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Trevor's Christmas Essay

He was offered a baseball contract by the Philadelphia Phillies, which would have sent him for seasoning to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ D League’s Beatrice Blues in Nebraska, helmed by player-manager Leon Riley, the grandfather of future Hall-of-Fame NBA coach Pat Riley. It must have been hard on him to say no but he never complained or showed any resentment about the decision. He was making more money as a cream truck driver and had family to think about. All that would be a few years later. Spikes thrown over his shoulder. His uniform and glove tied up with a belt. He was used to walking down dirt roads. If he was lucky someone with a car or a wagon would stop to pick him up, but he never counted on it and he was never late for a game. Mainly, he walked, to Slater, to Huxley, to Boone, wherever there was a game in the area. That day he was walking to Ames for a game in west campus town. His future father-in-law would call him “the long-legged Swede.” Almost everyone else, teammates, classmates, neighbors called him “Sody.” Over three decades later, he was just “grandpa” to me.

I never saw him play, but years later I heard the stories and read some of the clippings. The same customers at his bank and friends who spoke nostalgically about his jokes, the Ole and Lena stories whose whole charm involved their lameness, would mention what a joy it was to watch him play shortstop. Tall for the era, he treated baseball like he did almost everything else in his life, whether it was his appearance, his clothes, his tools, or his cars. Nothing was out of place. Great care was taken with everything. The worst thing one could ever do is appear to be out of control. In an era where everyone smoked, he did not. Drinking alcohol, he never thought of it. No wild lunging at a baseball out of the strike zone. The shirt never untucked. Everything had to look natural and graceful on the field even if it meant a lot of hard work that no one saw. I just knew he was my grandfather and he loved baseball, especially the Chicago Cubs. I remember the trips with my father and him to see the Minnesota Twins play. The afternoons in his retirement watching his team play on WGN. Even at the end, dying in hospice, he watched the game he loved.

I did not understand it at the time. Why was he watching a stupid game at a time like that? The Cubs were going to choke like usual. The three things in life a person can count on are death, taxes, and the Cubs losing. I did not understand it because I did not try to understand that farm boy in an undershirt perfectly pressed walking down that dirt road.

Baseball was freedom for him. He hated life on the farm. His father let him out of chores to play the game. Between the chalk lines he was the master of his own fate. He was not trapped in poverty, breaking his back in a field or barn for almost no personal reward. He could be somebody on that diamond. In a culture where positive reinforcement was unheard of, he got the love and approval we all long for. Enemies after the game were friends. All you had to do was play hard. Later, it was a way, through that game, he could show his son and grandsons that he loved them. Who would not walk a few miles for that?

One day he was playing a game against a team from Van Meter. He was the lead off hitter. The sixteen-year-old farm boy on the mound was named Bob Feller, the “Heater from Van Meter”, “Bullet Bob”. Less than a year later, before he even graduated high school, Bob Feller would skip the minor leagues and be pitching for the Cleveland Indians, even though it violated major league rules at the time causing a three-month investigation by then Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis. While other pitchers like Catfish Hunter and Sandy Koufax have pulled similar feats, only journeyman Johnny Antonelli and Feller did so as teenagers, and before graduating high school. That season he struck out seventeen St. Louis Browns batters and is the youngest pitcher to ever win twenty games. He was probably the fastest pitcher to ever pick up a baseball. The radar gun was not around for most of his career. Clocked later, he routinely threw over 102 mph over the course of nine innings. In 1946, at Griffith Stadium, he was clocked at 107.6 mph, the second fastest pitch ever recorded. When a young fireballer named Nolan Ryan was called up to the big leagues, the nearing retirement Feller could still throw harder than that young buck. What made this teenage kid from Van Meter scary on the mound was that his fastball was not his best pitch. Major league hitters that faced him still talk reverently about his curveball. In today’s world, Bob Feller would have been the Michael Jordan of the mound, and my grandfather and a bunch of teenage kids from Ames, Iowa were about to face him.

For the rest of his life my grandfather told the story of that day with his tale always ending the same way, him making it home as evening fell and saying to his father that he just played against the greatest baseball player to ever put on a pair of spikes. He told the story often and not just because he could drop the name Bob Feller to those listening to him. It was important to him. So, did those plucky kids from Ames and the surrounding area beat the unbeatable Bob Feller? Did my grandfather hit the game winning homerun? Maybe cause Feller to kick the dirt? Did a bunch of farm boys do what most major leaguers could not?

No. Most of the time life is not a Rocky movie. In the real world, Goliath usually wins. In fact, he messes up David pretty good. Bob Feller walked off the mound that day with most of the kids from Ames going back to the dugout with the bat still on their shoulder.

So, why did my grandfather love to tell the story of that game? He had more heroic moments on the diamond. There were games where he put the ball over the fence for the winning run or made the diving play, snagging the ball about to go through the hole to save the victory. When other people tell the story of what happened in that game long forgotten, some claim my grandfather got a hit. Others do not remember. Most of what happened on that diamond has sadly been forgotten in the haze of time. For some reason Bob Feller remembered that game. I know that because my grandfather and he talked quietly about it when my grandfather visited the Bob Feller museum in Van Meter. I don’t know why Feller remembered it. My grandfather remembered it because he “got some wood on the ball.” Against a force of nature named Bob Feller, Lowell Soderstrum, a teenage kid no one ever heard of, got “some wood on the ball.” Sometimes in life all you can do is “get some wood on the ball” and that is more important than you will ever know.

The last few years have been hard on me. I walked away from a Ph.D. program, not because I could not do the work, I was smart enough, but because those in charge were doing some awful things, and as the keeper of the secrets it was easier to walk away than become like them. People in religious authority lied to me, and I lost my faith for a while, a long time. I was promised a job with the Ames Tribune that got misplaced when editors changed. The one thing I wanted to do my whole adult life was talk radio, and I would be great at it. I was offered at job in Seattle, even introduced to my co-host. Then the station financially fell apart a few weeks later. I went to Las Vegas to make my fame and fortune in the mortgage industry with my best friend. He was making money hand over fist. A month later the real estate bubble popped. I found myself living with a jobless alcoholic who never met a bottle he did not like, and a kid who worked his entire life, except for the nine months he lived with me. Sciatica laid me on the ground, unable to straighten up, which I had never experienced before, for weeks on end. Romantic relationships were dashed against the rocks. Lies. Cheating. A cousin and close friend died of a brain tumor. There were days and weeks where I did not know if I was going to make it. I remember looking at bridges and thinking if everything falls apart I could live under there. There have been moments sobbing in my car, not because I was worried about my fate, but because I felt like a disappointment to my father and grandfathers, three people of the most importance in the world to me. I ended up in a moldy basement, not wanting to be there and not knowing what the future might bring.

Maybe you have gone through similar things. For a lot of people the holiday season is an awful time. A season that is supposed to bring people together ends up being nothing but painful and isolating. Maybe you lost your job. Spending your first season apart from your children or spouse. Hard words. Verbal acid sprayed at you by someone you trusted. A special needs child. Cancer. Physical problems. Stress. Mental issues. An addiction. Financial debt that there seems no way out of. The bank has sent that letter to the house. Life does not work out the way we would like. These things are like forces of nature… like a teenage boy facing Bob Feller, the greatest pitcher to ever pick up a glove.

Stay in the box. Breath in. Breath out. Focus. Do not give up. Take your cut. Sometimes the best you can do is “get some wood on the ball” and that is more heroic than most people will ever know. I would like to think that is why my grandfather told that story. Here is hoping you put some wood on the ball.