Heading to Peaked Hill Stadium (it’s pronounced Peak-ed Hill) for my first Chilmark softball game in about twenty-five years, I keep thinking of that Neil Diamond song – you can “pack up the babies, grab the old ladies, everyone goes, everyone knows” this Sunday morning salvation show.
“This place is our church,” says Mary Caldwell, who owns Zapotec restaurant in Oak Bluffs with her husband Caleb. “This is where we pray.”
The stadium is actually a field of dreams cleared for free by excavator John Keene of West Tisbury and other volunteers. It opened in 2001. “There
was a rock in right field covered by poison ivy. We removed it and buried some dead ballplayers,” says chief caretaker Billy Meegan.
No Fenway Park, the field has dips in the ground that can send a taut athlete sprawling, and a dirt road in right field (automatic homer if a ball reaches it unmolested). The usual crowd is there, men and women, boys and girls, literally eight to eighty-four, in a social activity whose stiffest combat is verbal. If you’re hoping for scads of fifteen-to-fifty-year-old men playing serious softball, look elsewhere on the Island.
Chilmark softball has come full circle. It began in 1932 at the Homestead, a Menemsha meadow behind Herbert and Hazel Flanders’s house. It moved two years later to the Salt Meadows, owned by the late Anne Simon, on the road to the Menemsha Inn. In those days it was purely a family game. After moving to a Chilmark field behind Muriel Toomey’s house on the road to Gay Head in the late ’30s, the contest became all adult and overwhelmingly male. During the ’80s and ’90s, the Chilmark game evolved into the West Tisbury game – what heresy! – before returning to its present location off Tabor House Road. Count ’em up: nearly three-quarters of a century of swirling memories; generations come and gone; men playing catch with their sons and their sons playing catch with their sons; appearances by Roger Baldwin, Robert Crichton, Jackie Robinson, and Spike Lee; a thousand friendships made and just as many kept.
As I sit on a milk crate watching the game, I have to ask myself: which Chilmark softball game do I prefer, the manly tradition or the family rite?
Malcolm wanders over. Malcolm! Of all the legendary figures in Chilmark softball – players such as Ozzie Guillen (I mean, Fischer) and David Flanders – Malcolm alone is formally immortalized. Writing a 1980 article in Peter Simon’s book On the Vineyard and simultaneously reprinted in The New York Times Magazine, the late novelist Crichton (The Secret of Santa Vittoria) rhapsodized: “No one knew much about Malcolm, he looked like Central Casting for Billy Budd. He played, I think, about eight games, and during that time hit about twenty balls so far out that about ten of them were never found again. He went away as quietly as he came, and most people were secretly glad Malcolm went. For one thing, we were running out of balls.”
Actually, Malcolm Stevenson is not such a mystery. Coached at the Chilmark Community Center as a twelve-year-old by longtime softball maven Bill Edison, he blossomed on Toomey Field. “For one shining season, because of Bob Crichton, I assumed the mantle that David Flanders had,” says Stevenson of the man who occasionally pointed to the pine trees in straightaway left field and homered to them, à la Babe Ruth. Stevenson is a little softer now, a lot more bearded, a Washington lawyer and father of a son playing this morning. There is wistfulness in his voice about the passing of his own legend. But then Malcolm goes to bat and launches a shot toward the right-field road that Dan Booth Cohen, defying uneven ground, bushes, sand, and gravity, runs down. “When I realized what I had done, I regretted it,” Cohen says afterward. “I could have been carried off.”
A game where greatness can be regretted? Try to understand the nature of Chilmark softball. “It’s the intergenerational aspect,” says lawyer Gus DuPont, attending the game with his son John, a Stanford freshman. “Weekend warriors, a field with holes and divots, injuries,” he adds pleasantly.
And people. What people. Someone points out an old guy in a CIA T-shirt. It’s Dan Pinck, seventy-nine, who spent World War II in China hiring secret agents to give him information about the Japanese occupiers. In the process, he acquired knowledge about shipping and troop movements that led to the sinking of several Japanese ships. “I had suitcases full of money, but the guerillas didn’t want to take any, so I deliberately lost to them in poker,” says Pinck, who wrote an acclaimed book called Journey to Peking: A Secret Agent in Wartime China.
Pinck was also a city planner, a professor of architecture, an editor, and an assistant to the late, great New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling. “He could go into a city and within a week or two know so much, you’d think he spent three years studying it,” Pinck says of Liebling. “He was a good, gentle person. What made him great was his writing and concern for people.”
When Pinck steps up to bat, I run into an old friend, Lynn Puro, who has driven up from Vineyard Haven. A former tennis pro, she teaches graphic design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and coaches the men’s and women’s tennis teams. Of late, she has organized a women’s softball league on the Vineyard. “Women feel comfortable here,” says Puro, perhaps the only player on the field with spikes, “and I’m able to integrate softball into my tennis. I’m hitting the ball out ahead more and with more power.”
