Supermen: For America, #1

By Ken Kuhlken

Otis Otterbach, born the day the atom bomb destroys Hiroshima, is mentored by his grandma, a poet and painter who teaches him to believe in the implausible, and his father who coaches him in baseball so well, he becomes a big-league pitching prospect. But wicked conflicts visit in the person of Cynthia Jones, mother of Casey, Otis's best friend and catcher.

 

Experience a road trip to the little league world series, read about a little girl lost in New Orleans, a boy tormented by sex and other facts of life, and the MLB draft, and.mysterious mission that takes Otis and Casey coast to coast and turns their lives upside down. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hickey & McGee
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223670605

Ken Kuhlken

Some of Ken’s favorites are early mornings, the desert in spring, kind and honest people, baseball and other sports played by those who don’t take themselves too seriously, most kids, and films he and his Zoe can enjoy together. He earned degrees in literature and writing including the Master of Fine Arts from the Iniversity of Iowa. His books, which include the HIckey Family Crime Novels and the For America Collection, have gotten honored by Poets, Essayists and Novelists, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Private Eye Writers of America.   

Book preview

FOR AMERICA

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. John F. Kennedy

Book One – Supermen

One

From Clifford Hickey: 

When Otis Otterbach finished writing his story, he came to me, an old friend and teammate, also a journalist. I suspect he chose me as his editor because he doubted most people would believe him,  but he thought I would, since I knew plenty about the lunatic Cynthia Jones. 

From Otis:

Earl Otterbach pitched two minor league seasons: 1940 for the Texas League Tyler Trojans, 1941 for Wilkes-Barre of the Eastern League, both Cleveland Indians affiliates. Then came Pearl Harbor. Like most ballplayers his age, Earl enlisted. In July 1943 he was a corporal in Patton's 7th Army on the outskirts of Messina, Italy, when a German slug ended his pitching career.

While home on leave, he married Chloe Garfield, a school teacher in Piedras, a congregation of high hills on a mesa from which we could see the haze over Mexico and the foggy Pacific. 

Chloe began labor the same day an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy obliterated Hiroshima, Japan. Earl was home on leave. He chose my name, Otis, after his grandfather, a third baseman.

Upon his discharge, my dad agreed to move in with us at Grandma's house. My grandpa, an attorney with a missionary fervor, took on more pro bono cases than billable ones, yet he paid off the mortgage before he died of overwork at age eighty-two. Freedom from rent and Grandma’s help taking care of me allowed my mom to go on teaching and my dad to open a small cabinet shop. Besides family and baseball, woodworking was his passion. 

Grandma's house was an American Foursquare built in 1905, a design both simple and elegant, with twelve rooms in two stories, an upstairs deck on each side, and a half-basement. The yard was shady with eucalyptus, pine, olive, mulberry and pepper trees, on a hillside acre overlooking the main boulevard of Piedras. From the upstairs decks and back yard, we could see all the way to Mexico and the Pacific beyond the Coronado Islands. Even the Dukes of Durham in England, from whom Grandma assured us we were descended on her side, or our ancestors on Grandpa’s side who resided for a short, tragic time in the White House, might have envied our home. 

I had a battalion of cats to chase and pamper, big dogs with whom to wrestle. And Grandma who kept me from breaking bones by climbing too high in the trees, blessed me with hugs and kisses and, most of all, told me her stories. 

From Grandma, I learned about the historical Hiawatha, disciple of the prophet called the Peacemaker and unifier of the Iroquois, and about Longfellow’s warrior Hiawatha and Minnehaha for the love of whom the warrior slew the evil magician. I befriended the Hunchback of Notre Dame, admired the repentant thief Jean Valjean and despised his nemesis Inspector Javert. Grandma provided my dreams and daydreams with Robin Hood, Maid Marion, and King Richard of the Crusades, and with Merlin, sorcerer and advisor to King Arthur and his rowdy, chivalrous knights obsessed by the call to adventure and devoted to recovering the Holy Grail and thereby restoring health to the Fisher King and his kingdom. And I came to adore Grandma’s most revered hero, Joan of Arc, who may have been crazy but who lived and died true to her calling. From Grandma, I learned that stories aren’t make believe so much as pathways into another world.  

Most every day, in her studio out back of our house, Grandma told stories and recited poems while she layered colors and textures on the landscapes she painted, and I watched, listened, and lived the noble adventures. With such a life, I rarely lamented that my dad worked long hours and came home sleepy and my mom took few breaks from correcting the countless essays she assigned her eight grade English classes. Wherever we went, she brought along and corrected papers, even at ball games. 

