Searching for Harry Dorish
We lived at the far western end of Cook County in a little 3-bedroom house abutting the busy highway, Butterfield Road, AKA Illinois 56, surrounded by farms and farmland gradually being abandoned as the farmers sold their fields to developers and made way for the relentless expansion of the city.
But in those days, 1956, to be exact, the city hadn’t yet enveloped us, and we could look across Butterfield Road to a working farm where roosters crowed each morning. A dying farm because for the prior two years the enormous field that extended almost a mile into the town of Hillside hadn’t been planted, despite the fact that everyone said that the best growing dirt on the planet was the black soil of the old lake bottom prairies west of Chicago.
Where nothing was planted the fields reverted to pastures containing a stunning array of grasses, feral grains and wildflowers: goatsbeard, black-eyed susan, cow parsnip, tall clover, morning glory, vetch, dock, Queen Anne’s lace, chicory, and in the fall, goldenrod and asters. Yellows, blues, whites and pink, a glorious tangle providing cover for meadowlarks, redwings, song sparrows, starlings, grackles, shrews, mice, moles, rabbits, gophers and the slippery garter snakes that we loved to catch. We were free to roam on foot or on our bicycles. When I say we I mean me and the neighborhood kids, but mostly I mean me and my brother Rick, 2 ½ years younger. We were inseparable. I knew these abandoned fields were a kind of paradise for us to explore, but by now I also knew that it couldn’t last, because by the time you are 10 years old you are old enough to notice how things have changed.
It was summer and we were obsessed with baseball. We’d converted one of the small vacant lots next to the road into a tiny baseball field where we played pickup games with as few as 4 or 5 kids. A home run was a hit over the telephone wires and into the highway. Someone would need to go searching for the baseball in the ditch across the road in the tangle of Osage orange, cottonwood and elm saplings. Finding the ball wasn’t always easy because the baseballs were never white; knocked free of their covers we applied black electrical tape. A new baseball cost a dollar, which was an almost unimaginable sum, nearly enough to buy a day’s worth of food for a family of five, like ours.
Being obsessed with baseball did not mean, unfortunately, that I was much good at baseball. I could hit, I could catch almost anything on the fly and even run a ball down if it was hit over my head, but I couldn’t field grounders. When I saw a ground ball coming I panicked, tried to stab it with my glove at the same time that I tried to get out of the way, and this conflict of purpose meant that often as not I missed badly and the ball bounced through my legs, hit me in the shins or worse. We’d learned to play without coaching, and maybe if I’d had a decent and patient coach I could have become proficient at fielding grounders, but a patient and perceptive coach was as rare then as now.
My dad was no help. Each day he’d come home from work exhausted, worried about money, worried about how to keep the old Hudson running. He smoked incessantly. At 5’10” he weighed about 145 lbs and on the days when the Hudson couldn’t be coaxed to start (most days) he’d walk the mile into Berkeley, catch the commuter train as far as Manheim Road, then walk across the long, rickety wooden bridge that traversed the railyard to the factory where he worked, a factory that made the containers (“battery boxes”) for the 12-volt batteries used in General Motors cars. He’d leave home with a sandwich in a paper bag and 25 cents in his pocket, enough for the rail trip, coffee and a snack, but not enough for cigarettes. Those he’d buy by the carton, keeping them on the top shelf of the front hall closet, rationing himself to one pack a day, which he’d carry in his front shirt pocket. Lucky Strikes in their red and white packages, no filter.
In 1956 dad was 35 years old, already losing his hair, and looked older. Always he wore a white shirt and tie to work even though he was out in the factory for the better part of most days and the white shirt would come home gray from the dust and carbon black powder used in the synthetic rubber formulas he’d devise. A white shirt and necktie, the uniform worn by the educated workers, the engineers and managers, distinguished him from the regular workmen who wore blue or gray work clothes and who had union jobs that often paid more than what dad earned. Dad’s shoes, although they looked dressy, had steel toes. “You don’t want to be on the factory floor without steel-toed shoes,” he said. He’d seen all kinds of industrial accidents, and in one of them, a man with soft shoes had lost his toes when a steel cabinet toppled over on his feet.
So dad had no time or inclination to help me learn to field ground balls. Part of my problem, I was convinced, was my inadequate glove, one of the cheapest imaginable. I’d needed to restitch the leather webbing that tore when someone threw me a fast pitch. If only I had a real glove, like Denny Richardson! Denny was two years older and lived next door, part of the huge Richardson brood that stuffed themselves into their tiny two-story Cape Cod house. Denny had a Spaulding glove, a real mitt like major leaguers, an Alvin Dark autograph model. He played center field on the Major League Hillside Little League team, which meant he was very good. I once saw him take away a home run by running to the wall, leaping up, and making the catch. Everyone cheered, and I thought, he’s one of the gods. And he lives next door.
