WLT (34 page)

When Frank met Buck, the old guy reached out for a handshake and missed—he was almost blind, Frank soon saw, and that was why he needed Frank, to venture out between innings and fetch the hot dogs to sustain him through nine innings of broadcasting. The steps down to the hot-dog stand were treacherous.

Buck smelled of powerful cologne—to keep the writers away, he explained. He was a dapper old guy in a plaid jacket and a green tie, which he tucked into his shirtfront, between the fourth and fifth buttons. He kept a cold cigar plugged into the left corner of his mouth, and talked around it, his gray brush moustache riding up and down under his hooked nose, hooded eyes, arched eyebrows, and gray snap-brim hat.

As near as Frank could piece together the story of Buck Steller over the next month, he came from Colorado, an old cowpuncher, who had arrived in Chi Town (via Nashville, where he had killed a bunco artist in a fistfight) aboard a B&O freight without a spare pair of underwear and walked straight west to Tony Studs's Bar in Cicero and shoved aside the gunsels at the door and sat down with the boys in the boiler room and eight hours later, $14,000 richer, he pushed back his chair and walked to the Palmer House. He slept for three days, and a week later was flat broke again—the best week of his life! Everything the best! Oysters and steaks, wine and whiskey, a penthouse suite, banks of fresh roses, and a tall dark lady named Pasqual who could turn a man inside out. Buck went through the simoleons like a hot knife through butter. Soon he headed back to Cicero to reload but a big genial fellow named Gino took hold of his elbow and said to lay off, that Tony Studs did not like to see greed on the part of newcomers. Gino spoke softly and carried a cannon on his hip, and as he spoke, he smoothed out Buck's lapels and straightened his tie. Buck said, “Fine. What Tony Studs wants, he's got. I'm gone.” He headed for the North Side, won a little there, and finally talked his way into The Game at the Drake Hotel, in a room eighty feet long overlooking the Lake, though Buck didn't notice that until six hours later when “I was down so far that if I jumped out the window I'd fall up” but twenty hours later he had collected a pile of chits a yard high and that's how he came to become The Voice of the Cubs on WGN, because so many of those chits belonged to Mr. Phil Wrigley, who owned the club. He said, “Steller, here's my personal check for sixty-eight thousand dollars. When you're done spending it, come see me about a job,” and two weeks later he made Buck his broadcaster, which lasted three years, until a chewing-gum underling who resented Buck's heavy fan mail and way with the ladies fired him.

That was Buck's version. Arnold Dingell of the
Star
said, “Buck Steller, a.k.a. Ernest Twiff, was an old cigar butt from the Chicago
Trib
copy desk who landed the WGN job when the able-bodied went off to the war. The Cubs fielded a team of gimps and cripples and dingleberries and they stuck Twiff behind the microphone. He was fired on V-E Day. Ask anybody on the Cubs.”

But this was Minneapolis, a Triple-A town, and the Cubs didn't play here, so who could you ask? Buck never mentioned having worked at a paper. To him, newspapers were fish wrap, and the scribes and the Pharisees who sat poking at their typewriters in the press box were nothing but sore losers. Nobody cared what they wrote. The game was all over by the time the paper came out. Buck sat at the microphone, taking a paintbrush to the game, making the Millers into giants who waged war with blazing fastballs against an arsenal of bats, the merciless sun beating down or black storm clouds threatening. If Buck spotted a kid hanging over the railing by the dugout, he'd make the kid an orphan with a rare blood disease or a gimpy leg. The players looked at that kid, wiped the tears from their eyes, glared at the enemy, and vowed to decimate them. Hatred burned in the dugout. Old grudges flared up. Revenge was always uppermost in their minds. The Millers played for the love of the game and the good people of the Midwest, but they were human too, and not to be trifled with.

The writers snickered and hooted at him—it was pure green envy, he told Frank. He got one hundred letters a week, and they got none except for complaints that the paperboy was heaving the Daily Whosis up on the porch roof. By the time a writer got into print, the game was yesterday's mashed potatoes. No wonder they were so bitter and vengeful.

Blindness seemed to improve Buck's powers of narration. He could make out shapes and shadows, evidently, and follow the sound of the play, and was free to invent the rest, to elaborate and give it weight and color. “And Fisher leans back on the mound and he kicks toward the sky and reaches back and
hurls
the fastball. And Dusty
jumps
on it and sends a sizzling grounder
off
the lanky left-hander's glove—Ouch! that stung! Fisher drops to his knees! and the ball
shoots up through
the hole, Davis missing it by a half-inch as he
lunges
headlong in the grass, and out to left-centerfield it merrily rolls as Ginter comes charging around to third safely, and Dusty wisely holds up at first, though he made the big turn, challenging Barger's arm in center, trying to draw the throw—there's been bad blood between those two for
years
but I guess I don't need to tell you
that
,” Buck hollered, taking a fairly routine single and making it into a Play that made the listener perk up his ears.

