In the spring of 1901 the University of Notre Dame varsity baseball team was busy preparing for a game on the South Bend, Indiana, campus. Ed Reulbach, the team’s starting pitcher and future star of the Chicago Cubs, noticed a tall, lanky youngster approach trainer Tom Holland and ask if he could have the job of water carrier. Informed that the job had already been filled, the kid sat in the grandstand for the entire game “with his overalls and farmer’s sun bonnet on,” Reulbach recalled.
The next day Reulbach traveled to Niles, Michigan, a few miles north of South Bend, to pitch for the town’s baseball team. Sitting on the bench before the game, somebody offered him a tin cup full of water. “I glanced at the individual and almost fell off the bench—there was the same kid I saw at the Saturday game when he asked to be a water boy,” said Reulbach. “He sat next to me on the bench and offered me a cup of water every few minutes, until I finally told him that I did not need a bath, just a cup of water every other inning.”
Known for creating such indelible
baseball characters as Jack Keefe (You Know Me Al), Alibi Ike, and others,
Lardner received his early indoctrination to the intricacies of the game by
covering the Central League, a Class B minor league for the South Bend
Times. The league, which produced such future major-league stars as Goat
Anderson, Owen Joseph "Donie" Bush, Slow Joe Doyle, Jack Hendricks, Dan Howley, and John Ganzel,
provided Lardner with a training ground for learning more on how to be a
reporter and how to cover a sport he had loved since childhood. “Altogether,”
Lardner later confided to a fellow newspaperman, “I had a lovely time on that
paper.”
Ringgold (later shortened to Ring)
Wilmer Lardner was born on March 6, 1885, in Niles, Michigan, the youngest of
nine children raised by Henry and Lena Phillips Lardner. A successful
businessman, Henry provided his children with all the comforts money could buy.
The family's spacious Broad Street home was located just a stone's throw from
the Saint Joseph River and each child had his or her own nursemaid. From an
early age, Ring and his brother, Rex, developed a mania for baseball. Ring
claimed that even when he and his brother were being pushed around Niles in
baby carriages, the two “could rattle off the batting order of any of the
National Leagues’ twelve clubs.”
Although born with a deformed foot
and forced to wear a brace until he was eleven years old, Ring did take part in
such activities as baseball and swimming. As the children of privilege,
however, the three youngest Lardners were not allowed to, as Ring put it, “mingle
with the tough eggs from the West Side and Dickereel [a poorer German
neighborhood in Niles].” The Lardner children’s insulation from the harsh life
outside their home extended to their education. Instead of attending local
primary schools, Ring, Rex, and their sister, Anna, were taught by a private
tutor named Harry Mansfield. Nicknamed Beady by his young charges, the tutor
came to the house “every morning at 9 and stayed till noon and on acct. of it
taking him 2 and a 1/2 hrs. to get us to stop giggling,” Lardner remembered.
The private lessons offered by
Mansfield did not seem to help when the Lardners took their examinations to
enter high school—they all flunked. A kindhearted principal, however, relented
and, on a probationary basis, placed Ring and Anna in the ninth grade and Rex
in the tenth grade. In spite of their sheltered early life, Ring and his
siblings flourished in their new surroundings. In addition to playing on the
football team, Ring, Rex, Ed Wurz, and Ray Starkweather formed a quartet that
spent many nights serenading Niles' young female population. Hardly an evening
passed, said Lardner, when “some gal’s father did not feel himself called on to
poke his head out his Fourth Street window and tell these same boys to shut up
and go home for the sake of a leading character in the Bible.”
If Lardner became tired of his
hometown’s late-night offerings, he could always hitch up a horse and buggy and
set off for South Bend’s bright lights. Convincing the family’s horse Fred,
however, to trot at a pace suitable to see a date home before curfew proved to
be a difficult task. On one occasion, Lardner did not get his date home until
3:30 a.m., “which was at that time,” he noted, “the latest which either she or
I or Fred had been up, but mother was still sitting up and I tried to tell her
the old proverb how you can trot a horse to South Bend but you can’t trot him
home but she couldn’t hear me on acct. of somebody talking all the time.” It
was the last time Lardner dated that girl.
