Apocalypse Then: Life Before Canada

By Steve Lehman

The other scout from the Pirate organization who hung around the team was Dick Probola. “Pro” was a lovable little imp with very little hair and an infectious smile dancing on his face. His mouth was a perpetual fountain of wisecracks, bubbling out around the stub of an unlit cigar. He had come to the Pirate organization from Cleveland where his claim to fame was signing “Sudden” Sam McDowell in 1960 for $70,000. The “bonus baby” era was just dawning in MLB. McDowell had a successful career mostly in Cleveland, but after bouncing around a bit toward the end of it, he finished up with the Pirates in 1975.

Sudden Sam is said to be the model for the bartender in the 1980’s sitcom, Cheers. Pro would have been a great character on that show. “It's a great day for squeezing grapes!” He would sing as a manic mantra while hitting pepper with the young prospects. Everyone else picked it up, too, and the chanted phrase echoed all over the field in four part harmony. At the time, I had no idea what it meant. Now, I can imagine Rex Bowen telling the Little Pirate staff one day that their job was to field test the boys. “Give their little grape nuts a squeeze,” Bowen must have said, “and see if these young guys got anything.”

The Little Pirates would meet to take the bus to away games down at Forbes Field in Oakland, and one day Pro got on the team bus in a fit of giggles. He'd just been talking to Roberto Clemente about the progress of his contract negotiations. “I'm not going to kiss Joe Brown's ass and other things,” Clemente had said. Brown was the successor to Branch Rickey as Pirate GM.

Clemente was a Hall of Famer, but he broke all the traditional unwritten rules of the game. He didn’t plant his back foot at the plate, and his body parts flew in all directions when he swung at the ball. He would occasionally lose his hat after a ferocious cut at a fat looking pitch. He was a fantastic right fielder, but his basket catches offended old school sensibilities. After a routine catch, he would sometimes flip the ball underhanded back to the infield. Clemente’s showboat mannerisms were all forgiven, though, because he had the wonderful habit of coming through with the bat in critical game situations.

Mr. Clutch, which eventually became his nickname, was also an exemplary human being like Willie Stargell. Clemente spent most of his time in the off-season doing charity work. He died in a plane crash in 1972 trying to get relief supplies through to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. His oldest son Roberto Jr. spent a brief time at Leech Farm playing with the Little Pirates, but his baseball career was cut short by a serious back injury.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Lehman
• Release date: Jul 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463797334

Steve Lehman

I grew up in the American Midwest but have spent most of my adult life in Canada as a teacher of writing and English literature. Enlightened ideas of education where I work at John Abbott College in Montreal have given me the freedom to create curriculum, enough time to practice my own writing, and the ability to arrange sabbatical excursions. I have also been able to teach for varying periods of time in California, Saudi Arabia, Austria, and South Korea. The most important literary influence on my thinking has been William Blake. He was a renegade poet and visionary artist who lived in England during the early years of the industrial revolution. Blake all but equated creative imagination with God, and the mythological figure that represents this energy in his work is called Los. In a flash of youthful exuberance, I came to see myself as Los Layman, using a variant spelling of my last name. Later, I decided it should be Los Laymen to be more respectful of Spanish grammar and less egotistical. Blake’s idea was that no individual can possess the creative imagination. The spirit migrates among people and from one generation to the next with unfathomable caprice. Writers can only troll the shoals of language in hopes of periodic visitations from Los who lurks eternally in the depths.

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Apocalypse Then: Life Before Canada

by Steve Lehman

Published by Editit at Smashwords

Copyright 2019, Steve Lehman

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer.

Thanks to Rita Toews for the cover and Wendy Allison for invaluable editorial assistance.

