When I was a kid, spending summer days and nights at Grandpa and Grandma Champ's house in the hollow by the marsh at Walnut Lake, Michigan, Al Kaline and the Detroit Tigers were always on the radio or the old black-and-white TV.
Sometimes, the family -- my dad, my cousins Marc and Jeff Champ, Grandpa and my brother Eric Anthony Ghianni would load up and go down to Briggs Field (where I cut my left leg on a headlight, but that's another story, though the scar remains).
Kaline, who died Monday at age 85, was my brother's favorite player.
As I grew older and more independent and my dad took us to live in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, my team was the Chicago Cubs and Ron Santo forever became my favorite player. Always will be and he had the fighting spirit that kept him battling despite life’s obstacles until long after most of us would have surrendered. A true Boy of Summer.
That’s another story and you can find it on my blog somewhere if you look.
This is a short little note about Al Kaline, because he died yesterday, April 6, 2020, while we all hid in our houses from the virus.
But this isn’t about deadly viruses and these strange days indeed (most peculiar, mama.)
This is about Walnut Lake, also.
Cigar smoke. Or Prince Albert in the can jammed in a pipe as Grandpa presided over the house he built with help from my Uncle Les, Shirley’s husband. They are dead long ago.
Grandpa thought he ruled the house. Unless Grandma decided otherwise. “Now Bea….” “Well George ….”
Maybe Marc, Jeff, Eric and I would sleep out on the back porch, screened in and not really locked. Can you imagine that in 2020? Course this was back in the mid-1950s, when Uncle Joe Champ’s health was failing from the flame-thrower scars in his lungs, further ambushed by smoking. Everyone smoked back then. (I did, too, as soon as I could. That’s another story and tobacco was only a part of it.) Those days at the lake continued well after Joe died. I think in 1957 or 1958. I was just a kid, but I sure loved him. My son’s name, coincidentally???, is Joe.
Back in the late 1950s, Grandpa once went out into the woods, pounding pieces of timber together in the middle of the night. Scared the shit out of us. There was a killer … or perhaps a monster on the loose in our eager and impressionable minds.
We didn’t sleep well that night. It wasn’t until the next day, when he showed off the timber pieces over his breakfast of pepper and scrambled eggs (mostly pepper) and kippers (sardines) or fried perch, that we learned the truth. He had been the monster. Laughed like hell that he’d scared us so. We laughed, too. We all thought he was the guy who, I think they say “hung the moon.” Whatever. He was a great man.
Almost everyone is dead now who was there, but those nights and days at Walnut Lake returned to my heart and head after I learned Al Kaline had died.
We had the opportunity to meet most of the ballplayers back then in those gentler times, and he was no exception. We’d always go see games when the Yankees were in town, too. You ever see Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris at bat? How about Whitey Ford on the mound and Yogi Berra trying to throw a pickoff ball to second from behind home? Ahh, wonderful times.
When I think about Kaline, though, it is not so much about baseball, but more with thoughts of playing poker with Grandpa (he didn't let his grandchildren win), while listening to the radio.
Grandma would take us out to the vegetable garden, where we'd dig for night-crawlers and put them in an old cottage cheese carton filled with black soil.
The plan was that we would be ready to get up at 5 the next morning to paddle out onto the lake and catch bluegill, sunfish and perch. Cleaning them later at the stump out back while Grandpa smoked his pipe. If we caught a bullhead, he’d pound a nail in its head so he could skin it.
Grandpa would bury the innards, hoping that Topsy, the black beaglish hound, would not dig them up, roll in them or eat them. She did frequently. Helluva good dog.
When Topsy died, Grandpa and Grandma got Spuddy, another beaglish dog, who (along with Grandpa) lived with my Mom and Dad in Nashville after Grandma died. Another story. A dog story. Check out my book about my Mom if you are interested. Somebody ought to make a movie about it, but I haven’t kissed enough ass in life to know how to even approach such a project or who to approach.
Anyway, after the fish were cleaned, the boys would cross on the path through the marsh and then over the black-oiled road to the clubhouse at Walnut Lake. Back then it was a blue-collar town and beach. Now, I think rich people, probably mostly millennial assholes and their parents and offspring, live there with their fancy speedboats and lack of sentiment about what that lake meant to us.
The boys and my cousin Michelle (Marc and Jeff’s sister who now ferries Amish and Mennonites across Kentucky and always wears floppy hats, but that’s another story and I love her) had fun. She was older than us. Still is, by the way. Sorry Michelle…. Or Mitzi, as Grandpa called you.
I guess I should get back to Briggs Field or was it Briggs Stadium? Shit, doesn’t matter. It was a real ballpark. Hot dogs and beer and Coke were sold. Maybe peanuts and Cracker Jack. No raw octopus and sake or whatever the fuck they serve at ballparks today. If Grandpa Ghianni was there, a flask of brown whiskey was there, too. No security at the gate back then.
It was in the time of double-headers, and about halfway through the second game, Grandpa got tired. I think he waited by the park, because of his arthritis. But we, Dad, Marc, Jeff, Eric, me, would have to go get the car. My Grandpa Ghianni, who sometimes visited the Champs, may have been there, too, I noted above. Anyway, we were parked bumper to bumper across that part of Detroit. It was before they burned the city down and Roger Smith killed GM.
Had to walk across the bumpers of the cars to find dad’s white, convertible Oldsmobile. Unfortunately, one of the cars had a broken headlight and the sharp glass grabbed my left leg when I dragged past it. Blood spurted like in a Peckinpah film. Nah, not really, but it bled like hell.
I think my Dad, the only WWII infantryman who was nauseated by blood… actually, he probably saw too much of it, caused some I’m sure, while in his late teens and early 20s … panicked. I think they wrapped my leg in a T-shirt and we went home where Grandma and Mom tended to it. When Dad died last September, and after we buried him, we were at Eric’s house, where my Cousin Marc (or Maurice, as the big-city fancies in Detroit call him) and I were drinking 12-year-old seltzer or somesuch, he asked if the scar was still there.
I showed it to him.
Anyway, I could go on. Maybe I should someday. Walnut Lake was heaven for little boys. I loved rowing the boat across the lake with Grandma at dawn. Grandpa’s hips were too arthritic for boat rides, though he could sleep while floating on his back across the lake. Sometimes with a grandson aboard.
And then, at night, fried perch, bluegill and potatoes. Corn on the cob, if a neighbor brought some. Strawberry shortcake, perhaps. Or watermelon, but we'd have to go outside to spit the seeds. Before poker.
And Al Kaline on the radio hit another home run for the Tigers.
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