In addition to learning the finer
points of outwitting parents, Lardner discovered a far more dangerous habit as
a young man—drinking. Finding alcohol proved to be no problem for Lardner and
his underage friends and together they could always “take our custom down to
Pigeon’s where everybody that had a dime was the same age and the only minors
was the boys that tried to start a charge acct.” By the time he graduated from
high school in 1901, Lardner had “mastered just enough of one live foreign
language to tell Razzle, a gullible bartender, that [he] war ein und
Zwanzig jahre alt [aged twenty].” (Lardner’s fondness for alcohol was
a contributing factor to his premature death at age forty-eight.)
After graduation, Lardner turned
down a scholarship offer from Olivet College. Times were hard for the Lardner
family. Henry's eldest son, William, a Duluth, Minnesota, banker, had convinced
his father to invest heavily in the institution. The bank's failure, coupled
with a bad investment in a Canadian mining operation, forced Henry to sell his
large land holdings to pay off his creditors. Ring's early attempts to make a
living did not help matters. He worked in Chicago as an office boy for the
McCormick Harvester Company and the Peabody, Houghteling and Company
real-estate firm, but was fired after only a few weeks. Returning to Niles, he
found a job with the Michigan Central Railroad at a dollar-a-day salary. The
railroad fired him, however, for, as he described it, “putting a box of cheese
in the through Jackson car, when common sense should have told me that it ought
to go to Battle Creek.”
In January 1902 Lardner’s father
scraped together enough money to send both Ring and Rex to the Armour Institute
in Chicago to study engineering, an occupation for which both proved to be
ill-suited. “I can’t think of no walk in life for which I had more of a natural
bent unless it would be hostess at a roller rink,” Ring observed. Instead of
hitting the books, the brothers spent most of their time in Chicago taverns and
theaters. By the spring the two had flunked out of the institute and returned
to Niles.
Although Rex was able to find a job
as a reporter for the Niles Daily Sun, as well as being the Niles
correspondent for the Kalamazoo Gazette and the SouthBend Tribune, Ring spent the next year recovering “from the strain which
had wrought havoc with my nervous system.” He found time to write and perform
with a local musical group called the American Minstrels, which organized
performances at the Niles Opera House. In 1904 he took a job with the Niles Gas
Company at five dollars a week, later raised to eight dollars a week. The only
trouble Lardner had with his job came in reading meters, usually located in “dark
cellars where my favorite animal, the rat, is wont to dwell. When I entered a
cellar and saw a rat reading the meter ahead of me, I accepted his reading and
went on to the next house.”
Lardner may have spent the
remainder of his life avoiding rats in dark basements were it not for a happy
accident involving his reporter brother, Rex. In the fall of 1905 Edgar Stoll,
son of South Bend Times owner John B. Stoll, visited Niles to
try and convince Rex to quit his job and work for the Times. Rex
was on vacation at the time, so the Niles Daily Sun editor
sent Edgar Stoll to visit Ring at the gas company for more information. Ring's
newspaper career came out of this one chance meeting. He remembered:
Mr. Stoll sought me out and stated his errand, also
inquiring whether my brother was tied up to a contract [with the Daily
Sun]. I said yes, which was the truth. I asked how much salary he was
willing to offer. He said twelve dollars a week.
Why?
“Oh,'” I said, “I
thought I might tackle the job myself.”
“Have you ever
done any newspaper work?”
“Yes, indeed,” I said. “I often help my brother.” This
was very far from the truth, but I was thinking of those rats.