Contents

Prologue

I. The Soybean Capital of the World

1.The Mystery of Light

2.When the going gets tough, the tough go swimming

3. Beanballs and Nigger Babies

4. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

5. Sweet Delight

6. The Great Migration

II. How Sweet I Roamed: 1959 - 1964

1. Down in the Mines

2. Baseball Cards

3. Blueberry Hill

4. Husky Bullseye

5. Squeezing Grapes

6. No Martyr's Cause

7. The Will to Live

8. The Parking Lot Rocks

III. A Dayglo U-Haul North

1. The Great Mandala

2. Baked Alabama

3. Winners Never Quit

4. Stinking Gringos

5. Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

6. Purple Haze

7. Yellow Dog

8. 1968

9. Naked in the Noosphere

10. Hell No, Won’t Go

11. A Dayglo U-Haul North

Prologue

This account of my life in the USA before moving to Montreal is not factual. It’s as close to being true as I could make it, but my memory is faulty and selective. All history is imperfect and probably has more in common with fiction than with science. It’s said that the winners write the history, and having survived into my seventies, maybe I’m a winner in some relative sense, but I’m not rich, famous or heroic. On the other hand, if you can see the world in a grain of sand, as William Blake envisioned, maybe you can see all of humanity in every single human being. Maybe there’s a lot to learn from each one of the seven billion plus of us.

My life’s work has been teaching language, literature and writing, and it always seemed necessary to practice what I preach. Being at least as self-absorbed as the next person, that practice has more and more taken the form of memoir. Especially after starting a second family at age sixty, I have wanted to leave a record for my younger children. When they are old enough to be interested in my story, most likely, I’ll be either dead or demented. My adult daughter, too, might be interested in some of the details to follow.

So once again, I would like to dedicate this narrative to Wendy, Joey and Jimi. I’m proud to have played a part in helping them get started in life. Also to my mother, who has always been my best girl and matriarchal guiding star. And to my father who had a difficult personality but an excellent character. He was always there when I needed him. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of Rich Shevchik. For those of us lucky enough to know Snead in those halcyon days, the tragedy of his loss personified the trauma of the 1960s.

As we used to say back then, brothers and sisters, peace!

I. The Soybean Capital of the World

1. The Mystery of Light

You would know the secret of death.

But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind in the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.

Khalil Gibran

Electric fans blew out through screened windows in summer. The idea was to draw in cool evening air through other windows in the house, except there wasn't any cool air, and the humidity was about as high as the temperature. My dad would pull out a worn, white handkerchief, take off his thick glasses, and wipe the sweat from his face in disbelief, puddles forming around his elbows on the kitchen table. No exercise was required to get his glands going like that, as he sat suffocating and grumbling in his drenched tee shirt. He came from Johnstown, Pennsylvania which had a cooler climate, but he had followed my mother to Decatur, Illinois after WWII. I don't think he realized the relationship would turn out to be quite that hot.

Decatur is not far from the Mississippi River and the topsoil in the fields surrounding the town is black and rich from silt carried downstream repeatedly over the millennia on waters flooding the Midwest plain of North America. It looks like the prairie, but it smells like the jungle. The haunting beat of Hank Williams' tortured country blues echoed through my prepubescent blood and eardrums.

The first air-conditioned place I remember was a restaurant my aunt and uncle opened north of town out on Rt. 51. They called it the Shamrock, but I don't think there was any real Irish connection. Walking in there at the age of four was a frigid shock. That same day, my older cousin Ross introduced me to carbonated water. I didn't like it, so he just poured it into the sink and gave me some of the old-fashioned kind. His authority with the restaurant taps was very impressive. Everything Ross did impressed me. I was the oldest kid in our family and needed an older sibling figure to look up to.

I saw my first TV show not long after that. Dad took me with him to a friend’s house, and we watched part of a Canadian football game. I don't remember who was playing, but it must have been the Montreal Alouettes. In 1971 at the ripe old age of twenty-five, I found myself in Montreal, and I've been hanging around ever since. It's a good place to live, but the winters are a little too long and cold for me. Now and again I still get homesick for the heat.

Our family eventually joined the TV revolution. An imposing twenty-one-inch Motorola console model came to squat in the family room like R2D2. Unfortunately, only one station from St. Louis was dimly visible through a snowstorm of flickering pixels. The idiotic falsetto voice of Howdy Doody came through fine, but his image swam into and out of focus through the snow. Soon a local station was created, bringing The Mickey Mouse Club clearly into our home, but Howdy Doody came over a different network, so it faded away into the swirling, white flurries. I was seven years old by then. Air conditioning, carbonated water, and TV: what next?