Softball! Of course! I’ve forgotten that there’s actually a game going on, complete with a young girl chalking up the score on a blackboard behind me. I turn toward the field and see a regular Hotspur, a “Mars in swathling clothes” named Jason (the next Malcolm?), let a perfect pitch go by. “Like a beautiful woman you don’t say hello to,” says catcher Peter Regan, a psychiatrist from Oak Bluffs. Eighty-four-year-old economist and author Dan Balaban hits a twenty-foot dribbler. “What I want you to know is that he hits the ball as far as he did at age thirty,” a teammate says. Balaban shakes his head and muses, “So many dim pictures, rising from the dust.”
An umpire stands behind the pitcher, but some calls are made by consensus. Is young Isaac Pollan of Aquinnah out on a force play at third? His father Michael has caught the whole thing on video. “We could hear the sound of the ball hitting the mitt before you slid in,” he tells his son.
“This is how technology will ruin the game,” Billy Meegan says, smiling.
Has the Chilmark softball game always been this interesting, or do I just arrive on a lucky day? Someone puts me onto Dan Greenbaum, who goes back to the beginning. “Balls got lost in heavy grass at the Homestead, and there was a four-foot boulder in the Salt Meadows center field, so people would go after fly balls with only one eye on the ball,” Greenbaum, a seventy-nine-year-old retired engineer, explains with a chuckle. “We’d shorten the distance to first base when kids were hitting, and use pinch runners for the old or infirm. T.P. Benton, the son of Thomas Hart Benton, was one of the best. Balls and strikes were called with flexibility. If teenagers hit one into the bushes or poison ivy, they were called out. It was a very social game” – a woman or child had to be selected on alternate picks – “and we restricted the number of innings when there were sailboat races on Menemsha Pond in the afternoon.”
Greenbaum remembers that in ’37 or ’38, the game moved to Toomey Field. Players had to contend with an uphill climb to a cedar tree, a road, and a poison-ivy-covered stone wall in right field; a hole almost two feet wide and several inches deep in center; and pines down what should have been the left-field line – a line that therefore had to circle some twenty feet around them. By the time Americans were girding for war, the Chilmark game had assumed its famous identity as both warlike and democratic – warlike because the men played to win, democratic because they were chosen by ability. When peace came, the game subdivided into all-adult and all-kid games.
I remember one day in the ’50s when I was maybe fifteen; they needed a warm body in the big game and I was inserted at short field, a tenth, roving position usually located behind the shortstop in left-center. A batter hit a line drive that I caught and threw to second, doubling up a runner. When the next batter flied out to me, my father and his friends cheered lustily. Wouldn’t you know it: Make a great play and lead off the next inning. I let a perfect pitch go by, Jason-style, and the adults grumbled uneasily.
A decade later, I was the one groaning. With the game oversubscribed (an occasional thirteen-year-old phenom was allowed), people lined up to be picked in what everyone called the Slave Market. The opposing captains – first Paul Dintz and Dan Balaban, later Peter Simon and Jim Brooks – were no fools and usually passed me by until I had to be picked in what became the second half of a double-header.
It was worth waiting around for the conversation alone. “The games were always run on the principle, ‘This is how we’ve always done things,’” says Danny Brudney, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “For instance, concerning which far-off pine tree determined the left-field foul line. I forget the circumstances, but at one point in a game there was a dispute over the rules, and I remember Bob Crichton launching into a detailed story – a brief oral history, really – about how we’d always done things in some particular way. I think few of us were actually convinced by his inspired rendition of our collective past, but the tale itself was so magnificent that we were all silenced. My memory is that his team got two runs out of it.”
The peripatetic Crichton figured in the most unforgettable Chilmark moment, which he described in On the Vineyard.
Hall-of-famer Jackie Robinson attended one game as the guest of Peter Simon and his mother Andrea. In the best tradition of Chilmark generosity, Andrea and her late husband Richard, the founder of Simon and Schuster, had befriended the Robinsons, housed them for a year in Stamford, and successfully fought local red-lining restrictions to get them a home.
“In the ninth inning,” Crichton wrote, “with men on base, I stepped back from the plate: ‘Now batting for Crichton, Jack R. Robinson,’ and handed him my bat. He fondled the bat and peered out at the pitcher. He clearly wanted to give it a try but then he handed the bat back. What I remember was the silence of respect that no one else was ever accorded on the field.
“‘No, you’ll do it better than me.’”
The sight of a nearly blind Jackie Robinson appearing at the game a few weeks before he died must have moistened eyes all around Toomey Field. But Bill Edison’s torment topped all. As he remembers, he was the pitcher at that existential moment. When Crichton announced a pinch hitter, Edison screamed, “No way do you put in a pinch hitter in Chilmark!” Edison didn’t realize whom he had dissed. When informed, he was depressed the remainder of the season. “That was the end of my career,” he tells me. “I was no good after that.”