Denny did not deign to play in our pick-up games in the little field. If he had, I’m sure he would have socked the ball over the wires, over the highway and deep into the fallow cornfield where we might not ever have found it, so it’s just as well, but sometimes he’d let me see his glove. He’d inherited it from his older brother, who was in the army stationed in Germany. The glove was made of smooth, thick leather, substantial but light, supple, beautifully broken in, the pocket darker where a ball could nestle and never pop free, with a smell like leather and sweat.
“C’mon,” he said. “I’ll throw you a few.”
We went out to his backyard that was separated from ours by a white picket fence, the same fence that I’d run into on my bicycle when I was learning to ride and didn’t yet know how to stop. That collision caused my parents no end of grief, since Mr. Richardson demanded that my father pay for the entire fence to be repainted, which my father had no intention of doing. After 3 years the issue was still at an impasse and the Richardson parents and my parents did not speak to each other.
Denny threw me a hard pitch that I caught easily in his glove. I soft-tossed the ball back to him and he threw me several more, even harder. Each time, the ball buried itself easily in the glove’s supple pocket. Then he threw me a couple of grounders which I snared easily.
See? It’s all in the glove. If only.
“Come to the game tonight,” said Denny, taking back his glove. That was the game where he made the great catch in center field. The legendary catch. One of the gods. And he lived next door.
Yes, if only I had a glove like Denny’s. But a glove like Denny’s cost at least 7 dollars, maybe even 10, so there was no chance of my getting one. For Christmas? No. Everything my parents bought came from Sears, and I’d studied their catalog intently. Sears sold only its own brands, none of which approached the quality of a Spaulding. To get a genuine Spaulding glove you’d need to go into Chicago to a real sporting goods store, a trip that would take a whole day on the train and cost all kinds of money. No, it wasn’t going to happen. In the meantime I consoled myself with the knowledge that I wasn’t as hopeless a fielder as I seemed, but for the magic of a real glove.
We all had our favorite major league teams. Denny rooted for the Yankees (of course, he was royalty) but most of my friends were either Cubs or White Sox fans. The Cubs, even then, were eternally hopeless, so I chose the White Sox, mostly because my father favored them. My favorite player was the White Sox’s left fielder, a Cuban named Minnie Miñoso. Miñoso played with animated joy in each movement. Just the act of drifting lazily under a pop fly told you he knew that playing baseball for a living made a man as happy as he could be in life. On the radio broadcasts I could hear the play-by-play voice of Bob Elson announcing Miñoso’s turn at the plate. Elson never called him Minnie, but intoned his full name: Orestes Miñoso, drawing out each syllable: OOOH-restes Mee-nosooh.
My mother, a loyal Michigander, favored the Tigers and their great players Harvey Kuenn and Al Kaline. Alkaline, my father would joke. Where’s Acidic? And my mother would glare at him. Her older brother Joe had played minor league ball in the Tigers farm system and rooting for Detroit was a kind of family religion. Unlike dad, she knew her baseball.
We collected baseball cards. Topps cards, each pack cost a nickel and contained 5 cards plus 2 dry wafer-thin pieces of unchewable bubblegum that imparted the freshly opened package with its odor. It was seemingly random which cards you got, and if you wanted to collect the whole set, about 200 cards, as I got it in my head to do that summer, you had to beg and barter with your fellow collectors. And keep buying, getting useless doubles of the cards you already had, except that you could trade these away for the ones you were missing. You learned pretty quickly that the Topps Company wasn’t stupid, and some cards were common and easy to score while others were rare as pearls. And it didn’t matter how good the player was. Willie Mays, for example, was pretty easy to get, while others, like the rookie card for shortstop Luis Aparicio, were rare. Both players, of course, are in the Hall of Fame. The rarest card of all featured a journeyman relief pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles named Harry Dorish.
No one had Dorish’s card, no one. The summer was waning, soon the baseball season would be over and football cards would replace the baseball cards on the store shelves. Someone had to get Dorish and finally someone did: word went out that a kid named Andrew, or Drew as he wanted to be called, had Dorish’s card.
Although he lived only two streets away I barely knew Andrew. He wasn’t part of the group that gathered at our little baseball field or who rode their bikes through the fields or who played “best fall” on the dirt piles at housing sites. In fact, Andrew never went outside, at least no one ever saw him. I knocked on his door and his mother answered.