The most memorable personality on WTVP out of Decatur was a somewhat heavy-set announcer named Al Pigg who did the farm reports. His program came on in the afternoon. It was the first of the day after the test pattern, so I often watched some of it while waiting for Mickey Mouse to appear. Coming from Pigg, the price of pork bellies carried quite a poetic punch, right between my two little redneck eyes. In addition to The Mickey Mouse Club, among other programs we watched were Abbott and Costello, Sky King, and Make Room For Daddy. Probably because it had recently ended, nostalgia for the American pioneer era was at its peak in those days, so there were numerous Westerns like The Lone Ranger, Wyatt Earp and later Have Gun, Will Travel.

The local radio stations were WDZ, which gave Gene Autry sidekick Smiley Burnette his start, and WSOY. Soybeans were our bread and butter.

Augustus Eugene Staley brought soybeans to Decatur, Illinois in the early years of the twentieth century. He had been born right after the American Civil War into a family of Northern sympathizers in a part of North Carolina infested with such contrarians. When he was very young, a missionary returned to his church from China bearing a bushel of soybean seeds. They made an impression on Eugene, even though they were not Roundup ready. Before the age of twenty, he filled his pockets with them, figuratively, and headed north. The incredibly productive, black earth of the Mississippi River valley turned out to be his promise land.

A.E. Staley believed in the potential of the humble bean, intrinsically, but also as the alternate crop in rotation with corn, which then totally dominated the fields of central Illinois. Rotation of the two replenished the soil and vastly improved yields of both crops. Staley first opened a small soybean crusher in nearby Tuscola, then moved to Decatur and began operations on a larger scale in 1912. He circulated promotional material to encourage local farmers to grow soybeans, so that he could crush them. By 1927 Staley was the leading soybean processor in the USA, crushing 39% of the national total. World prices were quoted from Decatur for many years, and the town became famous, at least locally, as the soybean capital of the world.

A.E. Staley also encouraged the guys working in his plants to play football. He organized the first professional football league in the USA, and his Decatur Staleys later moved to Chicago to become da Bears. My father worked for the A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company for almost forty years, and he also played football, though not for the Staleys or da Bears. He played for Windber High School in Western Pennsylvania and Manchester College in Indiana. Sports were an important energy outlet for him, and I learned to love them, too. Dad had been brought up in a German pacifist church between the World Wars, but then he joined the army. In those days, the Church of the Brethren believed that war and dancing were sins, but that football and other sports were merely a waste of time.

Decatur is a bell weather for what is now known as Red State consciousness in the USA. When people in Peoria, ninety miles north of the soybean capital, get confused about how the political winds are blowing, they ask each other, How will it play in Decatur? You can find my hometown on the map halfway between the State capitol of Springfield and Champaign-Urbana, which is the location of the University of Illinois. It had a population of about 65,000 souls when I lived there: now it's up to a little over 80,000.

Decatur's other claim to fame, even before soybeans, was its importance in the life of Abraham Lincoln as he rose to national and international prominence. His family moved from Indiana to a few miles west of Decatur in 1830. He gave his first political speech there, promoting the importance of navigation on the Sangamon River. Having reached twenty-one by that time, when the family moved again the next year, Abe chose to stay in the area and live independently. Let's say, Decatur made a man out of Abraham Lincoln.

He went from Decatur to the village of New Salem, a little north of Springfield, and got a contract to deliver a load of goods by flatboat down the river system to New Orleans. There, witnessing the worst of slavery firsthand made a dramatic impression. Abe returned to settle in New Salem where he lived for the next six years. The village was later restored as an outdoor museum, which my family visited in the early fifties. As such a little kid, I didn't understand the concept of a recreated village, which was a historical museum. I just wondered why that strange little town was so old fashioned.

About the time life in New Salem was being lived as later recreated in the outdoor museum, my great grandfather was fighting in the American Civil War. A teenage William T. Johnson apparently had trouble communicating with his commanding officer somewhere in Tennessee during the Chickamauga Campaign. Through the torturous proceedings of military justice, he ended up out of the service and back home, but soon re-enlisted and returned to Tennessee. He survived the war and fathered my mother's father long afterward in 1891.

Grampy, as he was known in the family, had a favorite story about Abe Lincoln when he was a neophyte Illinois State Legislator. It seems that the opposition party introduced a surprise procedural motion to end the legislative session before the previously agreed upon date. Lincoln's Party decided simply to exit the building in order to kill the quorum, so no vote would be possible. Anticipating this, the Democrats had locked the doors from the outside. Lincoln calmly walked up the stairs, opened a second story window, and jumped out, which destroyed the quorum and kept the legislature in session. Grampy told this story with great relish and considered it proof of Lincoln's political genius.