If Jackie Robinson’s appearance stands at the top of Toomey Field memories, there were many more. “There were also Wednesday night games when I was a teenager,” says Jay Lagemann, sixty-one, an Island sculptor. “One of our players brought something in a bottle one night, and when it was our turn to bat he was passed out in center field. Jules Worthington brought homemade beer another time. We were behind by ten runs in the last inning, and we wound up winning. At least, that’s the way I remember it.”
There were Bunyanesque figures out there, Chilmarkers such as David (the Chilmark Whale) Flanders, who hit tape-measure homers; Ozzie Fischer, who came off the UMass varsity to hit line drives, machine-like, over the shortstop’s head; and Dan Cabot of West Tisbury, a first baseman who could catch errant throws that seemed to sail halfway down the line. There was Peter Simon of Chilmark, always barefoot, pitching underhand or making nearly underhand throws from the outfield, a regular Ted Abernathy. Jerry Kohlberg, a business whiz back on the mainland, became just a bald-headed little guy with a red elf’s hat at the game. Jerry participated in perhaps the most unusual double play in Chilmark history when a ball bounced off his head to Peter Neumann, who caught it and touched second to double up a runner.
Every once in a while, a woman would break into the lineup; Jay Lagemann’s mother Betzy, the first woman to produce a network radio program, played when she wasn’t shining on the tennis court or at the bridge table. Year-rounders and summer people mingled easily – having two Mayhew brothers from the family that first settled the Island in 1642 made that official. Even the longtime umpires were memorable. Roger Baldwin, who founded the American Civil Liberties Union, ruled with the thundering authority of an Old Testament prophet. Another umpire, Rabbi David Wice of Philadelphia, had a strike zone that extended unto the heavens – almost literally, because batters sometimes had to jump while swinging. Wice took plenty of verbal abuse, but always good-naturedly. When people threatened to quit the game because of his calls, he’d say, “Summer’s fleeting – it’s your choice.”
“I was writing a screenplay based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel,” says Bruce Davidson, seventy-two, an award-winning photographer. “I asked Rabbi Wice, ‘Which comes first, Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur?’ ‘Which comes first in the alphabet?’ he said. I never forgot that.”
“The game was a lot of fun – something you looked forward to,” says Ozzie Fischer, now ninety-one. “Was it serious? Yes and no. I remember two brothers: Peter, who had a good time, and Steve, who took the game seriously.”
Nothing good ever lasts, does it? “A curmudgeonly man bought land and built a house in foul territory down the left-field line,” says Peter Simon. “We chased down foul balls on his property, and he got mad at us. One Sunday morning he drove his car onto the mound and announced, ‘I won’t let you play anymore.’ We talked him down, but when the Toomey house was sold, the same man allegedly convinced the new owner to plant pine trees in short left field. That ended the game there.”
In the early ’80s, Simon moved the game to the West Tisbury elementary school, where the Chilmarkers not only enjoyed Sunday baseball but engaged in challenge matches with Edgartown. But the absence of a homer boundary bothered Simon, and after about five years he relocated the game to the West Tisbury firehouse. Jerry Kohlberg, who specialized in rebuilding failing businesses, matched everyone’s gifts, and a wire fence around the outfield was built for about $3,500.
But the game was getting away from Chilmark and Chilmark traditions. Playing on Friday nights as well as Sunday, the softballers were hitting so many balls over the fence that Simon had to substitute a “limited-flight” ball (with a blue dot next to the name) for the livelier red-dotter. Even then, about five homers a game still flew into the woods.
The game also grew into semi-fast-pitch and ultra-competitive softball. Film director Spike Lee appeared in uniform, exhorted his teammates, and roared at the umpires, setting the standard. “Not a great player, but a nice guy,” says Balaban. “We liked his contentiousness.” Some players were just too contentious – “too many alpha males,” as Billy Meegan puts it. With a mellow new millennium in mind, Meegan and Bill Edison opened Peaked Hill Stadium and placed no restrictions on who played. “I love the fact that so many friends from the Chilmark game have become friends off the field,” says Simon. “People I never would have known. And now their kids are playing with as much passion as we did. It’s all familiarity – and family-arity.”
And that includes ladies and babies. So I have to conclude that the Chilmark game, new and old, trumps the overheated game it temporarily spawned: family values over manly values, if you will. But I miss legendary Toomey Field. So does Peter Simon. He has put his house off Tabor Road on the market, and he’s eying the old Toomey place. “I’d like to buy it and restore the field of dreams,” he says.
The game of dreams back on the field of dreams – would that be dreamy, or what?