“Andrew,” she called. “There’s someone here to see you.”
Andrew trundled to the door. He wasn’t fat, exactly, just kind of pasty, and moved like he wasn’t used to moving.
Maybe he’s sick, I thought, and it kind of scared me that he might be sick, the kind of sickness that you just had, that was you, that you would never get better from. What if I got it?
“I hear you got Harry Dorish.”
“Who told you?” The house inside smelled like no one ever opened a window. I stood outside, not wanting to enter.
“Everybody knows. Look, Andrew, I have all the other cards. Dorish is the only one I don’t have. I’ll give you 5 cards for him including Ted Williams.”
“I’ve got Ted Williams. Anyway I don’t want more cards. I’m selling them. Penny each for anyone except for Dorish. You can have Dorish for a buck.”
“A dollar? For one card?”
“Yep. And it’s Drew, not Andrew, don’t forget. Come back with a dollar.” He closed the door.
I stood outside for a moment, hoping he’d be reasonable and change his mind, and then finally gave up and walked slowly home.
A dollar? Where was I going to get a dollar? My only source of income was finding discarded beer and soda bottles at the roadside and turning them in for the deposit. I knew the math. I’d need 20 quart-sized beer bottles or 50 regular-sized beer or pop bottles to make a dollar. Other kids I knew got money from their parents for doing chores. Most kids got a weekly allowance, but in our family there was no allowance. You got milk money for school lunch and maybe an extra nickel for a popsicle. Maybe. And your chores you did because you were part of the family and needed to contribute. There just wasn’t any money.
So back to looking for beer bottles in the ditches along the highway. It was dangerous work given the trucks and speeding cars and sometimes I’d get caught in the thickets of sow thistles and come home bleeding. That first afternoon I found 4 quart-sized beer bottles and 2 coke bottles, worth 24 cents. I hauled them home, explaining to my mother what they were for.
“A dollar for one card? That seems unreasonable, like extortion,” she said.
“Supply and demand,” said my father when he came home.
Nevertheless, my quest continued, each day yielding fewer and fewer empties from the ditches I’d already picked clean. My mother, fortunately, took up the cause and sometimes she’d toss a few pennies into the jar where I kept the yield from my bottle returns.
“Don’t tell your father,” she’d wink.
One day my dad came home late from work and tossed a nickel into the jar. “You know,” he said, “Dorish was on the White Sox until they traded him last year. He wasn’t half bad a reliever, actually. Don’t tell your mother.”
That day, to save the nickel, he must have walked the extra mile and a half on which he usually took the train.
It took three weeks for me to accumulate a whole dollar. A tough three weeks. The little store down in the center of Berkeley where I returned the bottles was the same store that sold the baseball cards. I’d stare at the display rack holding the card packs and think, I have all this money. I could just buy a few packs and see. Maybe I’d get Dorish.
But I didn’t bite. I held steady to my plan. Meanwhile school had started and although I saw Andrew on the bus, he never looked at me. In fact, he sat alone. Maybe I should sit next to him and make friends, I thought, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want him to be my friend. This was a business arrangement, not a friendship.
Maybe he doesn’t even have the card. After all, I’ve never seen it. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?
Finally the day of reckoning arrived and after school I marched to Andrew’s—Drew’s—house carrying my glass jar containing a whole dollar in change and knocked on his door.
Once again it was his mother who answered and summoned him. She glanced at my jar and said to him, “Remember what I told you, Andrew.”
“I’ve come for Harry Dorish.” I held out the jar to him, but he ignored it.
“I’ll get the card. Wait here.”
Same smell. Like something was wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.
Andrew came back with the card and handed it to me. And there he was, the smiling face of Harry Dorish with a background picture of him striding into home plate. Dorish once stole home as part of a double-steal and his record as the only pitcher ever to steal home stands to this day.
“One cent,” said Andrew. He held out his hand.
“I thought you wanted a dollar?”
“My mom says I can only charge you a penny. So one cent.”
I looked at my jar. All that work and now he only wants a penny.
“What if I give you a nickel?”
He looked around. “Shhh. That’d be great. Thanks.”
I gave him a nickel. “Bye, Drew. Thanks for the card.”
“Bye.” He closed the door.
I wasn’t sure what to think. When I got home my mother saw the jar, still full.
“What happened? Didn’t he have the card after all?”
“No, he had it.” I fished it out of my pocket and showed it to her. “His mother only let him charge me a penny so I gave him a nickel.”
“Well, that was nice, and now you’re rich,” she said. “You still have most of your hard-earned money.”
