Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (13 page)

Of course, with Frank trying to start his own business, it was the worst possible time for his in-laws to descend on him. Hot dogs and ice cream were about all that was served, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven as I sat there on the stool every day deciding whether I wanted another hot dog, and helping eat away at what little profits they were earning at the time.

In addition to his tolerance, Frank did something else that left a lasting impression on me. He took our family to two Cleveland Indians night games. This was before the day when a man had to take out a second mortgage if he wanted to treat his family to a major-league baseball game. I think
each of our tickets was about $1.25, but it still must have been a bit of a sacrifice. I wonder if a guy like Frank could spring for the ticket prices today, plus food and drinks. Even accounting for inflation, I suspect that a lot of little boys like me are not making it to the park these days. However,
other
boys were the last thing on my mind that first night.

The Indians were playing the Boston Red Sox at Cleveland’s old Municipal Stadium. We entered the ballpark and walked through the crowded, somewhat dark passageway around to the entrance leading to our seats. Then we walked out into the brightly lit, vast expanse of openness. There was a beautifully manicured green field below us and people in unending rows of seats, billboards and music surrounding us. It took my breath away. I absorbed every sight, sound, and smell that was there that night. I sometimes have trouble remembering my telephone number, but I still remember the starting lineup of the 1954 Indians.

As I often tried to explain in my youth, it wasn’t as if I wasn’t learning. I was just learning different stuff. Anyway, Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, had at least one Cleveland Indians fan, and I suffered the true sports fan’s exhilaration and heartache when they won the American League pennant that year but lost the World Series in four straight to the New York Giants. Pinch hitter Dusty Rhodes (in those days, everyone named Rhodes was called “Dusty”) killed us with two home runs.

I watched the World Series that year for the first time on
television at my grandma Thompson’s house, since she and Pa Thompson sprung for a TV before Dad and Mom did. Ma Thompson’s primary interest in buying a TV was because of
Wrestling from Hollywood
. I am not kidding. When one of the heroes like Freddie Blassie would throttle one of the villains like Gorgeous George, then put a triple dropkick on him, she would jump up and exclaim along with the announcer, “Whoa, Nellie!” She especially loved the midget Indian wrestlers when they would come out in their headgear doing war whoops. At Ma Thompson’s, I never worried about being exposed to
Masterpiece Theater
or its equivalent, and that suited me fine. For Ma Thompson and me, it was either midget wrestlers or something involving a ball.

This was during the time when an important social issue was beginning to be reflected on the sports field. By 1954, Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League, was playing center field for the Cleveland Indians. Therefore, he became one of my favorites. However, that was not enough to raise my social consciousness with regard to my own world. Playing Little League, for example, it never did occur to us that we didn’t have any black players on our team, or any of the opposing teams, for that matter.

This would have been in the period when “separate but equal” was accepted, and that meant the majority of black
kids in our community were bused about twenty-three miles to the Mt. Pleasant community to go to school. For us kids, that was just a fact of life; we didn’t think much about it.

That didn’t stop us from competing. Some black teenagers had a pretty good baseball team, and some of us formed a team to play them. In all the games we played against each other, there were never any issues except some good-natured ribbing. One day we were playing and we had a middle-aged black fellow serving as umpire behind home plate, calling balls and strikes. I was up to bat. By then I was a lanky six feet, three inches or so. The pitcher threw a pitch that was probably three or four inches off the ground, and the umpire called it a strike. “That ball was barely off the ground. My knees are way up here,” I yelped, pointing to my knees as if he couldn’t see them.

Quick as a wink, he replied, “I can’t help it, buddy, I didn’t make you.” I don’t recall if I got a hit, but I laughed off and on for a couple of innings. I couldn’t wait to tell Dad, who naturally thought it was as funny as I did.

I could sense things changing, though in other ways. In high school during one summer, I worked for the “city” cutting grass along the highway with a “sling blade.” (I wondered why every little incorporated community in Tennessee called itself a “city” no matter how small the population. I guess “city police department” sounded better than “wide spot in the road police department.” But I digress.) One of
my fellow members on the city “chain gang” was a black boy named Bobby, who was about my age. He was a nice enough guy, but he acted like something was on his mind all the time. He seemed studious and serious about his work, and I had assumed that he would be happy-go-lucky like I was. His demeanor registered with me, and I’d started to piece it all together.

