Louisiana Voice

Sometimes we just need a break.

This is the time of year, of course, when all the stores pipe in seasonal music in an effort to subliminally force the Christmas spirit on us in the hopes that like a guilt trip, it will motivate us to spend lots and lots of cash on cards and gifts for everyone from the landscape contractor to kids and grandkids.

Nothing like a little not-so-subtle advertising to put us in the mood, right? I mean, who wouldn’t be stirred down to our very souls by such a deeply moving Christmas carol like Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer? (by the way, I make it a personal objective every year to make it through the Christmas season without being subjected to that awful song.)

And of course, there are the mind-numbing TV Christmas specials, paid for by an endless array of commercials hawking everything from cars to diamonds to toys and appliances.

And that is precisely why I am offering a little respite from the routine, the routine of writing about politics and the routine of being ground down by an annual Christmas season that long ago stopped being about Christmas, co-opted by a mindset of commercialism bordering on outright profiteering.

The way I cope with this is by reading. If I’m not writing, I’m usually reading. (Yeah, I know, that doesn’t speak much to my neglect of cardiovascular exercise. I’m starting to get those Aretha Franklin upper arms and my stomach makes a handy table for my laptop.)

But reading is my passion and I want to tell you about a delightful book I just read.

Anyone who loves baseball (and who doesn’t, after that thrilling seventh game of this year’s World Series?), will thoroughly enjoy Uncle Drew and the Bat Dodger by Thomas Cochran.

It’s not about politics, there are no spies, no murders and no sex. Just baseball. And better yet, it’s set in Claiborne Parish, up in north Louisiana where I traipsed around as a much younger man, in the fictional town of Oil Camp.

It mentions such exotic getaways as Minden in Webster Parish and Arcadia in Bienville, where my old sandlot team, the Ruston Ramblers played some hard-fought games against Emmett Woodard’s Arcadia Aces.

We finished as runner-up to Arcadia several years in a row but never beat them for the title. They even beat us in the championship game one year with only seven players. They were that good. (It was against Arcadia, however, that I got my one and only run batted in—the game-winning RBI, no less—in my 10 years as the Ramblers manager and occasional player. That I ever got to play at all is attributable solely to the fact that I owned the team. But I still hold to the opinion that I could have been a good baseball player except for the unfortunate inability to hit, run, catch or throw.)

But back to our story. It’s listed as juvenile fiction by the book’s publisher, Pelican Publishing of Gretna, but I would recommend it for youngsters of all ages. I’m 73 and I loved it. I’m not sure where author Cochran is from, but I’d bet my old glove he’s from north Louisiana.

The story is told through the voice of nine-year-old (soon to be 10) Teddy Caldwell who meets his elderly neighbor, Drew Weems, by hitting a baseball through the old man’s window. A friendship quickly forms between the two. When Teddy mentions that Derek Jeter is his favorite player, Drew, Uncle Drew, snorts in derision. He confides that his all-time favorite is Cantrell “Bopeep” Shines, hands-down.

Uncle Drew, it turns out as the story unfolds, was a 14-year-old farm boy when a bus broke down in Claiborne Parish near the pond where he was fishing. The passengers were members of an all-black barnstorming baseball team of the old Negro Leagues which existed before Jackie Robinson broke the major league’s color barrier.

Shines, the team’s star pitcher, was fed up of not being paid and walks away on foot, trailed by the curious Drew. Eventually they hook up and Drew fries the fish he has caught for Shines who confides in the white boy his plans to make “real money.”

Drew decides to throw in with Shines and the two strike out on their own barnstorming tour across the South and even into Texas where Shines, with Drew serving as his catcher and bookkeeper, takes on all comers in one-on-one encounters, challenging would-be hitters to bat against him. The bets range from a few cents all the way up to an eye-popping $500 bet with, of all people, retired Detroit Tiger Ty Cobb, owner of the all-time high major league career batting average.

I won’t tell you how that face-off ended, but along the way, Shines picks up the name Bat Dodger. (He called himself Bopeep because he herded hitters “like sheeps.” He used banter with hitters to his advantage by getting into their heads much like we imagine Satchel Paige might have done in his prime.