“Yes,” I said proudly. I tried to think of something I’d do with the money but nothing came to mind. It wasn’t close to enough for a real glove. I went to the bedroom Rick and I shared and stashed Harry in the shoebox where I kept my cards all neatly sorted and put the jar containing my money in the top dresser drawer, along with my underwear and socks.
It was an unexpected feeling, now that my quest was completed and I’d finally collected the whole set, a feeling that, after all that effort, did it really matter? Yes, it mattered, but maybe not all that much. Not as much as I thought it would. More like a relief that my quest was finally over and I could move on to something else. I felt like a weight had been lifted.
My jar didn’t stay there long. My youngest brother, Gary, who was almost 4, existed on a diet of honey sandwiches. He refused to eat anything else. Soft white bread, margarine and honey, chased with a glass of milk. We were out of milk and bread but the milkman was coming this afternoon and my mother had paid him in advance. But Rick and I both wanted grilled cheese sandwiches when we came home from school. No bread. No cheese. My parents operated on the thinnest of margins.
I remembered a couple of years back when we’d gotten low on food and I’d asked my mother if this meant we were poor.
She laughed. “Please, you mustn’t think that. Sometimes we get a little strapped but we’re not poor.”
She took me aside and hugged me. I think she was trying not to cry. She never ever talked about growing up, unlike dad who told us story after story about his boyhood in Duluth. She hugged me again, then smiled.
“Don’t ever think that,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
So not poor, just strapped sometimes. Strapped.
“We’re out of eggs for the morning, too. You could get yourself a popsicle,” she said.
“I want one,” said Rick.
We went off on our bikes down the Taft Avenue hill toward the center of Berkeley to the grocery store, and I held the little glass jar carefully so that it wouldn’t fall and break and scatter the coins all over the street.
We parked our bikes near the worn wooden steps that led up to the front entrance. A tiny bell tinkled whenever anyone opened the door.
“I was wondering when I’d see all that cash you’d collected with those beer bottles,” said the grocer. He had an enormous bald head, wire-framed glasses which barely fit over his ears, and wore a long white apron cut out at the sides so he could put his hands in his pockets.
Half dozen eggs, a pound of American cheese, a loaf of bread and two popsicles came to 82 cents, counted and recounted beside the cash register while other customers grumpily waited.
Rick and I sat side by side on the front stoop eating our popsicles. The stoop was wide and we were careful not to obstruct traffic in and out of the store. I got an orange popsicle and Rick got a grape.
“Trade you halfzies,” he said.
So we traded halves. I got grape, he got orange.
“Bet you if I buy a pack I get Dorish.”
“Bet you don’t.”
“So give me a nickel.”
“Why should I give you a nickel?”
“You owe me a nickel. Remember?”
“I don’t owe you any nickel. I already paid you back that nickel I borrowed last year.”
“Well give me one anyway.”
So I gave him a nickel. In truth, I wanted to know if he would get Harry Dorish because he was lucky that way, and wouldn’t it be strange if he got the one pack that contained that one rare card just when I no longer needed it.
He didn’t. He got Adcock, Ford, Mays, Lollar and Malzone. A terrific lineup, but no Dorish.
“Here, you keep the cards. I just wanted to know.”
I glared at him and stuffed the cards in my pocket.
“You gave me the nickel. You didn’t have to.”
We climbed the Taft Avenue hill toward Butterfield Road then walked our bikes on the sidewalk along the highway. The air had a musty end-of-summer smell. Ragweed and goldenrod pollen, my dad said. I carried the groceries in a paper bag under my arm, trying not to squish the bread. I had eight cents in my pocket.
Eight cents, after all that. Kind of a relief, really. Money does funny things to people.
“Are you going to be friends with Andrew now?”
“Nah. He never goes out.”
“He gets all the good cards, doesn’t he.”
“I think his mother buys them for him.”
“So what, they’re still cards.”
They were still cards but it wasn’t the same. Even buying the exact card you needed, like I’d done with Harry, wasn’t the same as getting it in a pack or trading for it. Maybe that’s why I’d given Rick the nickel, to have one last chance of getting Harry the right way.
But, right way or not, I finally had Harry safely tucked in with the other Orioles, and we had food for the afternoon and for breakfast and lunch tomorrow. With eight cents left over. A good day, all in all, if you thought about it like that. A pretty good day.
DAVID BATEMAN, a retired physician, spent a large chunk of his childhood in Berkeley, Illinois, where he learned to play baseball on the rutted farm fields that were rapidly being swallowed up by Chicago.
