The Day I Took A Bite Out of Fashion

This week I’m sharing an Easter memory before telling you the tale of Rube Waddell, my new favorite ballplayer.

Welcome to Easter Sunday Moronitude! It’s pretty much the same as always, but this time I’m all hopped up on Cadbury eggs. Seriously, I’m a little jittery from all the candy right now. Who would have thought I’d still be celebrating the way I did when I was 5? 

Happy Easter! As a mostly godless child who grew into an almost entirely godless adult, Easter has never been a big holiday for me. Of the Big Three it has always been clearly in third place. And in all honesty, pretty much every member of my family’s birthday vaulted ahead of Easter as well. 

Sure, it was always great to get together, eat a leg of lamb and, as mentioned already, an exorbitant amount of candy. But our traditions were never really set in stone the way they were for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and once I got older, Easter became the first holiday that I started skipping. 

Yet, there is one memory that is etched into my mind from Easter that is as memorable if not more so than any of my other holiday memories. Some may recall the event as the time that I decided to take a stand against a corporate monolith intent on turning the world into conformist automatons. Others, perhaps more accurately, remember it as the day I acted like a spoiled little shit and ruined Easter brunch. 

It was Easter morning, sometime in the mid-1980’s. My family was planning on going to the local country club’s restaurant, Boundary Oak, for Easter brunch. Now, we were not fancy country club people, and it wasn’t a private club or anything like that, they just had a nice restaurant and they did a killer Easter brunch. There were no less than three ice sculptures on a given year, so you knew it was legit. And you can be damn sure they had a carving station with lamb, ham and prime rib. I digress… what I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t super hoity-toity, but I couldn’t stroll in wearing my usual uniform of shorts and a Transformers tee shirt. 

My mother wanted me to look nice for Easter, so she went out and bought me a new outfit. When she presented it to me, well, things went downhill in a hurry. 

At the age of 7 I didn’t really have a full grasp on concepts like “fashion” or “seasonal colors,” so when I saw the outfit laid out for me—nice navy shorts and a pink polo shirt—I was a bit miffed. OK, that’s an understatement, I lost my goddamn mind. I started screaming. I started crying. I’m pretty sure I yelled, “Everybody’s going to think I’m a girl!” It was not my proudest moment. And it got worse. 

After being told that it was a very nice outfit, that I was going to look good, nobody was going to think I was a girl and that my mom would appreciate it if I could do just this one thing for her, I was left in my room to cool off and get ready. Which is not what I did. 

No, I took the polo shirt, focused my anger on the little alligator logo on the chest and bit a hole in it. And by “hole in it” I mean I bit off that little gator and spit it to the floor. Perhaps I was inspired by the jaws of that fearsome apex predator, but I bared my teeth and told Izod Lacoste what I thought of their take on sensible mid-eighties fashion. 

This decision of mine did not go over well with the powers that be. 

To this day, I think that may have been the angriest my mother ever was with me. And boy did I deserve it. What a little shit. All she wanted to do was have a nice brunch without her son looking like Pigpen and I threw an enormous fit. It’s weird, I know I was a little kid and little kids aren’t known for their rational thought, but I still feel ashamed of how I acted. I let something as trivial as a shirt ruin an entire day for my whole family. 

My mom made me work off the damage that I did to the shirt. My allowance was withheld until the shirt was paid for, and the level of chores I was expected to perform in order to earn said allowance increased tenfold. At least that’s how I remember it. I probably only had to do one extra thing, like pick up after the dog, but over the years it has built itself up to being hours of backbreaking labor in a salt mine. 

The story has been brought up often throughout the years, usually around Easter. My mom also never missed an opportunity to bring it up every time she saw me wearing pink on my own volition, often with a rye joke asking if I was going to bite a hole in this shirt or if that was reserved for shirts I received as a gift. 

She may have wanted to feed me to a pack of alligators that day—thankfully they hadn’t relocated to Florida where this could have been a possibility—but I know she took pleasure in the countless guilt trips I experienced as penance over the decades. She was the master of the long-term guilt trip. And I deserved every minute of it. 

Weekly Song To Rock Out To 

Shambala by Three Dog Night 

The other night I was hanging out with my fiancée on the couch. We had just finished watching “Almost Famous,” so we were in the mood to talk about movies and music. Which led to us asking, which song would play over the opening credits of your biopic? For me, the answer was NOFX’s Linoleum, it would come in blasting right after a cold open involving me hurting myself in the most slapstick manner possible. 

