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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Seaforth News, 1955-07-28, Page 7Some of Baseball's Best -Known Screwballs The late Uncle Wilbert Rob lnson's Brooklyn Dodgers (call- ed the Robins then) had been taking their spring exercises in Jacksonville, Florida, for some- thing like three weeks when a rookie inquired idly of his roommate, "Hey, what's the name of this town, anyhow? "You mean to tell me," the roommate demanded, "that you been here all this time and don't know what town you're in? For gosh sakes, don't let Roble hear you say something like that." "Who's Robbie?" the rookie asked. "They don't have characters like that in baseball these days," old-timers often complain, wist- fully and inaccurately. "The game hasn't got the color it used to have." Fact is, the harle- quins and gowks and chowder - heads are still with us, and probably as numerous as they ever were. Trouble is, there are no Ring Lardners or Charley Dryden to make them memor- able in prose. After all, there never has been more than one Rube Wad- dell or Ossie Schreekengost at e time. (It was Waddell whose contract provided, at his room- mate's insistence, that he must not eat crackers in bed, and it was Schreek, the roommate, who once nailed a steak to the :hotel dining room wall in elo- quent criticism of the delicacy.) Over the years, the zanies and characters have come along in !tingle file, and they're still com- ing. Before the 1955 season is done, there'll be tales told about !Some worthy inheritor of the eap and bells worn successively by Waddell, Bugs Raymond, Van Lingle Mungo, Dizzy Dean, :Hobo Newsom and, if you like, Yogi Berra, writes Red Smith In "Home and Highway." Perhaps the most imaginative :raconteur of them all was Marry Steinfeldt, infielder with the old Reds and Cubs, though that claim may be disputed by anybody who has had a dish of -lea recently with Al Schacht or fty Gomez. Steinfeldt told admiringly of at second baseman in the Texas :League who was spiked making The putout on an attempted titeal. He limped about for e Moment, resumed play. He hart - idled every fielding chance fault- lessly, made a home run; a ONLY FOR DUMMIES — Looks like an amusement park high - ride, but it's something the bravest thrill -seeker would hesitate to tackle. It's a dum- my -occupied ejection seat which Was displayed at the recent Paris, France, air show to dem- onstrate power behind the blast that hurls a pilot from a crip- pled jet plane. It's for real-life use only in emergency. He Gets a Bang 1 + t of Life 11 began when Harold fi Herd first saw an ancient cannon in a WestCoast museum. The instrument engineer decided then and there to make a miniature of it from metal. He. did, and ever since has been building, shooting and selling what he calls the "world's smallest real cannon." Public demand has turned his hobby into a business. He's even had to supply kits for hobby shops. Harold Herd checks the' scale of one of his tiny cannon. His working miniatures range from 15th Century French bombards to the ear-splitting Rodman gun of the Civil War. The "little big shots" can be fired just like a real cannon Powder, paper wad and ball aro rammed into the muzzle and the charge is touched off with a smouldering punk. They have amazed artillerymen with their accuracy. One -inch bulls -eyes at 200 yards, are commonplace. Two of Herd's cannon are being fired at targets in above photo. double and two singles in four times at bat. He and Steinfeldt started off the field together after the game. "Wait a minute," said the second baseman. "Feels like there's something in my shoe." He sat down, removed the shoe, and shook out two toes. There was the spring when Clark Griffith took his Washing- ton team to camp in Charlottes- ville, Virginia, and made each player deposit all his money in the hotel safe on arrival. This was to protect them against temptation, Confident that none of his heroes was able to buy his way into trouble, tariff was prepar- ing for tranquil rest one even- ing when, musing at his win- dow, he saw