The evolution in a lot of people’s thinking got a big assist from an unlikely source. Segregation was about to collide with another Southern institution: football. In this battle, segregation didn’t stand a chance. Bear Bryant, the legendary coach of Alabama, saw it coming and welcomed it. Alabama had won national championships in 1961, 1964, and 1965 with all-white teams, and of course that’s the way people wanted it—in fact, they insisted upon it. However, the Alabama teams began to falter after that. In 1970, Bryant put Southern California, an integrated team, on the schedule to play in Birmingham. A black Southern Cal running back, Clarence Davis, who was originally from Birmingham, along with another black running back named Sam Cunningham, ran roughshod over Alabama and beat them 42–21. Cunningham scored three touchdowns. Pretty soon, Bryant was allowed to recruit black players for Alabama (and started winning again). Bryant said, “Sam Cunningham did more to integrate Alabama in one afternoon than Martin Luther King had in years.”

“The Bear” might be forgiven for his overstatement, but
in one way or another over the next several years, whether due to self-interest, habit, or law, people began to think differently about what was right and fair.

Though good people can sometimes have a large blind spot in their value system, it was hard for the folks I knew to be mean and unkind when they literally had to come face-to-face with the result of some long-held beliefs and assumptions. We didn’t realize that a social transition was going on, even though we were living right in the middle of it. I guess that is especially true if you are busy just growing up and think you have your own serious problems to worry about. My generation saw the complete changing of certain basic notions. I went from a time when almost everyone I knew thought that separation of the races was the natural order of things to a time when almost everyone I knew thought exactly the opposite. That’s quite a journey. And it’s one that thankfully my home folks and I, along with a lot of other Americans, made together.

During grade school there was no organized football in Lawrenceburg, so we would just take our game of disorganized mayhem to the backyards and playgrounds on our side of town—tackle football with no pads. It was mainly a lot of grabbing, shoving, and running headlong into one another, sort of like a session of the Italian Parliament.

Lawrenceburg Public did have a basketball team. As much
as I would have loved to, I knew better than to try out for the team. They didn’t need a slow-footed kid of average height and marginal shooting ability. However, I did have one basketball-related thrill in grade school. It lasted all of about thirty seconds. My class was in the basement classroom of Miss Sadie, our music teacher. Miss Sadie’s job was to teach music without the benefit of musical instruments, except for her piano, to mostly farm kids and other uninterested captives. My own musical exposure extended to listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio on Saturday nights with Dad. When I was younger, my folks had taken me to the Opry to see Hank Williams, Sr., sing Dad’s favorite, “Lovesick Blues,” and I still remember the lyrics. Unfortunately, never once in the ensuing years was “Lovesick Blues” or the Cleveland Indians’ lineup ever the answer to any exam question.

In class we did a lot of “singing” to Miss Sadie’s accompaniment, learning about what a “sharp” and “flat” look like in a songbook, along with something about “beats to a measure.” What that has to do with music we hadn’t a clue (and I still don’t).

For some reason, most days Miss Sadie didn’t seem to be very happy. Let’s just say that Miss Sadie’s personality reflected her lot in life. In addition to apparently not liking kids, Miss Sadie had this weird hangup about Santa Claus. She insisted that his name should be pronounced as if it were “Santy” Claus. So when we sang “Santa Claus Is Coming to
Town,” she would stop the music and it would be “No, no, I told you it’s ‘Santy’ Claus. Sant
y
, Sant
y
. Okay, once again.”

Of course, most of us aspiring musicians sang even louder, “Santa Claus is coming to town.”

“No, no, no,” she’d say, and we’d start all over again.

We had heard that, as a younger woman, she was very pleasant and perfectly sane. We couldn’t figure out what had happened to her.

