FLASHLIGHT
34th Flashlight:

OCTOBER  2009

FLASHLIGHT

PAGE 3

OCTOBER  2009 

“Up Too Close or Back Too Far?

(Thomas) Roger Noon '62
         Former Sports Writer for the Flashlight:
 

An alumni reunion is a time to share old times and be reminded of others. And like any event, there will be some who attend because they remembered the “good times” while others will skip because, among reasons, they especially remember the “not so good times”.         

Without a doubt, High School is a critical time in the life of a teenager. During our individual sojourns at Wellston, we were subject to the family and school events of the time, special lingo, up and down relationships of the boy-girl type, peer-pressure, cliques, coping with classes, after school items and homework. Many coped with them very successfully while others struggled.           

There’s something else that goes with this. Some people choose to remember only the good stuff, while others prefer to harp on the bad. We can agree High School was not all fun and games, but we can also agree High School was not all negative as well as some would like to picture it.                

My preference is that I like such reunions for a couple of reasons. One-is that it is an opportunity to return to St. Louis. The startling fact for me is that I have lived elsewhere much longer than I lived in St. Louis. (34 years Birmingham, Alabama, 5 years Louisiana, I year Ohio, 4 years Indiana). Second-is simply that I have the chance to meet and greet old friends. Many of these old friends I really like and are fun to be around, if only for a few hours!           

I think Miss Niles put it best at a reunion we had back in the ‘90’s. She said it was like a scene in a movie (“Brigadoon”?) where a special, magical time comes to people for only a little while and gone again before you know it. So why not embrace and come to terms with it when it becomes available to you?

 I often wonder-if I were to have stayed in and around St. Louis, would I have the same feeling about reunions?  The answer would most likely be yes! And it would be for the same reason as above-the opportunity to gather together with old friends and rehearse stories that I would not ordinarily see and do in the work-a-day world. And like the real world that has people we jell with and people hard to get along with, High School reunions would most likely remind us of the same.

 Some people might feel their lives were not as productive as they would have liked them to have been. They may not like to admit it. They might feel as if others were coming to “show off” their success. But reunions are not to be “comparison contests”. No one needs to be a judge and jury of someone else. We are simply there to enjoy each other. Sometime, you even have a chance to say an “encouraging” word to others who might still be struggling but perhaps for different reasons.

            For a long time my wife has not very interested in her High School reunions in New York despite encouragement for her to attend them. But recently, she has been realizing the friends she made and wonders if she had been mistaken in not attending them before now. So she has been trying to contact old school friends via Facebook. The search has begun, and I think it is opening a new world for her. Upon reflection, she too had her share of good and not so good times, but on balance, it was a good experience.

             I realize this Flashlight item will either be just before or just after our 2009 Reunion. If you are there, I hope the experience is good and refreshing for you if only for a little while. If you are not, I hope we will all be alive to attend and witness the next one in 2012.          Roger Noon ‘62       
 

FLASHLIGHT

                                                            OCTOBER   2009 

FLASHLIGHT

OCTOBER 2009

STAN THE MAN
 

After 22 years as a Cardinal, Stan Musial ranked at or near the top of baseball's all-time lists in almost every batting category. The dead-armed Class C pitcher was transformed into a slugging outfielder who topped the .300 mark 17 times and won seven National League batting titles with his famed corkscrew stance and ringing line drives. A three-time MVP, he played in 24 All-Star games. He was nicknamed “The Man” by Dodgers fans for the havoc he wrought at Ebbets Field and was but one home run shy of capturing the National League Triple Crown in 1948. 

He played his whole career with our St. Louis Cardinal helping to win 4 pennants. During this time Stan was never thrown out of a game.  NEVER!!  Think about this for a moment. Musial played in 3,026 games in his career, or about as many as his contemporaries Joe DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky played combined. He played across different American eras - he played in the big leagues before bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, and he retired a few weeks before Kennedy was shot. He played when Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller ruled the Top 40 charts, and when Elvis was thin. He played when Chubby Checker twisted, before television, and after John Glenn orbited the earth - and never thrown out of a baseball game.