two men tottering out of the hotel under a weighty burden. He recognized Eddie Ainsmith, his catcher, and a playmate toting the safe away in a quest of a cracksman, There was also, in fairly re- cent times, a four-eyed pitcher named Walter (Boom -Boom) Beck whose earnestness was not always matched by his effec- tiveness en the mound, He was working for Brooklyn in Phila- delphia's Baker Bowl, a tiny playground whose tin -faced right field fence resounded res- onantly when batsmen like Chuck Klein or Lefty O'Doul flogged line drives against it. Hack Wilson, playing right field for the Dodgers, had de- voted the previous evening to pursuits of his own taste, and was hung aver like a porte- coehere. He grasped and heaved and floundered chasing down Hits that ricocheted off the wall. Max Carey, the Brooklyn man- ager, made several visits to the mound to suggest that Beck re- linquish his place to a relief Boom - Boom pitcher, begged tor and was grant- ed another chance. Bang! went the line drives. Boom! And Wilson huffed and puffed and panted in pursuit. Again Carey called time, and Hack took a breather, feet wide, hands on knees head hanging low as he sucked in deep breaths. Firmly this time, Carey told Beck he was through. In furious protest, the pitcher flung the ball away. toward right field. Hack heard it slam the tin wall behind him. fIe lifted his head, wheeled in panic, scooped up the ball on first bounce and fired to second base the best throw he had made all day, We still have 'em — the Becks and Wilsons, Steinfields and Waddells — but it requires a little time to appreciate them. It was only last fall, for ex- ample, that some of the news- papermen covering the World Series heard from Branch Rickey, Jr., what it's like to be OUCH! — Waldo Corthes doesn't even clinch his fists as a Volks- wagon auto runs over his pillow -covered head in Wiesbaden, Germany. Of course, a Volkswagen is not the biggest car oiround, but would you like to try the trick? An Earlier Ballad Of Davy Crockett The present vogue of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" remids the student 01 balladry that this isn't the first time Davy Crockett has been romanticized and wide- ly sung in popular song. A hun- dred, years ago or mare, another song about him was going the rounds, another "Ballad of Davy Crockett," a piece still alive in tradition in the South and West, where versions of it have been recovered in West Virginia, Ken tucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. It all began with a blackface minstrel song called "Pompey Smash," a name popular enough in the 1840's to be parodied by Olcl Dan Emmett as "Pompey SEES SEA DAVY — A seagoing Davy Crockett. That's what 7 - year -old Bart Howard found at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco. Young Bart's hero was the figurehead on a clipper ship named for the King of the Wild Frontier. the employer of one of these baseball whacks. A newspaperman had been recounting how Branch Rickey, Sr., who could give William Jennings Bryan twenty pounds and outdo him in persuasive eloquence, had been talked to the edge of despair in a wage discussion with a rookie named Dizzy Dean. Young Branch chuckled, "I wonder if that was the same clay a little thing happen- ed at home," he said. "I was still a young fellow. Dad came home for dinner one night and he wasn't like himself. He was always a handy man with a knife and fork, you know, but this night he just picked at his food and he kept muttering over his plate. "I heard him say, 'But I'm an intelligent man.' I said, 'What did you say, dad?' But he kept talking to him self. 'I know I am," he said. 'That's what worries me,' I said, 'Huh?' but he went on to him- self. "I'm as intelligent as the next man,' he said. 