And So The Story Goes…

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February 25th, 2016

Welcome to Thursday Blog Day! I’ve discovered that picking Thursday as my day to blog is one of the best decisions ever. Like, ever! Like, totally! For the last 10 and a half years I’ve just written blogs whenever the feeling hit me, but for those last 10 and a half years I wasn’t also writing a book. I was writing all sorts of press releases, columns, and PR updates, but those also tend to fall into a specific pattern and in total they might add all the way up to 2,000 words in a week. Possibly 2,500, tops. This week, so far, I’ve written about 8,000 words, which is a little more manageable than last week, when Chapter 7 stretched 33 pages and 18,000 words. Chapter 8, this week, is a more standard length for the flow and pace I’ve been using, checking in at about 15 pages.

So, what that means is that I’m really writing a lot, and that’s a wonderful thing, but if I didn’t carve out Thursdays for this blog I’m pretty sure it would always come in a distant last in the race to put words together. All of that is just a long-winded way of saying this new Thursday Blog Day tradition is a really good one and a really efficient use of my time.

These last two chapters have been a riot to write. That means they’ve been a ton of fun. It doesn’t mean all the keys on my keyboard broke into a huge brawl and set my desk on fire. I’ve gotten to the chronological point where the younger version of me is in college, and the last two chapters have delved deeply into those years in two different ways. Chapter 7 was heavily focused on my classes at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville and my four years of NCAA baseball there. Chapter 8 goes back to freshman year all over again but it is far more about the people, friends, roommates, teammates, instructors, and other crazy characters I knew at SIUE, so it’s two different ways of looking at the same thing and it was really a fantastic experience getting it all written. Kind of exhausting, as well, but very fun.

The memories from the SIUE days have always remained really fresh in my mind, because it was such an important era in my life. I loved the school, loved my classes, and loved all the people who came through my life there. Many are still a big part of it, too.

Of course, playing baseball for four years there provided a very rich vein of gold to mine, so those stories are important, but I also had some other friends from my classes and I’ve recently been in touch via Facebook with the single best non-baseball friend I had there. Jim Keegan and I went through the Television – Radio Broadcasting curriculum in the Mass Communications Department at SIUE, and it was an incredible experience for both of us. Majoring and getting my degree in TV/R meant many hours in the studio (both television and radio) and many quarters of big long creative endeavors, to start with nothing and finish the quarter with a TV show, or a movie, or an audio play. After we’d been there a while, they pretty much let Jim and I have the run of the place, and often we’d have a “class” that never met as a class during the quarter. After the two of us flew through the regular set of required classes, they started creating “Colloquium” classes for us, which is a fancy way of saying they simply told us to come back at the end of the 10-week quarter and show them what we did.

Jim was from Lockport, Illinois, which is right by Joliet. He was as funny as anyone I knew there, and equally as smart. He was a baseball fan (a Cubs fan, at that) and we went to a lot of Cardinals games together, usually on a whim and almost always sitting in the right field bleachers for $2 each. Edwardsville was only about a 15-minute drive from Busch Stadium, so you could actually be eating a pizza for dinner at 6 o’clock and decide, on the spot, to head to the game.

Recently, he made contact with Barbara Regnell, who was one of our favorite instructors in the program. He got me in touch with her and we shared a few really heartwarming emails. I’m definitely going to try to get together with her when I’m in St. Louis for the race in September, and it’s funny that she only lives about two miles from the house I grew up in.

One of my other favorite instructors was Dr. Jack Shaheen, and he taught me so much about history and criticism of the arts it was practically thrilling to take his classes. I signed up for every one I could. His class “Motion Picture Criticism” was truly a lesson in how to critique a movie, and how film critics assess everything from acting to directing and production. Great stuff. Barbara Regnell had Jack’s email address and we made contact this week. I went to SIUE 40 years ago, and my instructors there had dozens of students in every class, for every quarter, for many years. What a thrill to not only make contact with two of them, but to also find out they actually remember me! Amazing.

When recounting my baseball experiences at SIUE, in Chapter 7, I was thrilled (but not totally surprised) at how little backtracking and research I had to do. So many details, many of them tiny, are still fresh in my memory and I only went back through online archives and my old scrapbooks to double check exact dates and numbers. It still feels like I could pick up a bat and strike out just as well now as I did then. Here’s the pitch. Swing and a miss.

On deck. Getting ready to strike out again
On deck. Getting ready to strike out again

In a lot of ways, because baseball is such a humbling sport, you can’t help but look back and see a lot more failures than successes, and over the decades that makes you think that you must’ve been a bum. After all, if you play at any level of the game and fail 70% of the time when you’re hitting, you’re probably the best player there. If you do that in the big leagues, you’ll end up in Cooperstown. For failing 70% of the time. It’s a tough game.

It’s just when I write it all down like I did that I feel a little more pride in doing as well as I did. I played grade-school ball, four years of high school ball, and then earned a full scholarship to a very fine school, played four years there and two of those were on teams that advanced all the way to the NCAA Div. II World Series. Then, I got the opportunity to play professionally for a couple of years. I guess that’s not so bad, and more importantly I got a fantastic education, I made the Dean’s List every quarter I was there, and I left that school a much smarter and more mature version of me. It was, cliche’ or not, the experience of a lifetime.