Her answer was this tune, Shambala by Three Dog Night. It seems like a perfectly apt tune, I could see how it would fit into her biopic well. But I also think this was a personal attack against yours truly because I have not been able to get the song out of my head for a second in the week since we had the discussion. 

It’s not that it’s a bad song, I actually enjoy it quite a lot, but it shouldn’t be the background to all of my thoughts. Yet no matter what I’m doing—eating a bagel, writing this newsletter, giving some serious side-eye to some prick not wearing his mask—I keep hearing “Land of shambalaaaaaa” in the furthest recesses of my mind. It’s not OK. And now, like a chain letter, I have passed that nightmare on to you, my dear readers. 

Charlie’s History Corner

April Fools’ Day is a scourge. While I enjoy a good prank as much as the next guy, I may have even pulled a few in my day, I sort of hate April Fools’ Day. As somebody who is very online, I always have to be on the qui vive for fake news, so an entire day of mostly fake (but believable sounding) news is a nightmare. 

So when I read a Tweet about baseball Hall of Famer Rube Waddell on this past April Fools’ Day I assumed it was fake. There is no way such a man existed. But this was no Sidd Finch situation, Rube Waddell was very real and by the end of this newsletter I guarantee he will be your new favorite ballplayer. 

Waddell pitched in the majors from 1897-1910. Over those 13 seasons Waddell built a pretty impressive resume, winning 193 games with an ERA of only 2.16 (11th all-time). Over a 5 season stretch as a Philadelphia Athletic, Waddell led the league in strikeouts each season. In 1903 he struck out 302 batters, a staggering 115 more than the runner-up. He wasn’t a one-pitch wonder, he had a whole arsenal of pitches, including a screwball, and pin-point control. Connie Mack said he had more pitching ability than anybody he had ever seen, and coming from him, that’s pretty high praise. 

There are plenty of dominant pitchers in the history of the majors, what makes him so special? Well, for starters, did you know that he ran away from home to spend a week at the local fire station when he was a kid? Or that his love of fire engines was a lifetime affair, and on more than one occasion he ran out of the ballpark to go chase one? 

Waddell was a character. An eccentric. Opposing fans used to bring puppies to games in order to distract him while he was in the field. And it worked. He loved puppies. He also was said to go into a trance-like state when staring at shiny objects. The A’s were having trouble tracking him down during one offseason, it turns out that he was touring with a circus as an alligator wrestler. (No word as to whether or not he did so wearing a pink polo shirt) 

Kids today think baseball is boring. Well, so did Waddell. Early in his career he would leave games to go fishing. I find fishing to only be remotely tolerable with a couple of adult beverages coursing through my veins, and I’m guessing Waddell agreed with me. The man was known as a bit of a drinker.

In that era, it took a lot to stand out as a drinker among ballplayers. So you have to believe Waddell’s boozing was pretty prolific since the left-hander earned the nickname “Sousepaw.” Unfortunately, his drinking fueled his instability and towards the end of his career things went off the rails. After his second marriage came to a particularly fraught end, Waddell put out an article in the Scranton Republican entitled, “Unkissed Girl Sought by Rube Waddell” as a way to let the world know he was on the prowl for Wife #3. 

After insulting a teammate’s straw hat and starting a fight on the team train, Waddell’s antics started to overshadow his performance on the field. His career came to an end not too long afterwards, although he did spend three years in the minors hoping to make it back, but it wasn’t meant to be. 

In Spring of 1912, Waddell caught pneumonia while helping people to safety during a flood in Hickman, Kentucky. After years of hard drinking, his body was battered and he never made a full recovery. By 1913 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, shortly thereafter he was placed in a sanitarium, and in 1914 Waddell died at the age of 37. 

Rube Waddell’s life is a true testament to the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. So next time you’re pitching in an important game, don’t forget to take some time to step off the mound to pet a puppy in Rube’s honor. 

That’s it! We did it! I really didn’t read anything of note this week, I’ve been too engrossed by “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson. About 140 pages in, I highly recommend it. 

Happy Easter, friends! Don’t forget to head to the store for discount candy tomorrow, AKA Fat Guy’s Christmas.