Lardner, who obtained the job at a
salary of twelve dollars a week, seemed undisturbed about his venture into a
new career. “I had no newspaper experience, but a two years’ course in a gas-office
teaches you practically all there is to know about human nature,” he noted. “Besides,
I had been class poet at the high school, and I knew I could write.” Lardner's
family had other worries. Although agreeing that twelve dollars a week was four
dollars more than what he was earning at the gas company, they pointed out that
traveling to work on the interurban railroad linking Niles and South Bend cost
$2.40 per week, and instead of eating free at home he would have to pay for his
lunches. Lardner, having given his word to Edgar Stoll, brushed aside these
financial concerns and accepted the job on the Times as a
self-described “sporting editor and staff, dramatic critic, society and
court-house reporter, and banquet hound.”
Before starting work in January
1906 Lardner received a rousing sendoff from Rex in a Daily Sun article
that called Ring “a recognized local authority on all matters that pertain to
legitimate sports, and he is at the same time a writer of ability having the
vernacular of ring, the base ball diamond, the football field and other lines
of sport, at ready command.”
The first assignment Lardner
tackled for the South Bend newspaper failed to endear him to his editors. Sent
to cover the wedding of a member of the Studebaker family, well
known in the community, he returned to the office with only five lines of news,
which, one of his biographers noted, “is probably just what he thought it was
worth.” For his next assignment, he gave a negative review to a show written by
the owner of the theater where it was presented, who also happened to be a
major advertiser with the Times.
Lardner discovered his true calling
on the newspaper in April when he started covering South Bend's entry in the
Central League, a Class B minor league with teams also in Canton, Dayton,
Evansville, Grand Rapids, Springfield, Terre Haute, and Wheeling. In those
days, minor leagues were not directly tied to major-league teams but were
independent entities. Players were lionized by local fans as much as today’s
big leaguers and, according to baseball historian Bill James, some of the “best
players in the game were in the minor leagues.”
The South Bend team’s games were
played at Spring Brook Park and Lardner, because a South Bend
Tribune reporter was the newest one on the job, was appointed by the
league president to serve as official scorer. The dollar-a-game salary he
received hardly covered the trouble it caused him. In hopes of impressing
major-league scouts, minor-league ballplayers often pressured the official
scorer to rule anything—even an obvious error—as a base hit. With the official
scorer's desk just twelve feet from the visiting club's bench, Lardner had several
altercations with players.
Writing a story a day during the
season, Lardner, while with the Times, developed the characteristic
style he used in his later work. “Instead of writing a stringy,
inning-by-inning account,” Donald Edler, Lardner's biographer noted, “he
composed his story around a personality or a single dramatic play, and then put
into it all the pace and color of a particular game.” His own brand of humor
also filled those early stories as Lardner displayed a keen sense of just how
far he could go in teasing and tormenting the colorful characters that
inhabited America's game at the turn of the twentieth century.
Looking for bigger game, Lardner
next tried to interest Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and Chicago
Cubs owner Charles Murphy in Bush. The young reporter had met both men at the
1906 World Series between the two clubs and both “had asked me to keep on the
lookout for promising young ball players and to report by wire, collect, if I
saw one,” Lardner remembered. “I would be financially rewarded if the players I
recommended were drafted or bought, and made good.”
If he convinced a major-league team
to sign Bush, Lardner also stood to receive a cut from the South Bend owners,
whose only hope of breaking even during a season came when the possessed a
ballplayer good enough—Bush in this case—to elicit an offer from a major-league
team before the first day of September, after which Class B players could no
longer be bought but were subject to the draft. After spending $9.30 in
telephone calls and telegrams, Lardner was unsuccessful in his attempts to get
a team to sign Bush. Eventually drafted by the Detroit Tigers, Bush went on to a
successful career with the Tigers. After his days as a player ended, Bush
managed the Pittsburgh Pirates, the White Sox, and the Indianapolis Indians.
