I Remember Harry Perkowski

That summer of 1949, at twelve, I got closer to baseball. I carried a ball and glove in the car in case I met someone who wanted to play. I judged people by their baseball connections: if they didn’t have any, they weren’t interesting to me. One of my grandmother’s neighbors, Mr. Martin, took on new stature when I learned that he was the famous Horsey Martin who pitched softball for Appalachian Electric Power Company in the City League of Beckley, West Virginia. I wouldn’t have guessed: he looked just like an ordinary guy-square, ruddy face, wore gold-rimmed glasses, never said much. But now I always spoke to him. He still never said much.

If I wanted to play baseball, there was only one place in Beaver I really could count on it; up on Tank Branch Hill with the Wills boys, Jack and Jeep. Almost no one else would play—they called it hardball, and it hurt your hands—so the three of us would go up the road from the Wills home and climb over the fence into Old Man Wolfe’s field. Sometimes we could con another boy or two into playing, but we rarely had more than a pitcher, two fielders, and two batters. So we played a simplified version of the game, called Straight Base, or Move Up. If you hit the ball, you had to run through the pitcher’s area and be safe at second base, or lose your bats. If you got to second, you had to get back home on the next batted ball, or you were forced out. There was no first base, at least not off at a ninety-degree angle to home. When you made out, you were “last man in the field,” and all the other fielders moved up a position closer to batting. However, a fielder could go directly to batter if he caught a fly.

Usually we “threw easy” to each other, like balling practice, so we could hit the ball. That was the most fun. But one day Bobby Meadows, a big boy from down the road, wanted to play and impress us with his fastball. It wasn’t that fast, but it was too fast for us, and he looked at you with disgust if you didn’t swing, although a lot of his pitches weren’t within reach. That day was no fun. Nor was it if Paul Pendleton was there: he was a blank-looking little blond boy who wouldn’t swing at any “dead pitch” because his brother Mason told him not to. That meant I couldn’t use my Gene Bearden knuckleball.

Lots of times we didn’t play Move Up, but just shared the joy of chasing flies. I hated to waste any chance to catch one. It irritated me greatly to see the fungo-hitter try to hit a throw as it bounced in from the outfield, because he almost always sliced it off to the side, and we just had to waste time chasing a foul ball. No one liked chasing grounders, and anyone (such as I) who couldn’t consistently hit fungoes took a lot of heat. We also shared the suffering of stoved fingers, usually thumbs, when we let a fly hit wrong on our tiny gloves.

As summer went on, nature shut our games down. Old Man Wolfe didn’t mow his field, and by late July the outfield grass was knee-high. Chasing a fly was like splashing after a ball in a pool. We would have to retreat to Jack’s front yard and just “pass some ball.” There wasn’t another convenient field big enough for baseball. On Sunday drives with my family, I began a quest for the ideal available field, evaluating all the vacant lots and pastures I saw. “There’s a good one, grassy and level,” I would think, or “we could play there: no one could hit it out,” or “too bad that one’s got a stream running through it,” and so on, adjusting sizes, building fences, trimming grass, landscaping, and laying out diamonds in my mind.

I was particularly enamored of a field near Hedricktown, the shanty part of Beaver. This field was long and wide and dignified and sloped gently up toward a small hill. Part of the slope now was covered with small evergreens, but it was easy to imagine the baseball field they said used to be there, where the old town team played and people had picnics and watched on Sunday afternoons. What happened to it, I wondered. Why did it stop? Why can’t it come back? Is everybody hiding something about baseball? I felt so alone. It was only about a hundred yards from the main road, but somehow I never walked over to inspect it closely. It was just there, like the background landscape in a comic strip, the cactus in “Red Ryder” or the stick palm trees in “Popeye” or the “Katzenjammer Kids.”

At home, the most relief! could get from my itch for baseball was to throw a ball up in the air and catch it. My oldest brother was only seven, not worth throwing to. He wasn’t interested anyway. At least once a week I might have the treat of a visit from Bill Brown, the deliveryman for Kester’s Dry Cleaners. He had been a friend of Dad’s for a long time, and always spoke to me in a friendly way, but paid more attention to me when Dad told him I had become a baseball fan. Bill was a fan of long standing, and loved to share his memories with me, but wasn’t condescending. He would drive up in his bright red panel truck and stop on a summer day and talk baseball. He was a bald, tanned man with a heavily lined face that held a grin a long time as he told me baseball stories. His gold teeth would show, too, as we sat in the shade of the front porch and talked. He looked like I thought a baseball manager should. Bill used to take the C&O excursions to Cincinnati and see the Reds. Once he said he saw Eddie Miller, playing shortstop for the Reds, run way down the left-field line and catch a foul fly over his shoulder. “They had these wooden folding chairs down there for the bullpen crew to sit on when they weren’t working,” Bill said, “and Eddie caught the ball just before he got to the chairs. He caught it, and whirled around and sat right down in one of the chairs. People gave him a big hand.”