Anyway, basketball practice was at the same time as Miss Sadie’s class, and kids on the team were excused from class. We boys knew that Coach Webb had been watching us play basketball at recess. My buddy, Bob, was a good shooter and probably should have been on the basketball team from the beginning. One day after he had sunk a couple of long ones at recess, a kid knocked on Miss Sadie’s classroom door, came in, and announced that Mr. Webb wanted Bob to report to him at the gym. We knew that Bob had been summoned for the basketball team.

I saw Bob’s ascendancy with decidedly mixed emotions. Well, actually, I was bitterly disappointed. Bob, and not I, had been rescued from musical purgatory for the glory and adulation that came with being an LPS Basketball Cherokee. Deep down, I knew it was never meant to be. However, a few minutes later my envy turned to total exhilaration. Bob knocked on the door and said that he needed me to come with him. I jumped up. I and everyone else knew that Mr. Webb was calling for me, too. At least, we thought we
knew. As soon as we got out the door, Bob said, “Freddie, I need to borrow your gym shoes. I didn’t bring any today.” I told him where I put them in the cloakroom and slunk back into Miss Sadie’s classroom just as they were singing another verse of “Go Tell Aunt Rhody (That the Old Gray Goose Is Dead).” The song seemed appropriate. I sat there in disgrace, knowing that my athletic career was over before it began.

Nevertheless, I was determined to “keep in shape.” For what purpose I did not know. But after church on summer nights, at my request Dad would let me out of the car and I would run home trailing the car, as Dad kept a slow pace. I suppose the neighbors wondered, “What has that Thompson boy done now to deserve this?” Actually, I was doing more than keeping in shape—I wanted to change my body from the sort of pear shape that it was in.

The rites of passage are not easy for a kid who is on the outer edges of the talent pool. More to the point, you have to take a certain amount of abuse. For example, in our pickup football games, when you reached a certain level you got to “center for both sides” because nobody wanted to play center. They wanted to pass, run, or catch the ball. You don’t do any of that when you play center. In fact, when you centered the ball, while you still had your head between your legs, the boy on the other side would pull you forward into the ground while everyone would run over you. Soon you got smart enough to invoke the “no-ducking rule” before the game
started. The rule was consistently breached, but it allowed you to retain the moral high ground in the argument that invariably ensued. It made you feel better about your bloody nose or whatever.

The older boys invented other imaginative miseries that would be seasonably appropriate. During basketball season they came up with a game euphemistically called “Bump.” We would take turns shooting from a specific spot. If you missed a shot, you had to bend over under the goal with your hands on your knees while the others, from a running start, took turns throwing the basketball at your backside as hard as they could. Considering my shooting ability and the size of the target that I presented, it made for some long afternoons for me.

But to me I was becoming a “player” both figuratively and literally. One might ask, Why in the world would a kid subject himself to such treatment? It reminds me of the story of the fellow at the circus who would walk around behind the elephants with a pooper-scooper and clean up after them. When asked why in the world he did not quit such a terrible job, his reply was “What, and leave show business?”

In Nashville my eighth-grade class had a softball team, but I didn’t go out for it. I tried to pretend I wasn’t interested, but the team seemed pretty well set when I got there and I didn’t see much chance of breaking into the lineup. This way they couldn’t say I didn’t make the team.

But that year something remarkable started to happen. I began to grow. And grow. I went from slightly above-average height to well over six feet tall. I’d also lost any signs of my little-boy chubbiness. I began my freshman year and could have sworn that a girl smiled at me for no apparent reason. I started to look into the mirror on a regular basis and finally had to face it. I was a hoss. A stud. It was happening. Never mind that that year’s annual picture showed a gangly, slightly goofy-looking kid with a bad haircut. As everyone knows, photographs can be deceiving. I was getting feedback, man. I started doubling down on a rusty old barbell that Dad had come up with from somewhere.

Still, progress was slow. My freshman year, I got nowhere in basketball and worked my way up to second-string center in football. Yes, still playing center. My superiors, the coaches this time, were apparently still looking for someone who was willing to play a good part of the game with his head between his legs. Ducking the center had just been replaced by a steady diet of forearm blows to the top of my helmet, and occasionally my face, by the fellow opposite me. Of course, this is practice I am talking about. I was never put into a game.