It was the summer of 1974 and I had just matriculated from the eighth grade and was awaiting my freshman year of high school. Meanwhile the Oakland Athletics were on their way to winning their third World Series in a row. It was during this time my cousin Greg taunted me into game of baseball. After a year of hearing my stories of the A’s and engaging in fervent baseball card trading, he asked me if I was going to do something with that bat. “You mean like, sell it?” “No.” he said. “I mean like, play with it.” The thought really never occurred to me since I wasn’t a baseball player but during the doldrums of the summer in a small town you’ll do just about anything. Greg had a baseball glove and I had a bat and we scrounged enough money to buy a baseball from the Red Front Store in town.
My grandmother had a field out behind her house and soon the two of us were imagining ourselves to be our hero’s during vicious games of our own version of “over-the-line;” me as Joe Rudi and he as his hero Pete Rose. Oddly, enough it was the A’s and the Red’s vying for baseball dominance at the same time. That summer I learned to hit a curveball, appreciate an unassisted double play and that playing the game was more fun than talking about it. It was also the summer my bat lost its color, got waterlogged from laying on the dew-drenched field overnight and for all intents and purposes lost its value.
I remember one day playing a hotly contested battle between Oakland and Cincinnati, when as occasionally happened the fire whistle started to blow. This was the means by which all the volunteer firemen would be summoned for a pending emergency. For the citizens of the valley floor it was always a curiosity to see how long it took for the sixth and final whistle blow to end before we would hear the fainter and quicker sirens of the fire engines. They were amazingly quick for how far many of the men had to travel to the side station off Main Street. As Greg and I stood on the field listening the smaller sirens grew close and eventually loud as they passed by the field behind my grandmother’s house. Turning northwest they were headed toward the mouth of the Eel River where on the horizon we observed smoke.
On this day, a call came from the part of the valley known as Camp Weott. Which was the first port on the Eel River during the early part of the twentieth century allowing transport for the many redwood trees being shipped down to San Francisco. It is mostly cool, damp and windy and even on a summer day can elicit a fire in the kitchen stove, which for many of the near century old Victorians was the only source of heat. One such home was owned by the Jorgensen’s. A patriarch family to the valley they were well known and beyond themselves in years. On this day Cliff picked a particularly sappy piece of alder to place in the stove and like many old homes the right combination of soot laden chimney pipe and heated sap created a classic chimney fire which in turn ignited the down wind shake roof which spread to the third floor of this old classic home. By the time the fire had reached the second story of their six bedroom home Cliff could smell smoke and walked outside only to discover his own home in flames. Realizing his wife of sixty two years Evelyn was upstairs in the second story sewing room likely asleep as was her afternoon custom, Cliff was helpless as his arthritis no longer permitted him to travel up and down stairways. In a panic, Cliff had only one option as the telephone line had already been severed from the heat, he went behind the house to the old milk shed which was recently converted into a crude but livable space by a college dropout named Bob.
Bob had received a baseball scholarship to Cal State Berkley. And in two short seasons he had made a quite an impression on the local talent scouts. He was offered a chance to play for the Giant’s triple A team in Stockton but he turned it down to further his education. It was an uncertain time with images of Kent State and flower power to remembrances of the Black Panthers and the Sibianese Liberation Army; world-views were radically changing. It was also the same time of the Jesus Movement and Bob had “found religion.” And now anti-establishment and resembling a hippie, it was not popular on the Berkley campus to leave your mind to the submission of faith. Soon, Bob found himself like many discarded “hippies” seeking refuge in the shadow of the redwoods.
When I met Bob it was several years later and just after I committed my life to Christ when I started milking cows for a Danish drunk, affectionately known around town as, Getty. Getty’s farm was the backyard of the old gutted and burned out house of the Jorgensen’s and close-by was the converted milk house, still in tact and still the home of a would be baseball player. Bob was in a wheel chair the result of rescuing Evelyn from the second story sewing room years earlier. As the story goes, though Bob never talked about it, was he was hit from behind by a collapsing burning timber from the second just after he got Evelyn across the threshold to safety.
The summer of 1977 I spent almost every non working moment with Bob. It was during that summer I learned how to play chess, appreciate a Monterey Jack grilled cheese sandwich and to “hit” the Bible. It was Bob’s way of referring to reading the Bible. Because Bill was a hermit, by choice and by circumstance, he also was a student of the Bible. You could ask him anything and he would know the answer, cross-referenced and annotated. His mind was amazing and his faith encouraging. However, I remembered thinking had I not come along who would he have been able to share it with?
At the end of that summer while we were discussing the attributes of God during one of our many chess games, I said, without thinking, “You ever gonna do something with that bat?” He looked at me with a blank stare. “What?” “You ever gonna do something with that bat?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Yes you do.” I was raising my eyebrows and turning my head in just the right positions as if to say, “Come on! You know what I’m talking about.” Just a couple of nights prior after coming home from a movie in Eureka we were listening and singing our lungs out to countless songs of Daniel Amos, Love Song, Gentle Faith and Larry Norman. We called it worship… after moments of his silence I just started singing one of those songs.
“I am a servant, I am waiting for the call…
I’ve been unfaithful so I sit here in the hall…
How can you use me when I’ve never given all…
How can you choose me when you now I’d quickly fall…
So you feed my soul and you make me grow
And you let me know you love me…
And I’m worthless now and I’ve made a vow
I will humbly bow before thee…
Oh please use me… I am lonely.”
We finished our game mostly in silence until it was time for me to be off for the afternoon milking.
That fall I entered my senior year of high school. The Oakland A’s didn’t make it to the World Series but then again, it didn’t matter. Joe Rudi was playing for the California Angels. I enrolled in UCLA but promptly decided to attend LIFE Bible College instead. Bob, well he moved to Redding, eventually got married and I hear is the pastor of a small church somewhere in Lassen County.
I often reflect back on that time and realize hero’s make a difference in our lives. Their impact is far reaching and we probably aught to exercise caution when selecting a personal hero. It’s someone you look up to, a person you want to be like, a person who when making the right sacrifice, in other words, when giving to others while risking a personal cost can make a personal impact and change your life forever.
It’s funny, I haven’t seen or heard from Bob in over twenty five years. Joe Rudi, on the other hand, just sent me a nice note… and a personally signed baseball bat.
But that’s another story.
