Roger Maris as their own, even though he …
I arrived early to my 50th high school class reunion after hitting a bucket of golf balls with Dad’s clubs, the same clubs we used when I last hit a bucket of balls in 1989. It seems that range balls are no longer purchased after a stroll to the pro shop. A machine near the tees plops them into your …
The best vendors at the ballpark snapped out quips and nonsense, thick as mustard on a hot dog. They poured a beer, handed over a soft pretzel and spun out a story about a mother-in-law they didn’t have or a fish they never caught. Those nearby leaned in to listen. Vendors made fans part of the game, like foul balls …
Accolades will shower Jackie Robinson once again this April 15, the 75th anniversary of him scaling baseball’s racial wall. Every big leaguer since 2007 has worn Robinson’s No. 42 on April 15. It’s the only number retired by all 30 major league teams — the first retired by an entire sport. It held no significance for him. Robinson played when …
When former Minnesota Twins Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat “got the call” from Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame this month, it came from Jane Forbes Clark. Few ask, “Who is Jane Forbes Clark?” Well, she chairs the Hall of Fame’s board in Cooperstown, N.Y., where in 1839 Abner Doubleday was said to invent the game of baseball. He did …
You know the world holds boundless possibilities when you live near the only golf course in the nation with the front nine in one state and the back nine in another. So when I was 6, I announced that everyone should reach age 12, then start over. There were a helluva lot of big thinkers through history. None of them …
An Iowa farmer builds a baseball diamond where corn should grow in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams.” Soon, ghosts play baseball. For legal reasons, actor Jimmy Earl Jones plays an author not named J.D. Salinger. The resonant bass voice of Jones says: “They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn into your driveway, not knowing …
Uncle Bert left Washington, D.C., each July, along with everyone else who worked for the federal government. The nation’s capital is built “on a tangle of woods and swamps.” It’s sweltering in the summer. Bert’s family of four drove to his childhood farm in Iowa, then up to my hometown, a small Minnesota river burg where his wife was born. …
It was a record 90 degrees at Metropolitan Stadium when the Minnesota Twins opened their home baseball season April 22, 1980. The math should have been simple: 36,000 fans + 90 degrees = extra beer vendors. Also in the equation: Every college kid in the Twin Cities would skip class. The drinking age was 19. The Met was a frowzy …
My limp, perspiring frame was draped over a table in a small railway station in a small Spanish town. “Want some water?” my sister asked. Something like “uhnnnnh” slid out of my mouth. “Eggs?” “Urrrrrrgh.” “A Coke?” “Ahhhnnnnhu.” I blamed my brother-in-law. Larry, a college prof, was on a Fulbright Scholarship at the university in Alcala de Henares, Spain. It’s …
Doc Kippen looked down at me through black-rimmed glasses, bows disappearing into his gray hair at the temples. “I wish I had a bullet for you to bite on, Jimmy.” I was on my right side, left foot pulsing with each heartbeat as the ankle hovered above my left hip. It could have been someone else’s leg. I had no …
It was an example of how to treat people. It didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t just chitchat as I dried the dishes weeks before we were to fly to Washington, D.C., to visit relatives during the last summer of the Kennedy administration. I was down to the silverware — the low ROI portion of dish drying — as …
The last time I restrained a black man was when I spotted Vince in the Moorhead State University bookstore. He was from King George, Va, about midway between the Civil War capitals of Washington, D.C, and Richmond, Va. Vince was back for our senior year in college after months of floating on the Potomac, or whatever people “back East” did …
Earl was my best friend at church, which was across the Red River in North Dakota. He didn’t attend my Minnesota grade school and was Native American. That made him like most other kids in church, except he and I had been baptized on the same day. And his dad was a war hero. I mean a “let’s make a …
The coronavirus has closed a lot of businesses, including barbershops, whose gravitational pull was once the envy of any trade. Shuttering these shops decades ago would have gagged communication in small towns and urban neighborhoods. Any news worthwhile to the citizenry was heard in Dad’s barbershop, long before it arrived at the newspaper office. The simple marketing genius of a …
Neil Armstrong took one giant step onto the moon on Mom’s birthday in 1969. She took one small step onto the noggins of stratified thinkers about three years later. It was an era of ritualized nonsense in high schools. Didn’t tuck your shirt after gym, the last class of the day? Some assistant principal who spent the Korean War pushing …
The grade school teacher would hand you a yellow-sleeved envelope containing your final report card each spring during our grueling 1960s public education in the Red River Valley. She would gleam and wish you a fine summer, then gallop like Secretariat toward any saloon, pool hall or campsite where children were not allowed. On the back of the report card …
