A group photo of my Fall Creek Little League team from the north side of Indianapolis in the summer of 1960 evokes a cavalcade of memories and reflections. It gives the lie to any assertion that group photographs, as a genre, are stiff or staid or a matter of meaningless formality. This one helps me to recapture the social world I inhabited at the age of 10. It also conjures my father, the team’s coach, at a much younger period (age 40) than I generally picture him. And it deepens my appreciation of a question he posed to me a few years before he died.

I received the photo just a few years ago from Gordon Dunne, front-row, right.  Gordon continues to live in Indianapolis and is one of a scant few high school friends with whom I have maintained contact. He sent me a copy of the picture after reading about Dad’s passing. I was not a kid who easily made close friends while growing up—often preferring to rely on my brother Leon’s more developed social skills and tagging along with his friends or relying on our mother to invite over kids whom we knew by way of their parents.  I rarely invited over peers that I had gotten to know independently; Gordon was one of those few. He had come to know and admire both of my parents and remained aware of them as he stayed in Indianapolis. He fondly recalled playing on the Yanks, the team that my Dad coached.

Gordon’s family, like mine, were registered Democrats—which was not commonplace in my neighborhood or among the broader population of the affluent white suburbs of Indianapolis. While coaching the Yanks, my Dad once came home from a meeting of all the team coaches to report that another coach had been extolling the virtues of Richard Nixon—then the Vice President and the GOP candidate for President.  “What I really like about him,” Dad quoted him as saying, “he reminds me of that Senator McCarthy.”  This was six years after the anti-communist witch-hunting senator from Wisconsin had been censured by the U.S. Senate. Dad, a lawyer and founding member of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, said he was so flabbergasted that he didn’t say anything. But political kinship wasn’t the reason for my bond with Gordon. I was drawn to his easygoing personality and his sense of humor.

One of the first jokes Gordon told me and other boys was during recess in third grade or so. A woman is riding a bus and has a bad headache and is searching desperately in her pocketbook for her aspirins, but having no luck finding them. “My aspirins! My aspirins!” she calls out loudly. (But in Indiana, we pronounced the word aspirin  as assburn.)  The bus driver calls out, “Lady, if your ass burns, stick it out the window and let it cool off!” This was a really risqué joke for me at around age 9. I always remembered it, but I’m positive I never told it to anyone.

My brother Leon and I are the two boys with glasses on the left of the front row; I am on the end, with one knee up and one down. This team would mark Leon’s final year in Little League. Note the ball in his left hand: he was a left-handed pitcher and—truly unusual—a left-handed second-baseman. (It’s much quicker to make the throw to first when you are throwing across your body from the right side.) He would become ineligible upon turning 13 in 1961. In contrast, this was my first year in the Majors. I was just one year behind Leon in school, but my December birth date put me two years behind him so far as Little League was concerned. I was 10 in the summer of 1960 and would get to play two more baseball seasons before moving up from Little League to C League.

There was a rule, at least in the Fall Creek Little League, that Major League teams should carry two ten-year-olds on their rosters. The two on our team were Tom Bushman and I.  Tom is in the front-row beside Gordon. There were other teammates (including Gordon) who were going into sixth grade like me at Fall Creek School, but they were already 11 and would have just one more year of eligibility.

Tom, like me, had an older brother on the team. His brother Bill is in the back row, with his hat obscuring just a bit of my Dad’s left cheek. Dad was concerned early in the season that Tom had a weak arm and wanted him to be able to throw the ball in from the outfield. For decades, Dad was fond of quoting Tom’s response when he suggested that Tom should throw the ball around at home with his brother Bill—get some extra workouts in to supplement our time together as a team. “Why, Mr. Fink,” Tom asked, “you think Bill needs the practice?”

Two decades later, Tom and his wife would buy a house on North Park Drive just down the street from my parents. He would be one of the air traffic controllers to go on strike fighting for safer and saner conditions in the air traffic towers in 1981, and thus he would be one of the casualties of the early months of the Reagan Presidency. Bill made a complete career transition, opening a carpet-cleaning business. From what I heard, be ran the business with integrity and was much happier without the stress of the airport tower. But in 1960, we knew him only as our best pitcher. Tom and I, as the younger brothers and the two 10-year-olds, mostly got into the lineup only a few innings per game, and mostly played in the outfield, But Dad gave me a few innings at first-base, my favored position, from time to time.

I remember Gordon’s personality off the field but in truth, I do not retain any good visual images of his conduct on the diamond.