I liked that story because Eddie Miller, now near the end of his career, was a utility infielder for the Phillies, my NL favorites because of young Robin Roberts. I could see Miller making the catch. It was a sunny day, an afternoon game. Bill also told me that while most people thought of Ralph Kiner only as a home run hitter, he once saw Kiner hit five straight singles in a game. “Little humpback liners,” Bill said, ‘Just right over the infield and sharp down into the grass-zing! zing!” He made a quick horizontal and downward motion with his cupped hand. He said Kiner could have been a percentage hitter if he had wanted to be, but there was more money in hitting home runs. I knew Kiner’s famous remark about singles hitters driving Fords and home-run hitters driving Cadillacs.

Although the major leagues played on into October, local baseball and softball tended to wrap up by mid-August, because so many of the players and coaches had to turn to preparing for the really big sport in the area-football. High school practice started the Monday closest to the middle of August. Bones Bragg was going to be a freshman at Shady Springs High School that fall, so he went out for football. One day that August of 1949 I was playing in the front yard when I saw Bones strutting down the railroad track, coming home from football practice, carrying his cleats over his shoulder by the laces, neatly tied together. He said he was the starting center on the freshman team, and invited me to do some pushups with him. I didn’t know how. He put on his cleats, dropped down in the yard and briskly dipped through a dozen or so. I tried, but couldn’t lift my body off the ground. ‘Jesus, Bobby,” Bones warned me, very seriously, “you’re gonna have to learn to do pushups if you want to play football.” Yeah, I said. Bones had wounded my confidence again.

Seventh grade started and as a veteran, I began to assume some position of authority on the recess softball field. I also followed the major league season through the World Series, and although I wasn’t excited about the Series, I hated to see the season end. I wasn’t prepared for the delightful surprise that followed for me a week later. Harry Perkowski, the Reds’ rookie, was going to pitch in Beckley! The lead on the story in the Raleigh Register read:

Local fans will get a chance to see a big leaguer in action Sunday. The occasion will be a game between the Eccles Admirals, champions of the Raleigh County Baseball League, and the Raleigh Clippers, who claim the Southern West Virginia Negro title, Sunday afternoon at 2:30 at Clipper Park on the Stanaford road.

Boy, this game had it all—the only local boy in the big leagues, the best team in the county league (whose games Dad wouldn’t let me attend because all the teams were from coal towns, and he thought the crowds would be too rough), and a hotshot black team. My first baseball game. The ballpark was out behind Beckley Open Air Theatre. My best friend Jack Wills and I went, and the day was miserable, cold and damp. To my surprise, there wasn’t a very big crowd. We stood along the sidelines behind the dugout between first and home, because we’d read that was the best place to watch a game. Actually the “dugout” was just a small structure with a roof and chicken-wire sides, and benches inside. It enabled us to watch the players closely, and I didn’t like what I saw: all they did was clean mud from their spikes and smoke cigarettes constantly, taking a few puffs off one and then throwing it on the ground, like the way Dad used to drop cigarettes and ashes on the floor at home when he’d rest on the couch in the middle room in the evening when he got home from the mines. I thought players were not supposed to smoke.

Even Harry Perkowski smoked. But he pitched beautifully, and we were perfectly located to watch him, because he was a lefthander. We were so close and he looked so big in his Cincinnati road uniform and blue cap with the red pointed “C.” He was so smooth and long-striding in his follow-through, so attentive to his work, so straight and square in his posture. The other players would watch him and talk among themselves. He pitched five innings of scoreless ball, allowed three hits—one by Sonny Watts of the Birmingham Black Barons—struck out five, walked none, then moved over to first base. Okey Mills, the county sheriff and the Admirals’ star pitcher, finished up, and he held on for the win, 5-3.

Harry, a strong lefthanded hitter, helped with the scoring, too, hitting a towering home run in the fifth. The bat whipped into an uppercut and the ball, white, shot high, very high, darkening, angling sharply up from the cold mud of the field, up toward the chill gray glare of the sky, a little dot disappearing black into the woods beyond center field.

The Register next day said the fences all were 500 feet away, but Bob Wills, the sports editor, asked Pat Salango, a Stanford engineer, to measure the home-run distance with his engineering tape. Salango said it was 420 feet to where the ball cleared the fence and 453 feet to where three eyewitnesses said Harry’s homer landed. Bob looked in the record book and deduced that the homer would have left all but four Of the fourteen major league parks at their longest point from home plate. Best he could find, Babe Ruth supposedly hit a 500-foot home run during spring training in 1913 and Jimmie Foxx hit one 550 feet in a league game. “So, after all,” Bob concluded, “history wasn’t made Sunday. But-that boy can still wallop the apple.” And I had been there.

And on top of that, I was going to meet Harry Perkowski. Montgomery Ward’s had hired him to work in the sporting goods department for the winter, and one Saturday soon after the home run, Dad, 35, took me uptown to meet Harry, 27. We got there early in the morning and Harry was along in sporting goods, wearing a brown suit, looking tall and strong. The space vanished between us. “Harry, this is my boy,” Dad said, smiling with his lips bunched together. Harry, looking serious, reached out and politely shook hands with me. Seconds stretched. Words floated in jello. We left. “I met Harry Perkowski,” I boasted to Jack Wills. No one else would have cared to know.