'Why, I'm a Doctor of Jurisprudence. I read, I think, I discuss weighty mat- ters with great men. I know I'm intelligent, but-' "'Listen,' I said, 'what's go- ing on, anyhow?' The old man slammed his palm down on the table and all the dishes jumped. "'But he said, .'I spend five hours talking to a Dizzy Dean!'" O'Smash," with a bow in the direction of the stage Irishman. In this blusutering piece of min- strel horseplay, Pompey Smash, like Davy Crockett, is a "princi- pal statesman" who, without his head, weighs half a ton He is a Negro -minstrel parody on Davy Crockett and the myth of the fire-eating frontiersman. This minstrel song deals with three of Davy Crockett's folk exploits, all recorded in the pub- lic prints of the 1830's and 1840's. One describes the mytho- logical battles Davy had with Mississippi boatmen. When he locked horns with these critters, he yelled seven times as loud as a whole drove of blurts and his eyes stuck out two inches, like the Irish champion Cuchulain's in his battle rage. The second incident rose out of Davy's reputed discovery that he could grin a coon out of a tree, and thus save powder and lead. One night he attempted to grin a coon out of one of the highest limbs of an old tree. He grinned but • nothing happened. Frustrated, he went back to his house, got an ax, eut down the tree, only to find that the exon was not a coon but a knot in the branch. He felt a little bet- ter when he discovered he had grinned all the bark off the branch. The third bit of business took place when he was campaigning for his seat in Congress. He went clown to Hay Hollow, caught an alligator, bridled him with a bridle of panther hides, and then got on his back and rode him up to Bear Clearing, right to the stump where the Other candidate was speaking. The other candidate left in a hurry, and t h e votes were Davy's. In the natural courses of folic• lore, folk incidents like these could have gone directly into a folk ballad of Davy Crockett. But they didn't. A minstrel man got in between the incidents and the ballad. Out of these inci- dents he made a minstrel song, in which a Negro named Pom- pey Smash me et s Crockett, watches him attempt to grin clown a coon, and fights with him when Crockett fails because the coon is made of woad. The epic fight results in a draw and Pom- pey goes on to other adventures with fallen stars and an alligator. In turn, the folk straightened the minstrel man's satire, turned his parody into a folk ballad, started a shift in the emphasis of the ballad from Pompey Smash to Davy Crockett, where, of course, it had been originally Out of this minstrel song, the folk imagination made the first ballad of Davy Crockett. The folk extracted the single main incident of the coon episode and consequent fight, and dropped out the less interesting material, as time and transmission have cut and concentrated many a ballad before this one.. The folk also worked over the punch couplet, full of the exag- geration beloved of those who exploited the frontier, until it emerged in this, its most concen- trated.and effective version, from Arkansas: Come to s'arch heads, both heads was missht', He'd bit off my head, an' I had swallered his'n. It was this memorable couplet that made the incident, the min- strel song, and the ballad. 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FOR SALE COMPLETE bathroom suite 6125,95! Complete line of plumbing supplies. PIppe, fittings and fixtures. Inquire Avenue: obligation. 38, Quebec. 01 Tenth USED Grain Binders and Threshers for sale. A quantity of binders and threshers in several makes and sixes. r use. Reconditioned reasonable dsatisfaction�guaran- teed. We 1ph E, Shantz Alma Ontario. v Phone er. eDrayton 887823, HELP WANTED UNENCUMBERED, young man. reli- able, for mixed Ontario farm, perman- ent if satisfactory, Preferring good Protestant home to high wages, D. Ittihad rIttihadIttihade guson, Ferguson Beach, C MEOICA, SATISFY YOURSELF — EVERY SUFFERER OF RHEUMATIC. PAINS OR NEURITIS SHOULD TRY DIXON'S REMEDY MUNRO'S DRUG STORE, 335 Elgin, Ottawa $1.25 Express Prepaid POST'S ECZEMA SALVE BANISH the torment of dry eczema rashes and weeping skin troubles. Post's Eczema Salve will not disap- point you, !totting sealing and burn- ing eczema acne, ringworm, pimples and foot eczema will respond readily to the stainless, odorless ointment, regardless of how stubborn or hopeless they seem. POST'S REMEDIES PRICE $2.50 PER JAR Sent Post Free on Receipt of Price. 