SUMMER READING

The Summer of 68:
The Season that Changed Baseball and America Forever
By Tim Wendel

From my earliest knothole memories with the White’s Bar Bobcats to my hustle and flow as an Arthur Hill High School Varsity athlete, I always dreamed of being a professional baseball player. I played hard and genuinely worked at it, but I never did impress too many people.

My brother and I were huge fans of Tiger baseball, George Kell, Mom and apple pie. Hell, my father even bought us complete Tiger uniforms when we were 6 and 8 years old respectively. But by 1968 I was interested in much more than baseball. I had a girlfriend who was pretty and nice and goofy and really smart. She was light years ahead of me in terms of maturity and seeing a broader perspective. Still, Tiger baseball beckoned even though it was gradually being co-opted and pre-empted by professional football.

1968 was a pivotal year in so many ways. It wasn’t just the gradual ennui of professional baseball. It was competing with real time war in Vietnam and it was shook to its foundations by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. It tore the country apart and it led baseball down a creaky bridge over which race relations, black power, the White Panthers and the malfeasance of the owners competed for time on Walter Cronkite’s Nightly News on CBS.

On February 27th, 1968, Cronkite gave this analysis: “We’ve been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and in Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest of clouds.” 100 million people were watching. And network news had plenty of clout in those days. Now we can only shrug and sigh about those now ancient times when integrity was part of good journalism. During this period one was to ascertain a team’s chances by determining how many of a team’s players were in the military reserves.

Welden delivers a provocative narrative filled to the brim with interlocking storylines that go beyond reporting to real analysis. This book will resonate for any thoughtful sports enthusiast as well as anyone who wants to learn more about the evolution of our country. The historian William Mead said, “It was an end of an era for baseball. But like so many things of consequence, nobody realized it at the time. So much in sports was about to change forever.” He was right.

In 1968 Denny McClain won 31 games during the season and pitched well in the World Series. McLain’s nemesis was Bob Gibson, one of the greatest hurlers of all time, had an ERA of 1.83 in games in which he did not pitch a shutout. Five times during the season he had a streak of twenty plus scoreless innings. They both earned Cy Young Awards. The Super Bowl gained ascendance while baseball became a boring pitcher’s game complete with shrinking strike zones. It was indeed the Year of the Pitcher.

Detroit lost population in the aftermath of the ‘67 riots. Census figures indicated that Detroit’s population decreased by 25% to 713,000 residents between 2001 and 2010, the lowest level since the heyday of Henry Ford. It was estimated that residents left at a rate of one every 22 minutes residents during that period.

The author skillfully weaves-in a suspenseful narrative and provides incredible insight into how the dialectics of 1968 led to the end of an era in our country politic that led to the Age of Aquarius and the birth of a new dawn. Along the way Wendel reveals the organic links to the Olympics, President Nixon’s rise and fall from grace and even Jose Feliciano’s soulful rendition of the National Anthem (many fans were enraged by Feliciano’s performance - too bad it was incredible).

The book is filled with photos of all the heroes of this one-of-a-kind World Series. He also gives a synopsis of each of seven games in the World Series. Despite knowing the outcome of this sentinel event, the reader gets sucked in by Wendel’s brilliant writing. He proves to be a master in creating tension even though we already know what happened. But he digs deeper than the typical sports writer and brings color, nuance and outrage to a story that was only partially known…until now.

Summer of 68 is available at Barnes & Noble. The paperback version is priced at $14.99. It’s a great price and a breathtaking read. You won’t want to put it down

Detroit: An American Autopsy • by Charlie LeDuff

Leduff is a tough gritty writer with a strong conscience and an ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. He knows when he is being played and he has a sixth sense when danger seeks him out, whether it is the crime syndicate in Detroit that controls money and politics, or the police officers that no longer care about a city on the brink. 