In the middle of the front row is Jeff Kuhn, a kid in my grade who was 11. The smallest member of the team but also very athletic, you could always count on Jeff to give the maximal effort at all times. He almost never struck out. And if he got on base, he could steal.

Paul Ford is on the right end of the back row. He was in my grade, often in my class at school, and also lived in my neighborhood. He was our starting center fielder. This photo shows him when he was sort of slow and strong and a little beefy; in seventh grade, his hormonal changes would turn into a track star who had no extra pounds and could outrun anybody. He would also be the first boy I knew to “go steady,” and I think it lasted all the way from seventh grade through the end of high school.

Our catcher, Brian Dixon, is on the left of the back row. Speaking in a high-pitched, almost squeaky voice, he would maintain a running commentary while receiving the pitches. “Pitcher catcher, pitcher catcher, pitcher catcher!” Meaning—don’t even think about the batter; it’s just you and me.

I don’t remember much about Brian but I do recall that his father spoke in some kind of accent, perhaps from Scotland or Wales. His father stunned me by saying that, even in the summertime, Brian had to be up by 6:30 every morning. I’m not sure if they had animals to feed or what, but most of us had the luxury to sleep later than that during summer vacation.

Next to Brian Dixon is one of our 12-year-olds, Eric Filippo. I think he was our starting first baseman. In between Bill Bushman and Paul Ford are two similarly looking boys with blondish coloring whom I cannot recognize. However, I know that one of them was named Don Scotten, and I believe he played third base. Since I haven’t named a shortstop, the other boy may have been our shortstop when Bill Bowman pitched (and he may also have played second base when Leon pitched.) I am quite sure that Bill Bowman was the starting shortstop when he wasn’t on the mound.

This brings me to that conversation I had with Dad a few years before he died. It was so unusual for him to ask for help in remembering something. In fact, I can’t put my finger on any other similar conversation I ever had with him. Typically, he not only remembered the names of all his own high school friends and college friends and men who had shops or dental offices in his hometown of Newton Falls, Ohio, and people he met during his years in the Army. He even tended to remember the names of people I talked about from high school and college as well or better than I did.

But here he was, calling one day from his law office, where he continued to work every day right into his 90s. He wanted to know if I could help him. He had been trying to remember the names of each of the players on that 1960 Yanks team—which, he reminded me, had won the league championship. He had nearly all of them all in his mind, but he was missing one.  He proceeded to go through the lineup. “Brian Dixon was our catcher. Either Leon or Tom Bowman pitched. Eric Filippo was at first base…Leon was at second…”. He went right on, “Paul Ford and Jeff Kuhn” in the outfield, and I’m pretty sure he mentioned another boy, Jay Trieb, who also played outfield and isn’t even in the photo. But Dad was right; he was certainly on the team and in fact was our best base stealer. Dad mentions someone for each position, but he is missing the name of our shortstop. Over 50 years have passed, and Dad is frustrated that he’s forgotten the name of one of his Little League players. It was such a powerful moment that I even discussed this during the eulogy I gave for him in 2015.

If only Gordon had sent me that group photo a few years earlier.

 

 

With This Ring

I’m not superstitious or especially sentimental,  and that’s a good thing because over the years I’ve lost some precious pieces of jewelry –  two or three watches,  innumerable earrings,  and even a few wedding rings.

When we married my husband gave me a simple band – not of gold or silver but of jade.   I lost it.

He also once gave me a ring set with a lovely pink opal.   One day I looked down at my hand and although the ring was still on my finger,   I saw that the opal had fallen out.  I searched,  but it was nowhere to be found.

And once in an antique shop in London we bought a beautiful diamond cocktail ring for me.   I lost that one too.

Then one summer at the beach I took off my wedding ring to put on suntan lotion.   Apparently the ring fell off my lap onto the sand,  and I forgot about it until we got home.   We went back to the beach to search but it was like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack.

And once we were having a marital dispute in the car,.  As we approached the Brooklyn Bridge I threw my wedding ring out the window onto the FDR Drive.   Did we even try to find that one?   Fuhgeddaboudit! 

But here’s a story with a happier ending.   At work one day I was in the teachers’  bathroom and took off my wedding ring to wash my hands.   I didn’t realize I’d forgotten to put it back on until I was home later that night.

The first thing In the morning I called the school and left a message for John our wonderful school custodian asking him to look on the sink in the teachers’ bathroom for my wedding ring.