889 Queen 51,E., Corner of Logan. TOO Dying Wishes Can Be Costly "When I die I want you to bring me here!" So said the pretty Scots girl as she spun around an Edinburgh dance hall to the dreamy strains of a waltz. And when she fell desperately ill she made her husband prom- ise to scatter her ashes at the spot where he had romantically proposed to her—on the floor of the Palais. Gruesome, maybe! But it was truly the last waltz when the young man turned up at the dance -hall with a casket --and duly scattered his wife's ashes on the gleaming floor while the organist played "I'll Walk Beside You!" An Australian rancher express- ed a last wish to have his ashes scattered from the air over the land he owned and loved. A friend who ran an air -taxi, Mr. Stanley Porter, of Brisbane, per- formed this last rite and took his two sons with him on the trip. It was a dying wish that brought death—for the 'plane crashed and Porter and one of his sons was kilted. When Francis Covell, the New York painter, expressed a wish to have his ashes shot from a gun on a hilltop overlooking his hone, there were technical dif- ficulties. The family comprom- ised. by attaching the ashes to coloured balloons, which were then shot down! in Rome Fannie Lepetit di- rected that she should be buried with all her jewellery and she went to the tomb—a vault with steel doors -with $300,000 worth. But since then there have been so many alarms of midnight in- trudes at the cemetery that the police are demanding Fannie should be exhumed and the jewels returned to her family. Sentimental eccentrics have asked to be buried with family photographs, sheets of music and even tape recordings. 50% MORE BUTCHERS 14,777 Canadians were em- ployed as butchers or meat cut- ters in 1951, an increase of more than 50% over the 9,485 in this occupation in 1931. IT Alf BE OR LIVER If life- not worth living It Irmo be your liver! lee a leatklt takes op to two pieta al five, bite a day to keep your disootive treat in top chapel If your liver bilo la not flowing trolly Your food may oat digest . , . gee bloats ap your atomaah ... you feel constipated and. as the tun and sparkle go out of life. That's when you need mild gentle Carter'. Little Liver Pala, Theme Ramona vegetable pills help atlmulate the Powof liver bile. goon your di tion atone functioning properly, and you !eel that happy days me hero again! Don't war stay sunk. Mulatto keep Carter's Little Liver PRI. ole baud. 87i at your druretat. OMEN ANDITWOMEIES N BE A HAIRDRESSER JOIN CANADA'S LEADING SCHOOL Great ortunity Learn Hairdressing Pleasant, dignified profession, good tyages.veldu agraatesocessful Marvel America's Greatest System Illustrated Catalogue Free Write or Call MARVEL HAIRDRESSING SCHOOLS 358 Bloor St. W , Toronto Branched: 44 King St., Hamilton 72 Rideau St„ Ottawa PATENTS FE:HERSTONHAUGFH & Company, A Established n• l countries. AN OFFER to every inventor List of Inventtona and full information sent free. Att rneys, Ramsayhe 23 Co,,Bnk St.teOttPat- awa, PERSONAL ice'" $1,00 TRIAL offer. rwenty-five deluxe personal requirements, Latest Cate, logue included, The Medico Agency, Box 124, Terminal "A" Toronto Ont, TEACHERS WANTED "SUDBURY DISTRICT" Two now mod- ern two -room schools, 4 miles front Sudbury require principals I grades 4.8) approximately -30 pupils each. Salary in accordance with qualifica- tions. 'Duties to commence In Sep- tember 1955. Please send applications to Mrs. D. R. Forbes, Box 395, Sudbury, lent," WANTED! A qualified Protestant. teacher for 1955.56 term. Salary $1,300.00. Apply to; Lester Draper,. See.-Treas., R.R.2, Gracetield,; Que. ISSUE 30 — 1955 SPEED QUEEN — Fleet - footed Mrs. P. Perkins doesn't worry about male wolves. She can outrun most of them. The Bri- tish housewife is pictured above winning the two-mile team race in the Ladies Inter -Club Athletic meet at London. Her time of 11127.2 set a women's record for the distance. E Ds ST w i tit CALCIUM CHLORIDE MECHANICAL SPREADER Available For Large Areas The Toronto Salt Works Limited 196 Eastern Ave., Toronto