“Which part?”
“Dunno. Soul mebbe. The spirit part,”
“How long’ve you known Henry, Fego?”
“Hey, I don’t know him. Joos met him lass winter. I work for him sumtimes since, thass it.”
“Oh.”
“He tol me you roomed with him. Gude. Cause I lak to know the pipple I fly bettern I know this beeg ol Henry guy.”
“Oh.”
“So whatchu thinka him?”
“I think he’s working hard on his soul,” I said. “I think he’s becoming a real person.”
Editor’s Note
Danny Boles, a long-time scout for the Philadelphia Phillies who began working for the Atlanta Braves in 1978, died on opening day of the 1991 baseball season. He was 66. In the early 1980s, he had his vocal cords removed to halt the advance of a throat cancer whose recurrence in 1989 led to his death.
Always a famous raconteur. Boles learned to talk with the aid of a microphone-like amplifier that he held to his throat. The amplifier gave him a mechanical-sounding “robot” voice that he was still able to infuse with personality. To obtain the material assembled in his memoir Brittle Innings, I conducted nearly forty interviews with Mr Boles. They ranged in length from twenty minutes to nearly three hours. He also gave me access to his longhand transcriptions of the journals of “Henry Clerval.” From these sources, I distilled the remarkable text now in your hands.
Look next year for my sports biography The Good Scout, in which I chronicle Mr Boles’s career as one of the most able major league scouts in post-war America. It will not stretch your credulity quite so far as Brittle Innings has likely done, and I immodestly regard it as the best book on this topic since Mark Winegardner’s Prophet of the Sandlots.
– GABRIEL STEWART
Columbus, Georgia
August 21, 1992
Acknowledgments
In addition to my family, I must thank these people: Howard Morhaim, my indefatigable agent; Lou Aronica, an editor and publisher who likes baseball as much as I do; Jennifer Hershey, who edited the ms. with intelligence and care; Eddie Hall, who sent me a little book about baseball in the nineteenth century; Diane Hughes, who told me about her hemophiliac father; Joel Gotler, who saw the film possibilities in this material; John Kostmayer, who did a screenplay based on an early novella-length version of this story; Mark Winegardner, author of Prophet of the Sandlots, a masterpiece of sports writing; and, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the makers of Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein films of the 1930s.
About the Author
Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award – winning novel No Enemy But Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning novel UnicornMountain , and several other novels and short-story collections. He also writes poetry and criticism, and has edited the acclaimed anthology Light Years and Dark and three volumes of the annual Nebula Awards collections. Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, and their two college-aged children. He followed the Atlanta Braves even when they were losing.