I like to think that my great grandfather might have had some interaction with Honest Abe in Decatur, hanging around the old log Courthouse at the corner of Main and Main, when Lincoln was an attorney arguing cases on the Eighth Judicial Circuit. And I'd like to think that a young William T. Johnson was present at the Illinois State Republican Convention held in Decatur in May of 1860, where Lincoln was endorsed as a Favorite Son Candidate for US President. The Land of Lincoln is still stamped on Illinois State license plates.

There was a divinely inspired, or somewhat deranged, man in Decatur when I lived there who habitually dressed up like Abe Lincoln, complete with top hat and tails, period boots and a scraggly beard extending below his naked upper lip. He used to walk around town in a trance, a mystically enlightened sadhu. I remember seeing him downtown mostly, but once also out by the ballpark, just walking along alone. Apparently, Lincoln impersonators are still a phenomenon in central Illinois, a claim to cultural superiority over parts of the USA dominated by Elvis impersonators.

My mother's father was a Republican like Lincoln and most folks in downstate Illinois, who thought the Democratic Party machine in Chicago was hopelessly corrupt. That was before the Republican Party came to be dominated by hidebound reactionaries as it is today, and before the Democrats had their change of heart in 1968 and started chasing the Southern segregationists out of their ranks. Grampy was a barber who tried the real estate game in the 1920s. He did well but lost everything in the depression. He continued to cut hair, and then went back into real estate when the economy improved. Later, he entered politics and eventually became Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Macon County.

His friends called him Cotton because of his curly white hair, but by the time I came along, it had mostly vanished. A rotund and graceful man, he would swoop down on me like a fallen tree. Timber! Then he would rub his stubbly cheek against mine, and make Donald Duck noises in my ear.

After he found himself back in the chips, Grampy closed his shop and retired from his day job. He moved a barber chair into the basement of the house out by Lake Decatur where he and Mamie then lived. Down there he continued to scalp his grandchildren, sons-in-law, and I don't know who else. It was a form of torture for a young boy to sit still on the varnished wooden board that he would lay across the arms of the chair. The old-fashioned hydraulic system sounded like flatulence from the bowels of hell when Grampy cranked the long lever to raise or lower it. He would press down with his hand, like a twenty-pound ham, on top of my head while he labored with love, wheezing and snorting intensely. Stop moving or I'll cut off your ear! he would growl. His ample breasts enveloped my shoulders in turn, as he stalked around the chair, clipping and snipping. The bits of cut hair would somehow always fall through the choking, white handkerchief safety-pinned around my neck: taunting jabs from these tiny pitchforks made me squirm in agony.

I was a small-town boy, but we had some relatives on farms around Mt. Vernon in southern Illinois. There was gnarled old Uncle Pat and his elephantine wife who everyone called Aunt Tiny. Apparently, her name was Christina, but no one called her Tina. And there were the Murfin's who had a big farm down there by 1950s standards. I got to ride a horse at their place. I also got to see Don Murfin take a hatchet and chop a chicken's head off against a tree stump: bright red blood spewed from its neck like a fire hose. I suppose all my farming relatives down there are working for Monsanto now, or have moved to the big city.

Mom's Uncle Harry was a banker from further down south in Cairo, Illinois. I only met him once or twice when I was very young and was surprised to be included in his will in the late seventies. He had no kids of his own and wanted to do something for future generations of his extended family. A couple thousand dollars came in very handy at that point in my life.

Mamie was a small, saintly woman who never had a cross word for anyone that I can remember. I took her love and support and food for granted. Mom's mom organized the big family dinners and picnics in Fairview Park that were one of the highlights of my life. The corn on the cob was always fresh and the fried chicken sweet to the bone. I loved playing ball with my cousins: sometimes even dad and my uncles would join in. My older cousin Ross and his big brother Vern, who everyone called Bub, led excursions into the surrounding forest. Once, I slipped while crossing a wet log bridge and fell into a creek. I wasn't hurt, but tearfully terrified from the frigid water