When I was finishing up Chapter 8 yesterday, I was recounting details about a bunch of the guys I played with (who were nearly all priceless characters) and one of those guys was Steve Novak. Steve and I shared an apartment with two other guys for two years, and we were a lot alike when we got there as scholarship freshmen. His dad played 11 years of minor league ball, so we both grew up in baseball families, and although I don’t think our dads ever actually played together, they certainly knew of each other when they were playing.

Base hit. And Steve Novak is right behind me!
Base hit. And Steve Novak is right behind me!
Out at the plate. And there's Steve Novak in the background!
Out at the plate. And there’s Steve Novak in the background!

Steve was a really good ballplayer, and a fantastic first-baseman, while he also baked the best crumb cake ever. Like, EVER! (Totally!)  But, what was really memorable about Steve was his innate instinct for standing or positioning himself in the home dugout when our team was batting, so that he’d miraculously be in the background of many of the photos that would be in the paper. He managed to get himself in the background of almost every photo I still have, in old tattered scrapbooks. It’s hilarious.

Steve is just one of hundreds of fantastic people I met in my time at SIUE, including the three quarters I had to come back for after my fourth year ended and my scholarship ran out. Playing baseball at that level demands so much of your time it’s very difficult to graduate on time, and almost all of us had to go back to finish up. We had a ton of fun, we drank a lot of beer, we played a zillion innings of baseball, but for the most part the vast majority of us hit the books seriously and graduated with honors. I’m proud to have been a Cougar at SIUE.

And, to continue on with this other new tradition of including snippets from my work here on the blog, I present the following in which I recounted how it was Lance McCord who finally got me to see the light about having some fun while we were in school. I was Joe Serious when I got there, and that’s fine, but Lance was the guy who got me to loosen up, and that probably also made me a better teammate.

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College is really your last time to benefit from the freedom and the lack of adult responsibility that is laid out in front of you. Once you’ve left school, you usually have very little choice but to grow up and join the real world. It would’ve been a shame to have not discovered this until it was too late, and it was Lance who finally showed me that there’s plenty of time to be serious in school, and grades were important to both of us, but there’s also time to play, to have fun, to be social butterflies, and to get almost, but not quite, into some harmless trouble. He made it clear that this gold mine of social freedom was deep and rich, and it should be approached with the same passion as the game of baseball. We had the time of our lives.

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Fun times, for sure. Like, totally!!! Lance is also the guy who, in 1997, introduced me to one Barbara Doyle, a colleague of his at IBM. So there’s that to thank him for, as well.

Cool to see my shirt in its new home. Australia!
Cool to see my shirt in its new home. Australia!

On a related but unrelated note, one of my backers on Kickstarter was a woman named Michelle, from Down Under in Australia. The reward she selected, when backing me, was a classic old embroidered crew shirt from the CSK days, but when I was back in Woodbury to get all this stuff shipped out I didn’t have time to ship the last three international packages, including hers. I had to get them out a few days later, from here in Liberty Lake. This morning, I got a great email from her and a photo of the shirt, all the way from the other side of the globe, including the “Thank You” note I put in the package before I sealed it up. Amazing to see one on my shirts, that I just had in my hands a few days ago, now sitting in her house in Australia. And what a nice email, too.

The book has been going through an important evolution lately. What seemed an insurmountable mountain of a project when I started, is now rounding into what is already recognizable as a book, although it’s still a “book to be” early in the process. I’m at about 130 pages now, and eight chapters, and since I’m aiming for somewhere around 450 pages, we’re really getting there. I assume I’ll probably end up writing well more than 500 pages, and then it will be up to Greg Halling and me to trim here and cut there, in order to make it a more manageable read.

I can’t wait to write some more!

Fore! Welcome back, golfers.
Fore! Welcome back, golfers.

Here in Liberty Lake, I hate to jinx us all by writing this but I think Spring might actually be sprung. In all the time we’ve lived here I don’t remember the golf course we live on opening before the middle or end of March, but yesterday I heard the telltale sounds of multiple golf carts and sure enough, the course was open. On February 24th. Amazing.

What’s also different is just the shift in the weather. Winters here can be pretty cruddy, and very gray, as the clouds move in and get stuck up against the mountains. We can go weeks without any bright sunshine, and when that’s the case the air gets really stale and dirty and it’s not fun to be outside. When that pattern breaks, it tends to break for good, or at least until the next winter. The last few days here have been very sunny, in the 50s, and with a beautiful blue sky.

And now we have golfers. Glad I got that last “walk in the park” in a couple of days ago.

And for the record, I still have my snow sticks in the ground along the driveway. I figure the day after I take them out, we’ll get a foot of heavy wet March snow, so they’re staying put for a while. Just to be safe. Because I’m totally safe. Totally!

Bob Wilber, at your service. Like, totally!!!

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