Wednesday, June 11, 2008

1968: My Lai, My Graduation, My Liberation, Third Place



This blog is about my fascination with baseball. But it is not about me most of the time. But as I review that incredible year of 1968, I find I have to blog at least a little about myself.

To baseball fans, 1968 was The Year of the Pitcher. The Cleveland Indians did well in a year in which the deck was stacked in the pitchers' favor. We had an amazing pitching staff--McDowell, Siebert, Tiant, Hargan, Stan Williams, Vincente Romo in relief. And we got just enough hitting to make Alvin Dark look like a genius. Unfortunately, baseball was not much on my mind that year.

I was a high school senior, and not a happy camper. I was probably clinically depressed, I was clearly anorexic, I had almost no friends and would have probably been a goth if they'd been invented back then. But I did love music. I convinced a local church to let me use a basement room to hold monthly folk music shows, which of course featured my folk act as well as lots of others. One day, maybe in June or July, I got a call from a former neighbor, Ron Haberle. He was in the Army, he said, had some interesting photos, had heard about our venue (called The Blues Hole) and wondered if he could show the photos there some time. I said sure, why not?

Turns out Ron was the official Army photographer assigned to My Lai, the village where an Army massacre would galvanize the world for years. As the room darkened and Ron's photos popped onto my dad's movie screen, the room fell silent. Asians lined up. Asians being shot. Asians being dumped into trenches, or lined up in the dirt paths of their village. Dead Asians, men, women and children. We were the second group in the U.S. to see Ron's photos of My Lai. The world had not yet had a chance to judge them. But as I sat there, transfixed, all I could think of was: I am NOT going to Vietnam.

Graduation from high school was a sort of liberation for me. I was free of all the phonies, the conformists, everyone I hated--the jocks, the sports fans, all those idiots who didn't understand that high school was bullshit. Although I later realized that I was a bit harsh in my judgments, getting out of high school and into college was a huge and very positive transition for me. I became so enamoured of my college life that I basically forgot about The Tribe and baseball for most of the time I was a student. It was 1968-72, one of the most powerfully seductive periods of any century, and I was in the thick of it.

Looking back, it seems like a dream. And although it tooks me years to work through all the anxiety that built up in my adolescence, my four years at school were like a rebirth. I came out the other end ready to take on the world--and ready to dive back into baseball fandom once again. The Rock was long gone--1968 had been his last hurrah, as he went out with a .211 BA in a parttimer's role. The 1970s would bring new and more painful frustrations for Tribe fans, but my own life had been enriched to the degree that I no longer lived and died by the Tribe's box score. In some sense it is sad to see such a fervant passion cool. But other passions took its place, ones over which I had (or thought I had) more control.

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