My Seasons / Excerpt
Chapter 6:
Sandlot Journal
My father gave it to me when I was a young man, a small book the size of a pocket ledger. It was written and illustrated by a man named Will Adams, a journal chronicling two sandlot baseball teams that, as a teenager a century ago, he played on in northeast Portland. It’s dated April 10, 1905.
Few people have ever read it, but I’m among those few. Will Adams, you see, was my grandfather.
I wish he could have known how much his words and drawings and self-invented box-score system have meant to me. But he died when I was 8, never realizing the legacy that would be handed down to me.
He played for two teams, one a school team — Williams Avenue School, just north of today’s Rose Garden area today — and the Albina Tigers, a summer team.
Those were the days of thick-handled, think-barreled bats and mitts that weren’t much more than padded garden gloves. In that decade, Honus Wagner set hitting records that would stand for four decades. The hot dog was invented. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was written. The World Series began. And Ty Cobb — two years older than my grandfather — left the fields of Georgia to play semipro baseball for $50 a month, carrying with him a pocketful of change and an edict from his father: “Don’t come home a failure.”
According to the baseball journal, my grandfather occasionally pitched but mainly played second base—the same position I played as a youth and the same position my two sons have played extensively. He also was team statistician and, judging from the journal, held that oh-so-rare position: team artist.
He would play a game, compile his own box score and draw sketches of teammates playing in baggy white uniforms with hats that made them look like police officers. His box scores were like none I’ve ever seen:
1 = scored
X = died on base
0 = made a good hit but was put out on base.
My grandfather finished the 1905 season with nine runs scored, three DOBs and 14 MAGHBWPOOBs.
“I pitched the first three innings,” reads one entry. “Good many errors on both sides. I made the only score in the last by knocking a home run. A poor game without any double plays or science of any kind.” Another: “Teachers and half the school were up to see the game. Two cops tried to fire us off but after same pursuasian (my spelling deficiencies, this suggests, are genetic) they said we might finish the game.”
Reading the journal and looking at the often-comical illustrations, it was easy to imagine Will Adams’ life neatly wrapped in nine-inning innocence. But when the yellowed newspaper clippings slipped out from the back pages, reality slid home, cleats high. The headline is: Mrs. Welch’s Serious Charges. The story reads:
Luzetta L. Welch has made application for divorce from William J. Welch, in the state circuit court. Cruel treatment is charged, and Laura Trabaunt is named as co-respondent. The plaintiff, as specific acts, states that the defendant on one occasion threatened to throw her out the window of their house; at another time she says he choked her, and once claims that he beat and otherwise abused her. She also alleges that he will not let her see her child.
The plaintiff in this court case was my great-grandmother. The child was my grandfather, Will Adams, who was seven at the time his parents’ marital land mine exploded. Laura Trauant, we can assume, was the “other woman.” I hate to imagine what “otherwise abused her” might have meant.
For all that he would accomplish in his 74 years, my grandfather’s greatest triumph may well have been overcoming the very man who helped give him life. For his father was an alcoholic, an adulterer and a man whose family paid the price for his anger. (Interestingly, one of Will’s drawings in the book shows a small child with a baseball hat being spanked by an unkempt, heavy-bearded man who scowls as he swats. “Say!!” the caption says. “You’se too small and little.”) After his parents divorced, my grandfather was brought up by a stepfather, a Mr. Adams, whose name he took.
Generations of pain often repeat, the psychologists tell us now, but Will Adams did not repeat his past. He was imaginative, artistic and slightly mischievous. He and his pals — guys nicknamed Happy, Gus and Woozy, according to the journal — published their own neighborhood newspaper called the Hooligan Gazette. And they played baseball. Lots of sandlot baseball.
“The Albina Tigers and the Lower Albina team played a nine inning draw Sunday morning, each team making 7 runs,” said one newspaper clipping in the journal. “As the Lower Albinas refused to play it out, the umpire decided in favor of the Tigers.” (I take pride in knowing Will Adams was on the team that wanted to keep playing.)
In one sketch, he shows a first baseman reaching for a high throw. (Caption: “Harry always was a natural born reacher.” Another, after an 8-1 Albina win, shows two feet sticking out of a grave, a shovel stuck in the ground. (Caption: “Put away.”)
At season’s end, he drew a player walking off, bags packed, in an apparent retreat to what my father always said was his father’s real summer passion, camping. (Caption: “Back to the woods.”) On the next page: A finely sketched close-up of a rose. (Caption: “We have rose colored hopes for the future.”)
After a traumatic childhood, I believe Will Adams’ future did get rosier. In fact, he became known as “Whistlin’ Willie” because everywhere he went, he whistled. He met my grandmother. He became a father to my father. And though I remember only one memory of the man — buying me a candy watermelon at Arch Cape while I was visiting at their Cannon Beach cabin — he has become more real to me now than he was then.
Still, I wish I could call him back, as Ray Kinsella calls back the players in Field of Dreams. I would love to ask him about the Albina Tigers and Happy and Woozy. About his abusive father. I would like to tell him about how his grandson — me — and the two great-grandsons he never knew played second base, like him. And, finally, I would like to thank him for breaking the chains of abuse and for giving those of us who followed rose-colored hopes for the future.