My dad cared little about money. If he could have collected on the IOUs and promises customers gave him, we might have prospered. He loved making dressers, tables, chairs, kitchen and bathroom cabinetry. But to quibble over money simply felt wrong to him, except when my mom disputed what he spent on baseball.

The AAA San Diego Padres played at Lane Field, a wonderland on the waterfront. A foul ball might carry over the right field bleachers and spook drivers when it landed on Broadway. A long foul just south of third base had a chance of bouncing onto a tuna clipper or Navy ship and going to a sandlot team in Singapore. Beyond the right field fence and across Harbor Drive, the Southern Pacific passenger and freight trains roared in and out of the Santa Fe depot. To me, Lane Field was holy land.

Every season, my dad treated us to at least a dozen Padre outings, most of them Sunday doubleheaders. When my cousin Ward joined us, between innings we squeezed under the seats of the rickety bleachers and climbed through the splintery labyrinthine structure. After a batter got announced and we emerged, my mom set aside her grading and brushed us free of spider webs.

Between outings to Lane Field, I spent most waking hours either living in Grandma's stories or in daydreams of the Padres, who usually thrashed the Hollywood Stars and the Seals from San Francisco, often behind the pitching of Memo Luna. And on one of those Sundays, three days before my seventh birthday, I climbed the rail above the right field bleachers, faced the crowd, and announced, I'm going to be a pitcher.

For a quiet, shy boy, that was a brazen act as well as an ominous prophecy.

Two

Down the hill from Grandma's house, at the junction of Piedras Boulevard and 92nd Street ―which my dad calculated as 100 city blocks from Lane Field ―I discovered another holy place, a sandlot outside the Boys and Girls Club where bigger kids gathered. Grandma used to walk me there and keep watch while I chased balls for the big boys, played catch if any of them would humor me, and got laughed at for wearing my dad’s pro ballplayer glove, the Rawlings Bill Doak model, even though my whole hand could fit into a finger slot. 

Then, during spring of my eighth year, a gang of men strung a fence, built two wooden dugouts, and hung a sign that announced tryouts for Little League.

My dad had read in a Friday newspaper about Little League, founded back east and swiftly expanding our way. The next day, he went to the library and looked up the official field dimensions, then built a mound in our yard and installed a scrap-wood pitching rubber and home plate forty-five feet away.

Every weekend I threw a couple hundred pitches to him. After a month I could usually hit the strike zone seven or eight times out of every ten. And once I told him about the upcoming Little League tryout, he strung lights between a pepper and an olive tree, so he could catch my pitches after his long workdays.

The flyer my teacher had passed out warned us that boys couldn't play unless they would be nine by before August 1. But since my birthday was only six days too late, and since I could already throw strikes, I thought they would surely let me play. My dad said, Maybe. 

Every weekday for a month before tryouts, I ran straight from school to the field with the new kid-sized Rawlings glove and a regulation Little League ball my dad bought me and waited until enough other boys showed for us to play workups or over-the-line. Most of the boys I knew or had seen around school. But the one I liked best, the boy I counted on, who some days even got there before I did, was Carl Jones. Nickname Casey.

Casey had copper hair and the freckles kids get from summers of sun-burning, peeling, and burning again. He lived one street  above the Boys and Girls Club, across a narrow valley that widened to make room for the ball field, on another hill, a twin of ours only shorter and not quite so rocky. A Padre outfielder like Dick Faber could've thrown a ball from Grandma's house to Casey's.

Casey would have gone to my school except his mom, the terrifying Cynthia Jones, made him attend St. Martin's Catholic Academy.  His dad, Casey told me, was in heaven.  According to some neighbor kids, Cynthia probably killed him.  When I told my mom that rumor, she laughed. Having met Cynthia at a library gathering, she said, "Mrs. Jones is rather spooky."

In February, dusk came way too early and sent most of the boys home. Only Casey and I stayed until one of us got a lump or bruise from missing a ball in the dark.

My dad slept in on weekends, but on tryout day, my pleas and excitement lured him out of bed before sunrise. We hustled down the hill and stood third in line at the Little League sign up table, holding cash for the fee, a completed information form, a phone bill for proof of residence, and my birth certificate.

My dad knew the fellow behind the table. Tom Shields, a builder of custom homes, who now and then bought my dad's cabinetry and was a favorite customer because he paid on delivery. He said, I hear you've got quite an arm, young Mister Otis.

I blushed while my dad handed him the papers. Tom Shields looked them over and nodded until he scanned the last item, the birth certificate. Well, he said, this is unfortunate. He looked me