John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” might be the most aching, life-ain’t-fair western film. Told in long flashback, it ends with a newsman trashing the notes from an interview that revealed who really pinged an ornery outlaw. “You’re not going to use the story?” asks Jimmy Stewart’s tired, flawed hero. The newsman explains, “This is the West. When …
These are panic-stricken days. Each win by one of baseball’s better teams, the Minnesota Twins, brings the boys closer to disaster. The team’s World Series prospects flicker with each home run that is launched through precisely calculated launch angle. The victory cigars grind to ash with each strikeout notched through optimum spin rate. After too many dreary seasons to count, …
The American League Central standings have barely shifted since the Cleveland Indians fell from a first-place tie with the Minnesota Twins on April 21. The turbulent April weather that could have crinkled a pitching staff has been forgotten. The Twins lead their division by 11.5 games. It could become a Mardi Gras season. This franchise has reached 100 wins just …
Who would think stark realizations about shrewd capitalism and insight to human nature could come from watching nine innings of pantomime baseball? Not this little black duck, as Daffy would say during cartoons in which Bugs Bunny was the smart one and Daffy was, well, daffy. Because the Minnesota Twins have had more bad seasons than good since moving into …
The Panama Canal had long disappeared. The wackiest ship in the Navy had no land in sight when Ellsworth Gregor Buechel of Pittsburgh sat down for a haircut at sea. He didn’t call the vessel he was on by its rightful name, the APL-14. He called it “The Ritz Carlton”: A football-field long, unpowered ship, four decks high, towed by …
Jazz the Cat thudded to the master bedroom’s wood floor followed by rapid tapping at 3:30 a.m. It sounded like a seizure. I went to college. Turning on the light proved me right once again. Cats with cancer migrating to their central nervous system don’t come home from the emergency veterinarian. There, they stopped the seizures with valium at 4 …
One of Dad’s tasks as autumn hummed into winter was lifting his golf clubs from the car trunk and storing them in the basement. He was doing this one October when I was about 16. “Why’d you ever come back to Minnesota from San Diego after the war?” I asked. “You could play golf all year.” Fate had made the …
After we arrived at the expansive field on the outskirts of Cooperstown, N.Y., that smoldering Sunday in July 2001 for Kirby Puckett’s Hall of Fame induction, Tim, Shari and I needed to visit the port-a-potties, all blue, lined in a row by the road. We joined one of the dozens of human anaconda lines packed with tomorrow’s sunburn victims. A …
I grew eager each December when the Christmas cards feathered out from a neatly stacked pile into a pitcher’s mound on the dining room buffet. It meant the one mimeographed Christmas letter would soon arrive. As I reached junior high, I couldn’t wait for what was the genre’s quintessential stereotype. The letter — who had a mimeograph machine? — addressed …
This blog was originally posted on Unheralded.fish’s Facebook page Monday. Ah, Veterans Day. It did not exist by that name the day I was born. But has every day since. That’s my slim contribution. Along with being a No. 19 draft choice in the Vietnam lottery. The closest I have come to winning a lottery. Then the Paris Peace Accord …
About a half dozen years after World War II, Uncle Joe rattled through some woods around Minnesota’s west-central lake country and started to frame a cabin. It was to be about 600 square feet in a clearing with a southern exposure. In winter, the struggling sun would bathe the windows facing the lake, making even a February day a little …
Twins President Calvin Griffith letter to Jim Thielman – July 1974 Whatever I wrote in that letter to Calvin Griffith in 1974, it didn’t include any profanities. I told the first owner of the Minnesota Twins about it a few years later. “Did I write back?” he asked. He said it was his habit to take phone calls and respond …
The Spanish word for retirement is “jubilación.” I learned Spanish when I rode with Juárez. Benito — we were on a first-name basis — never retired. He died at his desk reading a newspaper, by one account. So I will be avoiding desks and periodicals from here on. In the past year of reading about the challenging responsibility of retirement, …
Dunno why, but for the past half-century, Major League Baseball has missed the fun-filled opportunity to have Don Demeter throw out the first pitch of each season. The lanky, giraffe-necked Oklahoman will be 83 this year and retired from baseball for 50 years. It’s not as if he couldn’t have been capably handling this chore. If you’re not starting to …
When winter was packing a punch, the man would be outside Thielman’s Barber Shop sitting in a car, motor idling. On summer mornings, he’d likely be in a suit standing by the door, probably smoking a heater. Dad arrived, either in cold darkness or dewy early dawn, unlocked the door, flicked on the lights and knew what to do on …
It’s always summer. A few days until the Fourth of July in a small Minnesota town surrounded by lakes. For nearly 50 years, that was the setting each time I thought of my cousin, Dave. So I had the beginning written when I was invited to do his eulogy. Even though I never considered myself for this role, I didn’t hesitate …
On a peaceful, moonlit, October night in 1999, Bob the Remarkable Cat coiled around a gravely ill feral kitten. Bob was in little better shape. His long tail was a mysterious stub and a gash decorated his left side. Threads of gangrene had begun weaving through him. A dust of stars scattered when dawn broke on the outskirts of Detroit …