Beer and Whiskey
Money for Father Grabnickels
by Don Drewniak
Prior to
October 14, 1951, my only awareness of baseball
was that of a Boston Braves game played at Braves
Field on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston in August
1948 when I was five-years old. The game made
little sense to me, but the two hot dogs that I
polished off left a lasting impression as the
best food I had ever eaten.
Only four
dates hold more significance to me than that
October day: the date of my birth; the date of my
marriage; the date I was drafted into the United
States Army during the Vietnam War and the date
of my daughter’s birth. The 1951 date began
my love affair with baseball and my near lifelong
obsession with the Cleveland Indians.
By the start
of the 1952 MLB season, I had become a fan of the
Indians. Al Rosen, the Indians’ third
baseman, was my favorite player. How did an eight-year
old living in Massachusetts become an Indians
fanatic?
Fall River was
blessed with a minor league team, the Fall River
Indians, from 1893–1898, 1902–1910 and
1946–1949. With the ending of the third Fall
River Indians’ run, professional baseball
deserted the city. Well, not totally. Baseball
was a sport back then, as it was in the years
dating back to its beginnings in the 1860s. Sadly,
those days are gone. Today’s professional
baseball in the United States is business —
big business — with even major-league bench
warmers raking in a minimum of over $700,000 per
year.
In the 1950s,
most players had to work in the “real world”
during the off season, as their predecessors did
going back to the beginnings of professional
baseball. There were also those who were able to
barnstorm.
My parents
took me to see a barnstorming game played at Fall
River Stadium on that October 14th in 1951. One
of the teams was that of Birdie Tebbetts All-Stars.
I’m guessing that the opposition was
comprised of some of the local area’s better
players. Tebbetts had just finished his first
season with the Indians after having played with
the Red Sox during the previous four years. Other
Indians players on the team were Al Rosen, Mike
Garcia and Jim Hegan.
Bobby Thomson
of the New York Giants was also on the team.
Eleven days earlier, he hit “The Shot Heard
Round The World,” a one out, three-run walk-off
home run in the bottom of the ninth inning that
beat the Dodgers in game three of the National
League three-game playoff in 1951.
If memory
serves me correctly, my parents and I were seated
several rows in back of, and to the right of, the
dugout used by Tebbetts’ team. At some point
in the game, a foul grounder was hit toward the
area in which we were sitting. I raced toward the
railing separating the playing field from the
seats. My momentum carried me over the railing
resulting in my dropping a short distance onto
the field.
The baseball
gods must have been watching. I was unhurt and
before I could move, Rosen came out of the dugout,
picked me up by the back of my neck (or so I
remember), grabbed the ball and brought me into
the dugout. He proceeded to sign the ball and had
several other players do so as well. After
escorting me back to the “scene of the crime,”
he lifted me over the railing and I scurried back
to my seat.
As soon as I
was told that Rosen played for the Cleveland
Indians, I was “doomed” to be a fan of
the team.
What the
baseball gods give, they can take away. The
signed ball became my prized possession. Not
knowing any better, I kept the ball on top of a
bureau in my bedroom. I noticed sometime later
that the signatures were fading. Figuring that
sunlight must be the culprit, I wrapped the ball
in paper and placed it in a shoebox that I stored
in my closet. Over the next few years, I added to
the box other baseballs that I found scattered
here and there.
During my
sophomore year in college, my mother tossed the
box in the trash not knowing that one of the
balls was the “Al Rosen” ball. The
fault was mine, not hers.
By the start
of the 1952 Major League Baseball season, I was
possessed by baseball and, in particular, the
Cleveland Indians and my hero, Al Rosen.
Information about the Indians was difficult to
come by. Until I found a broken Philco radio in
the Tucker Street Dump that my father managed to
fix, day-to-day coverage of MLB was limited to
newspaper coverage from the Boston
Herald and the Fall River
Herald News, and the occasional
watching of a game on my Uncle Al’s
television.
The newspaper
coverage was predominantly about the Red Sox and
the Braves. However, box scores and updated
standings were treasures.
The newly-discovered
baseball cards began to provide me with some
sense of the immediate history of the game. For
much of 1952, my twenty-five cent allowance was
largely spent buying six-card packets of baseball
cards for five cents each. Grandpa John provided
me with an additional source of money.
He was a
reluctant church goer. From the time my
grandfather arrived in the United States, he
worked long hours in the cotton mills. He
resented those who did not work, and viewed
priests as non-workers.
I disliked
church services as much as he did. There were two
Sunday morning masses at St. John’s
Ukrainian Catholic Church, 8:30–9:30 and 10:00–11:30.
Very few kids attended the church services as
most of the parishioners were in their fifties,
sixties or seventies. Each mass was conducted in
Ukrainian which I did not understand, making the
time even more boring than it might have been in
English. Thank goodness I was allowed to attend
the early mass, and I usually went with Grandpa
John.
St. John’s
was a small church. It had ten-to-twelve rows
divided by a center aisle. Each row seated about
sixteen adults. Looking from the rear of the
church, men sat on the right, women on the left.
It was Grandma Zofia who “forced”
Grandpa John to attend mass.
When I went to
mass with Grandpa John, we always sat near the
middle of the last row on the right-hand side as
we faced the altar. That was by design. As I
remember, there were two collections during the
mass. One was a “seat offering” in
which money was placed in an envelope and dropped
into a basket carried by the priest as he walked
around the church. I often complained to my
mother about the seat offering as most of the
time during mass was spent either kneeling or
standing.
The second
collection involved the dropping of coins or
bills into a basket. Grandpa John claimed it was
beer and whiskey money for Father Grabnickels and,
therefore, it justified what we did. He taught me
a valuable skill — a skill, that because my
fingers were smaller and more flexible than his,
I was better at doing.
As the priest
hurriedly walked up the outside aisle to our
right, Grandpa John would always smile when he
saw bills in the basket as they provided cover
and quite often quarters would be balanced
against the bills. Those were the target coins.
When Father
Grabnickels turned the corner from the outside
aisle to the back of the seating area, we would
each drop a nickel in the basket and then, with
palms down, try to pull up a quarter with a piece
of freshly-chewed gum stuck to the bottom of our
index and middle fingers. I had reached the point
wherein I was successful about one out of every
two tries.
It was off to
church the morning after my first buying of
baseball cards and I was nervously excited. The
big moment came about forty minutes into the mass.
I made a clean nabbing of a quarter and forced
myself not to laugh out loud when I heard Grandpa
John whisper a Ukrainian swear word. He had
failed. The quarter was pure profit as the nickel
offering was given to me by my mother.
That was the
last quarter that I was to grab from Father
Grabnickels’ basket. I flubbed the try on
the following Sunday. A week later, Grandpa John
informed me that we needed to stop because he
believed Father Grabnickels was becoming
suspicious.
I had to
endure a confession session with Father
Grabnickels a month or two later. After admitting
to such sinful actions as having put well-chewed
Bazooka bubble gum on Betty Ann Crossen’s
seat in my third-grade class, he peered at me and
asked, “Is there anything else you want to
say to me?”
Yes, is it
true that you spend the collection basket money
on beer and whiskey?”
“No,
Father.”
|