There was this game, in '52, that year the Today Show came to television and the Diary of Anne Frank was published, and Musial's Cardinals trailed the Brooklyn Dodgers by two runs in the ninth. The bases were loaded. There were two outs. Musial faced pitcher Ben Wade. The two battled briefly, and then Musial connected - a long home run to right field. Grand slam. Everyone in the stadium stood and cheered wildly - what could be bigger, a grand slam in the ninth to beat the hated Dodgers - and Musial started to run around the bases in his own inimitable way, not too fast, not too slow, all class. And it wasn't until he rounded first and was closing in on second that everyone seemed to notice at once that the third base umpire was holding up his arms. A ball had rolled on the field just before the pitch. The umpire had called timeout.

Home plate umpire Tom Gorman realized he had no choice but disallow the home run. The stadium went black. The fans went mad. St. Louis manager Solly Hemus raced out the dugout, got into Gorman's face and called him every name he could think of - finally Gorman had no choice and threw him out of the game. Peanuts Lowrey came in like a tag-team wrestler and picked up where Solly left off - Gorman tossed him too. Before it was done, Gorman threw out six Cardinals. He felt like a cowboy in one of those old Westerns clearing out the saloon, throwing out people through plate glass windows.

Musial, who in the confusion had not been told anything, walked over to Gorman. He calmly asked, "What happened Tom? It didn't count, huh?" Gorman nodded sadly and said the third base umpire had called timeout. "Well, Tom," Musial said, "there's nothing you can do about it."

Stan Musial stepped back in the box while fists shook and boos and threats echoed around him. He promptly tripled off the top of the center field wall to score three runs and give the Cardinals the victory anyway. "Stan," Tom Gorman said after the game ended, "is in a class by himself."

Stan Musial grew up in Donora, Pa., during the Depression. They were a family of eight in a five-room house. In Donora, the smoke and fumes from the zinc factory mushroomed so thick and poisonous that no vegetation could grow on the hill. That barren, brown hillside was a constant reminder that the air was killing them. Stan's father, a Polish immigrant, worked in that factory and, not too many years after Stan started playing ball, died from the fumes.

Not that a tough childhood explains everything. Still, there was something about Stan Musial that did not let him forget Donora, did not allow him to change - "I'm so lucky," he used to say every day, more than once every day, so many times that people would roll their eyes. But that seems to be how he felt, every day, lucky.

Harry Caray, who of course first gained his fame calling Cardinals games on KMOX, would tell the story of a beaten down Musial going hitless in a Sunday doubleheader. The heat was unbearable that day - hell could not be much hotter than that St. Louis summer day - and after the game Musial walked gingerly to his car. He looked beaten down. He looked beaten up. Musial never seemed to think of baseball as a job, but a daytime doubleheader in St. Louis might be the closest thing.

"Watch this," Caray said to a friend as they watched the scene, and sure enough when Musial got to the car, there were a hundred kids waiting for him and an autograph. Stan leaned against his hot car and signed every one.

Folks like to say that people have changed. I don't see that exactly. The world has changed. Technology has changed. Movie and ticket prices have changed. Gas prices have changed,. Many of the rules have changed - the reserve clause is gone, Title IX is in place, they let people swear on cable TV, airplanes and restaurants won't let you smoke and you can no longer hold your infant in your lap in the front seat of your car. But people? I don't know. I get a little queasy when I hear old time ballplayers talk about how none of them would have used performance enhancing drugs, and a little queasier when I hear old-time politicians talk about how they always reached across the aisle. We romanticize  America in the 1950s. Those people tend to look a lot alike. Still, it's probably fair to say that there was something unique about the time that produced Stan Musial. Maybe in those days people treasured that thing they used to call class. Maybe they expected their singers to be dressed in tuxedos, maybe they admired strong and silent types, maybe they liked football players who did not celebrate their own touchdowns or boxers who spoke quietly, maybe they wanted their children to believe in a world where baseball players drank milk and said "golly" and married their high school sweetheart. The rest of the story -->

FLASHLIGHT

FLASHLIGHT