I got to school about an hour later and went straight to John’s office.   When he saw me,  without a word he dropped to one knee.   I put out my left hand and John slipped the ring on my finger.

– Dana Susan Lehrman

“Hi mom, it’s me, calling from Sweden.”  This will have to be short.  It is expensive.  “When was Grandma born?”  “What was her father’s name?”  I need some crumb of information if we are to have any luck tracking down relatives, and this was all unplanned. 1897.  Carl Corsberg, from ”Smaland”. That will have to do; she knows almost as little as I do.

And yet there we were, in the middle of southern Sweden, at the Swedish Emigrant Institute, full of old ship manifests, church records, US and Swedish census data, microfiches.  It was now or never.  It was 1998, and we were on a road trip through Scandinavia.   At the last minute, researcher Sally had discovered that we would pass through Vaxjo, the site of the Institute, on the way to Stockholm, so why not try to track down my Swedish genealogy?  About which I knew nothing, other than those few fragments just now gleaned from my mother.  I was the skeptical eye-roller.

It is not so easy to research Scandinavian names.  Historically, most Swedish family names changed each generation, taking the father’s first name (e.g. Nils Anderson) and turning it into the child’s last name (e.g. Gustav Nilsson), whose own child would be, say Sven Gustavson—and so on.  To make it worse, there seemed to be a recurring handful of names  (Magnus, Sven, Gustav, Karl, Peter, Anders etc).  And “Smaland” is not a town, but the region of Sweden from which came most of the many thousands of emigrants who left in the late1800’s.  In fact, so many emigrants went to the Midwest, the Institute sponsors annual “Minnesota Days” reunion events.

The young man on the staff who helped us, reluctantly at first given our meagre information, got more excited when he found the name was unusual;  Corsberg (in Swedish, Korsberg) was probably a place name, possibly adopted from a stint in the army where “knekt” names were used to distinguish between all the fellows with identical names. There was hope.

He quickly dug out evidence of Korsbergs, at least one of them born in Korsantorp (close enough to make it the source of a knekt name), others from Brunshult, both spots reportedly close to Hjortsberga (the only name on any map), and not far from where we were in Vaxjo!  The chase was on.  We hazarded fruitlessly through one lane roads in forests and farmlands in the general direction of Hjortsberga, hoping for some revelation in the red or yellow painted wooden farmhouses scattered over the landscape.  No magic.

Shadows lengthened, and we made our way to Hjortsberga, where we came upon the inevitable town church.  Figuring that we might as well make use of what remained of the late summer evening, we ambled through the graveyard with little expectation, armed with a rudimentary list of names from the Emigrant Institute.  And there were the headstones!  Korsberg, Brunshult: bingo.  Unbelievable.

Who knew, maybe some relatives still lived in the area.  On the street was a phone booth, with a phone book (not unbelievable in 1998).  Go ahead, look inside.  There were indeed a few Korsbergs.  I had to be prodded to make a cold call to a random name, and struggled when a Swedish-speaker answered.  But Ingalil connected me to daughter Lina, who knew some English; when she understood the outline of our story, she thought maybe we should speak with Vivi, the widow of an elderly Korsberg who still lived out on the old family farm.  We were invited for coffee and cake (what else?) the next day.

Vivi lived in a red farmhouse out in the countryside–we may even have passed it the day before.  In the grass on the side of the road, sat an ancient engraved stone reading “Brunshult”—not a town, but a place.  And so we met up with Ingalil, spouse Bo, Vivi, and son Matts to sit around the table, tell stories through Lina our translator, and pore over an ancient bible with names on the frontispiece.  The family tree we had constructed made clear how the farm would have passed from oldest son to oldest son, which matched up with Vivi’s deceased husband and his parents.  There was lots of smiling and nodding to make up for the language gap, and piecing together the old records was a bit of a stretch, but everyone was willing to give us the benefit of the doubt that there could be some family connection.  Of course, I had brought no pictures or documentation from the US, just my word.

Then suddenly Vivi’s face brightened.  “Oh,” she cried, “the Americans!”  She disappeared up the stairs and returned with an old photograph.  There was Carl, the son who had emigrated, with the wife and children he had acquired in Colorado, sitting proudly in a formal group picture.  And the daughter the front row, the last one on the left, I recognized–my grandmother Esther.

 

On Saturday morning I awoke clear-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to write something in response to this week’s GROUP PHOTOS prompt.  But I was distracted from writing by a series of aggravating and delaying techno snags. 
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