Leduff paints the picture in broad strokes - a mix of vivid colors of blood and death mixed with sepia toned wishes of the survivors. LeDuff accurately portrays the neglected sections of Detroit as a war zone, a jungle that few survive with their sense of safety intact. Le Duff lays it on the line. He takes several former mayors to task for corruption and taking millions of public dollars to line their own pockets like pirates laying claim to an ill-gained booty of gold doubloons. These are the Vikings of the millennium that circle the ranks of the Wall Street shills that continue to loot the public coffers.

Le Duff cites Kwame Kilpatrick for particular scorn. He writes about a Federal Corruption Trial involving a $1.4 billion dollar pension borrowing scheme while Kilpatrick was on parole from state prison, racketeering mob style. He stole from the poorest people in America and then played the race card.

Somehow Kilpatrick ducked and rolled and avoided a direct hit in his connection to the murder of Tamara Greene (known as Strawberry) during a raucous party at a Detroit Mansion for the upper crust in Kilpatrick’s circle. It was not an urban legend. In a curious twist of fate white industrialists were identified as Kilpatrick’s prime supporters. All told, Kwame is a dick to the nth degree. He even wrote a book by the title “Surrendered.” In it he blames everyone but himself for his troubles and apologized to no one for all of his wrongdoing.

Nothing changed during the reign of the post-modern mayoral regimes of Coleman Young, Kwame Kilpatrick and former Detroit Piston legend Dave Bing. There was no sense of stewardship or any thought of cleaning house. Corruption continued to decimate the infrastructure of Detroit, leaving cops, firemen, the comptroller, accountants, planners, elected councilmen and women scratching their heads. It seemed everyone was feeding from the public trough, siphoning away money that should have been used to keep the city running. No one could explain the missing millions. The money simply disappeared.

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

Leduff is a great storyteller who can weave plots and subplots that fill in the blanks and go beyond just reporting. He is a heart person who reveals the humanity of those Detroiters that will not give up without a fight even when they are living hand to mouth, walking the streets and slipping into addiction.

His loving humanity gives the story a clear-eyed account even when the human spirit seems paralyzed, leaving too many impoverished and traumatized folks left to ponder an uncertain fate. The horrific story about a frozen corpse is a case in point. It was clear that several people had seen the corpse but did nothing about as if it was just a typical day in Detroit…until Leduff pulled back the curtain of ennui to find someone to give a damn.

Eventually the corpse was identified. He was a real man with a notable past, a person with a family who became part of our disposable culture – another human being that succumbed to the ravages of the machine, dehumanized through violence and poverty. Thousands of ordinary people exist on the fringe of society and it has been that way for generations with no hope, no safe place. They are traumatized, violent and struggle with psychopathology. They ascribe to no organization or civic politic. They are often referred to as underclass. Karl Marx identified them as lumpen proletariat. It is scary out there. It seems likely that Saginaw is a microcosm of Flint and Detroit, but our fall is not inevitable. It’s up to us.

LeDuff evokes a phantasm of fear through the reality of Detroit’s decline and fall. It was once a model for other developing metropolitan cities; now it’s a burnt out shell ravaged by the war within the city.

Despite threats from the police and City Hall, Leduff uncovered widespread graft, cooked books and the disappearance of millions of dollars. A reckoning was coming.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book involves a subplot regarding LeDuff’s own heritage and the aching loss of his sister, a young woman who succumbed to the mind numbing savage existence of living in a dying town. He skillfully linked the fall of Detroit to her own personal decline. It is a parallel process that is simply stunning. Le Duff’s prose is gruff yet elegant as he writes about truth without justice. There is much in common between LeDuff’s story and our own disquieting desperation here in Saginaw.

But God helps us all so don’t give up.

On a personal note, Kilpatrick brought his retinue of thugs and hangers-on to White’s Bar in mid-2000. They were looking for some tasty blues and were directed to White’s Bar. The Blues Creators were performing and they were on top of their game. Lady Love sang the blues with grit and soul and Frank Washington took his guitar out of his case and jammed with skill and precision, very fluid. My daughter Kristy was in charge that night and gave everyone great service. Kwame seemed impressed by the whole scene, yet he didn’t leave much of a tip.