Drew decides to mentor the underachieving right fielder Teddy and teaches him to use the same windup employed by Shines. Of course, when he goes out for the team, the coach automatically assigns him to right field, the position generally played by the last player chosen, though in real baseball, from college on up to the majors, the strong arm of the right fielder is an important commodity.

But Teddy and Drew have other ideas. Teddy asks to try out for pitcher.

To learn what happens to Drew, Shines and Teddy’s tryout for pitcher, you’ll just have order the book from PELICAN.

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Recently I wrote about friend and former co-worker O.K. “Buddy” Davis who suffered a disabling stroke a few years back but who continues to cover sports for The Ruston Daily Leader.

Today’s post is about another friend of both Buddy’s and mine. And while we never worked together at the same time, we did work for the same newspapers at different times in our career.

Nico Van Thyn, like Buddy and me, is a graduate of the Louisiana Tech University School of Journalism and like yours truly, he has an Internet blog. While my writing efforts are generally dedicated to the misdeeds of various politicos, he concentrates on writing in Once a Knight primarily about graduates of Woodlawn High School in Shreveport. People like Terry Bradshaw, Trey Prather, Joe Ferguson and Tommy Spinks.

But again, like yours truly, he often writes about other topics and that is the reason for this post.

Nico’s story is quite unique and we’re the better for his having written about it. It’s a story we should never allow ourselves to forget. Ever.

You see, Nico’s parents were Jewish victims of Hitler’s concentration camps. Unlike six million others, however, they were fortunate to have survived the Holocaust. And they carried the numbers the Nazis tattooed on their left forearms for the remainder of their respective lives to prove it.

(How anyone can deny the Holocaust simply defies all logic.)

Encouraged and goaded by friends to combine the individual posts about his parents into a single volume, he at first resisted but finally relented and the result is his wonderful—and poignant—book, A tribute to Survivors: 62511, 70726.

Of his book, Van Thyn says it is available through the self-publishing company, CreateSpace, and it is listed on Amazon. “The title is the story of my parents and their lives before and after they were Holocaust survivors,” he says. “The numbers in the title are the numbers the Nazis tattooed on their left forearms.”

As much as it is Rose and Louis Van Thyn’s stories, it is also the story of Nico and sister Elsa and their journey from Amsterdam to the United States.

Anyone who has followed Nico’s blog for the past five years probably has already seen much of the material in the book. But it has been a while since the early chapters, and you might not have seen many of the photos in the book.

“Doing this has been a labor of love,” Nico says, “and several people encouraged me to do it. And it also has been a labor.

“Trying to do it on my own two years ago, I failed miserably because I am not that technical savvy. It was driving me more nuts than I already am—and it also was driving someone who lives with me a little battier than she already is. So I dropped the idea. But as I kept writing about my parents’ stories on this blog, people kept telling me I should put it together in a book.

“There are a couple of heroes responsible for it finally happening. Tom Johanningmeier, deputy sports editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (my journalism home for a final decade of work), formatted the whole thing, really put it together. Janet Glaspie, who lived down the street from my parents in Shreveport for years and helped care for them, proofread the pages and made many good suggestions and necessary fixes.

“Without them, I am not a published author,” he said.

“I never had great desire to write a book, but as I state  in the introduction to the book, I wanted my parents’ stories in one place for their many friends and mostly for our family, for the generations.

“And here’s what else; it can’t be said enough: The Holocaust was real, and the threat of oppression and genocide remains ever-present. There are people out there who deny the Holocaust, who excuse what happened, who say it is fictional history.

“They are so wrong, wrong, wrong. Often loud wrong. I knew two people who lived through it, and who told their stories.

“And I’ve retold those stories.”

To order the book (the list price is $15, plus shipping charges):

https://www.createspace.com/6486186 (this is the preferable option, although you might have to create a free CreateSpace account to place an order)

https://www.amazon.com/Survivors-Holocaust-stories-Amsterdam-Auschwitz/dp/153698308X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476637062&sr=1-1

Kindle: (price $2.99, no photos) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MF8CYKV

(Personal note to Nico: Thanks so much. While we love our sports, your parents are the real heroes. We agree completely with all those who commented on your Facebook page: this is a story that begged to be told because it’s so important that we never forget.)

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