Lardner kept busy in the off-season
by visiting every city in the Central League during the spring of 1907 and
reporting on any activity. When Terre Haute traded Buck Weaver to a Little Rock
team, Lardner noted that Weaver had been keeping in shape over the winter “by
acting as a life-saving line at a Terre Haute skating rink.” Upon the hiring of
new umpire Ollie Chill from Indianapolis, Larnder informed his readers that the
rookie man in blue had “obtained his preliminary training throwing pianos into
the second-story windows of flat buildings. During his experience as an umpire,
he has been known to pick small disgruntled ball players up by the Adam's apple
and toss them to the roof of the grandstand.”
In the summer of 1907 Lardner split
his time between his passion for baseball and his passion for Ellis Abbott of
Goshen, Indiana. The two were introduced to one another while attending a
picnic along the Saint Joseph River in Niles. His future wife inspired Lardner
to write: “The first time I cast my eyes upon young Ellis fair, I thought, ‘It's
my affinity who’s seated over there.’” With Lardner embarking on a
sportswriting career, however, the couple endured a long courtship, finally
marrying on June 28, 1911.
Lardner’s tenure at the Times ended
in the fall of 1907, when he developed “a desire to quit South Bend and get a
job on a paper in Chicago or New York.” His wish came true through the aid of
an old family friend. Ring and Rex Lardner cleverly timed their vacations to
coincide with the World Series between the Cubs and Tigers. While in Chicago,
the Lardners stayed with the Jacks family, former friends from Niles.
When Ring informed Phil Jacks of
his wish for a change, his friend, who knew Hugh S. Fullerton, baseball writer
for the Chicago Examiner, arranged a meeting between the two for
the next day. After a brief meeting in the Examiner offices,
the two men retired to a neighborhood bar for a few drinks before the
end-of-the-season game between the White Sox and Saint Louis Browns. The
liquor, said Lardner, “did away with my innate reticence,” and he and Fullerton
were soon engaged in a friendly discussion about baseball. When the men arrived
at the game, Fullerton introduced Lardner to Comiskey and proclaimed, “I’m
going to find a job for this boy in somebody's sporting department. He’s been
writing baseball on the South Bend Times for two years, but he
isn’t as sappy as that sounds.”
Fullerton arranged for Lardner to
be seated next to him in the press box when the World Series opened in Chicago
at the West Side Ball Park and even traveled with him to Detroit. The series
ended with the Cubs sweeping the Tigers in four games. Fullerton introduced
Lardner to Frank B. Hutchinson of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, and Hutchinson
offered him a sportswriting job at $18.50 a week. After Lardner accepted the
offer, his new boss asked him how he could manage to living in Chicago on such
a small salary. “I can get on the wagon [swear off liquor],” Lardner said. “You
can get on the wagon," Hutchinson responded, “but nobody can work for us
and stay there.”
Lardner’s decision to leave South
Bend did not sit well with his employers who realized they were losing a
talented reporter. Fortunately, Lardner’s young assistant, J. P. McEvoy, was
able to take over his old job. “The real requiem,” Lardner said, “was held in
the old manse in Niles, Michigan.” His mother, who considered Chicago to be
"a huge collection of Gomorrahs," arranged for her son’s room and
board at a respectable woman’s home on the city’s north side. After a short
time, however, Lardner found he could no longer afford this arrangement and
moved to a single room on the corner of North State and Goethe Streets.
Although Lardner made it back to
the old family home on numerous occasions throughout his life—he provided
financial support for his family as his fame grew—the sheltered existence he
knew as a youth faded as he dealt with the hard life of a roving reporter and
writer. “Small towns are fine to grow up in and a writer finds out a lot of
things in small towns he can't learn anywhere else,” Lardner later observed. “But
it wouldn’t be the same as you got older in a small town.” Those things he
learned while living in a small town, and his experiences as a journalist in
South Bend, permeated Lardner’s literary life—a career that produced, according
to Virginia Woolf, “the best prose that has come our way.”
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ReplyDeleteEin und zwanzig = 21, not 20.
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