The writers thought this was one of the dizziest things they had heard. They cackled and wheezed and sometimes took a wire coat hanger and tried to hook Buck's microphone line with it and yank him off the air. Buck had no engineer, just himself and a microphone and a cord that he clipped onto a phone line. If a writer knocked him off the air, Buck bided his time, waiting for revenge, waiting for the enemy to let down his guard, waiting for a big inning below to distract him and then, bingo, the man had an earful of guano. Buck was blind but his aim was sure.

He looked forward to road games, when he had a chance to shine—WLT couldn't afford the long-distance line charges so Buck did his play-by-play from the studio, reconstructing a big colorful game from the skinny little facts that came in over the tickertape. The tape might read:
Ball 3-2
—and Buck would say: “And McPherson is ready. He glares over at Reedy on third—oh, what history in that glance! what depths of frustration!—and now he winds up, and throws a high inside fastball that sends Husik sprawling in the dirt. He jumps up! It looks as if he may charge the mound! But he thinks better of it, and steps back into the box. Three balls, two strikes, and now McPherson is looking in for the sign, getting ready to deliver again.”

The engineer supplied the sounds of booing, cheering, and crowd chatter, from transcriptions, and Buck made the crack of the bat or the smack of the ball in the catcher's glove, and at least once a game, when the tickertape read:
Foul
—
No play
—Buck would holler, “And Dandy sends a high high foul ball straight back—LOOK OUT BOYS!—Into the press box!” And he'd pound on the table a few times and drop some tin cans and rattle a walnut in a popcorn box. “Oh boy! OH BOY! Wish you'd seen that one, folks! Ha-ha! All these old fat writers hitting the deck and diving under their typewriters—hee hee hee! Yes sir, you could hear the jowls flapping on that one! Oh boy! The fear etched on their faces! Oh, they look like they could use a clean pair of knickers now—ha ha ha! Yes sir! Smells like somebody dropped the whiskey bottle! Oh boy! That was worth coming all the way to Indianapolis for!”

The writers heard about the fouls Buck was banging their way and how they were diving for cover—“Oh boy! Old Man Dingell from the
Star
practically climbed into my lap on that one. Easy, Arnie!”—and they were laying for him when the Millers returned to Nicollet Field. They grabbed him during a fifth-inning Miller rally, with the bases loaded and nobody out, and stripped every stitch of clothing from him and threw them in the street and emptied a coffee can on his head. All the time, of course, Buck had to stay on the air, talking as if nothing was happening.

That was when he invited Fr. Ptashne from Our Lady of Mercy to join him on the broadcast. Father sat between Buck and the writers and offered comments on the game—he had a voice that could knock your hat off—and talked about his playing days at St. Lucy's back before they used gloves and about his brief career in the minors: “Yes, friends, I even had me a year of Class D ball, but then I got a better offer to catch in the Church, and that's the Big League, with Our Lord on the mound, shutting out Satan in the bottom of the 9th, score tied, bases loaded.”

“You take Christ for your roommate, and you'll never regret it,” said Father, looking over at the writers, and none of them cracked a smile. They looked straight ahead like they were in class. But none of them tried to pull anything with Father in the press box, and Father stayed nine innings. He had a bladder of steel.

Roy Jr. asked Frank if he had seen evidence of gambling, and Frank said, “No, I don't think Buck is a gambler. I'm sure he isn't. He's just a sharp-eyed old buzzard and we're lucky to have him.” Frank brought Father John around to the Ogden to see the station—“lifelong dream of mine, radio,” said Father—and to meet the boss. Father clapped Roy Jr. on the back with his big mitt. “Too much fornicating music in radio nowadays,” he told Roy, “but otherwise, you run a good shop.” They disappeared into the office.

Two weeks later, Father was broadcasting Mass on Sunday morning, in the dual role of celebrant and play-by-play announcer. “I now greet the congregation,” he whispered into the microphone as if covering a tennis match, and then thundered, “
DOMINUS VOBISCUM
.” The microphone was mounted on a brace around his neck. “And now we're preparing the chalice, mingling a few drops of water with the wine,” he confided a moment later. “And now I'm going back to the middle of the altar for the offering of the chalice. . . . and now I am blessing the incense. . . . and now I am incensing the offerings.” And a few minutes later, the audience heard a couple hundred
Corpus Dominis
as he dispensed the sacraments.

A week after that, it was Frank's twenty-first birthday, and Buck took him to a whore. First, they went to a bar called The Backstop, around the corner from the left-field pole, and enjoyed a few boilermakers. Then Buck said, “I've got a surprise for you, a couple blocks from here, a birthday gift. From me to you, slugger.” Frank thought it was a joke. He imagined that a naked girl would jump out of a cake. Buck pulled up in front of a grocery store. “Go to the side door and up the stairs and knock on Apartment B. She's expecting you,” he said.

She was a skinny blonde lady named Dandy who lived in an apartment strewn with clothing in cardboard boxes. She wore a blue bathrobe and her hair was snarled. She laid him down on a tattered quilt on an Army cot and pulled his pants down. What in the world are you
doing?
he was going to ask, but by then he knew. “What a nice big guy you got here,” she said in a sad voice. “Should I undress?” he said.