It”s not enough to simply flop on the couch for a day of football. There”s no way to avoid those ”get off the couch, we”re going antiquing” lectures, after all, unless you appear to be engaged in something meaningful. And so on Saturday I found myself “researching” the baseball career of Johnny Schulte, consuming much of the afternoon in the process.
Johnny who?
I”ll admit he never reached household name status. He appeared in just 192 major league games between 1923 and 1932, playing for the old St. Louis Browns, the Cardinals, Phillies, Cubs, Browns (again) and the Boston Braves. But he also caught for my grandfather on town teams before joining the minor league Oklahoma City Senators in 1915. And I met him once back in the late 70s, just a few months before he died, when he dropped by to see the family one last time.
Now I realize the opportunity I squandered.
There are so many things I could have asked. What captured my attention at the time, however, were his crooked fingers. Catchers suffered more in the early days. The diamond-studded World Series ring he wore also drew my gaze—and not just because I wondered how he wriggled it around the left-right-left course of his ring finger.
You see, Schulte served as a coach for the New York Yankees between 1934 and 1948. On Saturday it occurred to me that I had spent an evening with someone who knew Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio. In fact, I even owned an artifact relating Schulte, Ruth and DiMaggio—a Washington Senators program from the day of the Babe”s funeral. I found it in a box out east (and lost it thanks to an ex who despised old sports junk). The Yankees were playing in D.C. that day and whoever kept score noted in the margins that DiMaggio was in New York to honor Ruth. But Schulte was in the coaching box, visible to the card”s former owner.
On Saturday, while one person in the house suggested this shopping trip or that wine tour or some other diversion from college football, that connection struck me as a point to ponder. I determined to uncover the other greats Schulte encountered.
The exercise was fascinating.
Obviously the rosters of teams Schulte played for or coached were stocked with famous names, such as George Sisler, Frankie Frisch, Sunny Jim Bottomley and so on. He watched Gehrig wither from ALS and heard the Iron Horse”s famous speech first hand. But the others he encountered give color to an era past. For instance, Schulte caught Charlie Root while wearing two different uniforms. Root was the pitcher who gave up Ruth”s famous “called shot.” While with the Toledo Mud Hens in 1924, he shared backstop duties with Moe Berg. Years later, Berg toured Japan with an all-star team, secretly snapping pictures of the Tokyo skyline and key installations for the U.S. military, already wary of that nation”s intentions. During a stint in Terre Haute, he caught 42-year-old Mordecai Brown, better known as “Three Finger” Brown as the result of a childhood farming accident.
Farming is still rigorous, demanding and dangerous. It may have been more so back then.
Brown pitched for the last Chicago Cubs team to win the World Series, way back in 1908. He jumped to the Chicago Whales during the Federal League years. Wrigley Field was built to house the Whales. Brown”s Hall of Fame career began with the minor league Terre Haute Hottentots and ended in the same club, this time known as the Browns. In between they were called the Highlanders—a name difficult to imagine attached to an Indiana team.
The minor leagues were more robust back then, yet also subject to whims both economic and local. Schulte appeared with the Newport News Shipbuilders and the Wheeling Stogies. Over a long career Schulte counted the likes of Sloppy Thurston, Jigger Statz and Socks Seibold as teammates.
Flipping through electronic collections of rosters and statistics was like a romp through America”s past. There was a break in 1917-18 for World War One, the bouncing from team to team during the early depression, hoping to keep paydays coming and the World Series of 1947 when the Yankees battled Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson. When he first played professionally, Ford Model Ts bounced along rutted roads. It ended in the nuclear age.
OK, so he had the experiences. I just made the connections. Yeah, it killed a few hours and kept me planted in comfort on the couch. Yet it also gave a tremendous amount of meaning to an evening way back in the ”70s.
At the time, I was caught up in an old man”s beaten hands and trinkets. Saturday was another reminder that every elderly person you meet has a fascinating story to tell, if only we would stop and ask.
