Tenkiller is a typical eastern Oklahoma burg: a grocery, a barber shop, a beautician’s, a pharmacy, a seed-and-feed depot, a hardware store, a mechanic or nine. Back then, our chief industry was Deck Glider, Inc. Deck Glider belonged to a Tulsa-based firm called the H. C. Hawkins Company. Before the war, Tenkiller’s Deck Glider plant made heavy-duty floor waxers. My mama’d gone to work on its assembly line in the fall of ’37. Her moonlighting outside the home irked Daddy so bad, though, it goaded him to walk.
Anyway, after Daddy left, without so much as a fare-thee-well or a forwarding address, Mama had to work to keep us fed. By the time of Pearl Harbor, she’d worked her way up to a line manager’s position. Problem was, after FDR declared war on the back-stabbing Nips, the WPB-War Production Board-told us floor waxers didn’t contribute to the defense effort. Neither did toasters, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, vending machines, toothpaste tubes, and lots of other products with metal or plastic in em. So the WPB cut the supply of materials our factory needed to make the Deck Glider. In fact, it was illegal to make a floor waxer. You could even get fined for hoarding old toothpaste tubes.
Mama nearlybout panicked. How’d she support us if Deck Glider shut down? Tenkiller didn’t offer much in the way of jobs for women. It already had all the carhops, waitresses, switchboard nellies, and secretaries it needed. Besides, any of those jobs would’ve meant a step down in pay. Mama had monthly house payments to meet. There were men, heads of bigger households bigger than ours, even scareder than Mama.
Then a section chief from H. C. Hawkins headquarters in Tulsa motored down to soothe everybody’s fears. The parent company-old Mr Hawkins had brains-had arranged some war-production contracts with Uncle Sugar. Deck Glider, Inc., would close for a month to convert its equipment and its assembly lines to the boring of gear housings for antitank guns. No one would get laid off. It might even be necessary to add on to the plant and hire some line workers from out of town. Local builders would have to put up housing for these people. Commuting-even with car pooling and special gas and tire allotments for defense workers-was unpatriotic.
When Mama told me how the Hawkins Company had saved her job, she cried. “It’s gonna be Boomer Sooner around here again, Danny. The armed forces need a lot of antitank guns.”
But even after Deck Glider geared up for war work, a core of old hands-native Tenkillerites-set up their hours, or traded off with new workers on other shifts, so they could attend Red Stix home games. The plant ran three shifts. It never shut down. Mama worked days, six days a week. Even so, our field had a bleachers section, behind the backstop, for Deck Glider personnel. Despite her shift, Mama never missed a home game or a single hour of paid labor. She traded off or went in early. And Mama was no crazier for the Red Stix than Mr Neal, the barber, or Tom Davenport, the owner of a wildcat oil company, or anybody else in town. The Red Stix glued that sagebrush community together. Deck Glider and our local churches didn’t even come close…
Sunday mornings, New York ’s Mayor LaGuardia read the funnies to his city’s children over the radio. A station in Muskogee picked up this feed and played it for us dumb Okies and Arkies. I heard him once. I knew LaGuardia’s kisser from Movietone newsreels. I’d seen him conducting civil defense exercises, supervising air-raid wardens and such. He’d wear a white metal helmet, wave his arms, and carry on, reminding me of Lou Costello, the short funny fella in the Abbott and Costello comedy team. Over the radio, he sounded sort of sissyish. How did a fella who looked and sounded like him get to be mayor of New York? Tenkiller’s mayor, Gil Stone, wore yoke-collared shirts, snakeskin boots, and dungarees.
Then I read in the Tulsa World that a crew of politicians wanted to halt major-league ball for the duration. LaGuardia got hot about that. He ripped into the jerks: “Our people don’t mind being rationed on sugar and shoes, but these men in Washington will have to leave our baseball alone!” Hooray for LaGuardia. A guy who stood up for baseball was defending America better than some hot airbag in Congress, maybe even better than a poor dogface on KP down in Alabama or Missisloppi.
Of course, baseball was my meat and drink. Mayor LaGuardia, even if he looked like Lou Costello, at least read the funnies to kids over the radio and gave the antibaseball nuts what-for. I never stopped to think he had three major-league clubs in his own city, that maybe greenbacks and greed had as much to do with his defense of baseball as a love of the game. Or maybe it was just LaGuardia hanging tight with the Yankees’ pinstripe Mafia: DiMaggio, Crosetti, and Rizzuto. Who knows?
Okay, okay. How’d I get from a sagebrush town like Tenkiller to a peanut-growing burg like Highbridge? From the Red Stix to the Hellbenders, a scrappy gang in the low minors? After all, the war emptied the big leagues’ farm systems. The Selective Service Acts, a.k.a. the draft, carried off so many able-bodied young guys it nigh-on to wiped out the minors.
For a couple of reasons, though, I was a candidate for a farm club, if the farm clubs survived.
First off, I played crackerjack ball. As Dizzy Dean used to say, “It aint bragging if you can back it up.” I could. In the twenty games the Red Stix played that spring-a couple were exhibitions-I made only one official fielding error. Even that boot you could’ve argued. Our scorekeeper charged it to me on a hard drive I knocked down and scooped to Toby Watersong for a force at second. Toby had to reach a bit, and he dropped the toss. The error could’ve been mine, it could’ve been his. But Toby’s uncle happened to be keeping score that day. So what? No sweat, I figured. And still do.
You hear a lot about good-field/no-hit players: whizzes at hoovering up grounders and turning double plays, but zilches at the plate. I could hit. That spring I had thirty-six bingers in seventy-five at bats, including a game against a semipro oil-company squad that didn’t count in our division standings. A.480 average, seventy points higher than Ted Williams hit when he became the first major leaguer since Rogers Hornsby to pass.400.
I didn’t lead the Red Stix in batting, though. Franklin Gooch did. Goochie pitched, played center field, and ran like a scorched jackrabbit. He outhit me by over thirty points. Day after he graduated, he enlisted in the Marines. In June of ’45, he died on Okinawa on Kunishi Ridge, shot through the eye by a Jap sniper. I still have the letter Goochie wrote me from the field a month before the sniper got him.
Sorry to stray. But Goochie’s story ties in, sort of. The second reason I was a candidate for the minors, gangbuster stats aside, was I wouldn’t turn eighteen until after the ’43 season. My birthday’s in November. Even though I was single and a high-school grad, I wasn’t yet draft bait. Even at eighteen, I’d probably end up classified 4-F: unfit to serve.
I had a speech problem. Sometimes, I refused to talk. When I did t-t-talk, I st-stammered. Out would come broken phrases, like bursts from a half-jammed machine gun, then nothing. Sometimes the nothing, even when Coach Brandon yelled at me (maybe especially then), stretched on and on. So I sullened my way through school, eyes peeled and hackles up. Almost every other way, physically, I was normal, but my speech problem gave folks the creeps. If the Army docs didn’t find some physical reason for it-a cleft palate was out, and my bruised vocal cords should’ve healed long ago-Mama figured they’d cull me as a borderline nut case. A GI had to have a voice, if only to yell “Lookit!” when an infiltrator chunks a grenade into a buddy’s foxhole.