His kinfolk called him Charles Dunn. He was the youngest of four boys born to a sharecropper who during the Depression coaxed burley tobacco from the red clay of Ballard County, where America’s two great rivers — the Ohio and the Mississippi — became one.
“Dunn” was the boy’s middle name as well as his mother’s maiden name. He shared a first name with his father; calling him by his first and middle names was a way to differentiate him from the father known to many as Mister Charlie.
After Charles Dunn was grown and moved away from home, he was known simply as Charlie to his friends, co-workers and wife.
Years after that, his grandchildren called him Dandy.
But I called him Dad.
Dad grew up a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, when that team was both the westernmost and southernmost in the big leagues. Western Kentucky decidedly was Cardinals Country, especially during the 1940s, when St. Louis won the National League pennant four times in five years and beat the Joe DiMaggio and the damn Yankees in the World Series in 1942.
But the Cardinals were also the team of fans in Oklahoma and Arkansas and New Mexico at a time when its radio network was the biggest in baseball, transmitting game accounts broadcast by the magnificent Dizzy Dean.
As the decades ground on, Dad would listen many nights to games described over the radio by legendary sportscasters like Harry Carey and Jack Buck.
Inevitably, Dad’s love for baseball, and the Cardinals, would rub off on me.
This weekend traditionally marks the mid-point of the big-league baseball season and the All-Star Break, when winning teams strive to continue their winning ways and losing teams look to turn things around.
With Major League Baseball 2020 still on hold, let me share my 10 greatest baseball memories with Dad.
No. 10: Crosley Field, 1968: This was the home of the Cincinnati Reds, a team I would come to hate because kids I grew up with in Lexington liked baseball only after the Reds got good and turned into the Big Red Machine.
But it’s the first big-league ballpark Dad took me to. It was a dumpy old park in a dumpy old part of town, out by the freight yards. Walking up the concrete ramps to our seats the first time, the stadium reeked of hot dog water, stale popcorn and cigar smoke; I liked it instantly.
No. 9: The Baseball Encyclopedia, 1969: Over the years, Dad bought and saved many books — most notably the annual paperbacks titled “Who’s Who in Baseball” — packed with the statistics that baseball fans crave. It was a way that folks measured greatness in ballplayers: How many home runs did he hit that year? How many bases did he steal? How many batters did that guy strike out?
But during the 150th anniversary of professional baseball, the Macmillan Company published a compendium of baseball minutiae unlike anything ever seen. It contained more than 2,300 pages and weighed nearly seven pounds. Most incredibly, it cost $25 (equal to nearly $175 today), and Dad — who threw quarters around like they weighed nearly seven pounds — bought a copy.
How many hours did we thumb through The Baseball Encyclopedia, mining trivia with a goal of stumping the other? However many hours it was, not a minute of joy was wasted.
No. 8: Curt Blefary, 1969: I coaxed Dad out to the backyard for countless games of catch.
My lack of natural talent, especially compared with Dad’s athletic giftedness, became evident on those afternoons. I asked Dad which position would be most promising for me; he suggested first base.
He bought me my first good glove, a Rawlings first baseman’s mitt bearing the signature of Curt Blefary, a ballplayer who never fully lived up to his promising rookie year. He was so unpredictable as a fielder that his teammate Frank Robinson nicknamed him “Clank.”
It would prove to be appropriate that I would launch my own jangly baseball career wearing a Curt Blefary baseman’s mitt.
No. 7: The Cincinnati milestones, 1970: Cincy lay just 90 minutes from where I grew up, so it was a handy place to watch baseball. The year I turned 13, we hit a grand slam:
June 24, 1970: The last game at 58-year-old Crosley Field, a quirky old ballpark with an enormous scoreboard and stands that held fewer than 30,000 fans. We wrote off for tickets and got a pair of prime tickets just left of home plate. Despite the history being made, the game didn’t sell out.
June 30, 1970: We returned to witness the first game at Riverfront Stadium, one of those cookie-cutter multi-sport venues of that era. Our seats were up in the nosebleed section of left field, where the rows were so steep that you felt as though if you leaned forward from your seat, you would tumble forward seven rows.
July 13, 1970: Again we wrote off, via the post office, and again we scored tickets for the first-ever All-Star game at Riverfront. (More on this later.)
October 1970: My first World Series game seen in person, between two great teams: the Reds and the Baltimore Orioles.
No. 6: Rose scores! July 14, 1970: At the All-Star game at Riverfront, the National League scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth inning to tie the score.
So it remained until the bottom of the 12th, when hard-nosed Pete Rose broke from second base on a base hit, rounded third base and slammed into catcher Ray Fosse so hard that he bowled over the 215-pund Fosse, separating his shoulder.
Rose’s hard-nose play won the game for the Nationals, but Fosse was never quite the same. It was one of the most memorable plays ever in an All-Star game, and Dad and I were there.
No. 5: Summer of ’77 (or thereabouts): On a West Coast baseball trip, Dad and I arrived at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles minutes before game time and nabbed a pair of swell tickets in the lower deck between home plate and third base.
That was the game when Dad and I drank a beer together for the first, and maybe the last, time; neither of us were big fans of brewskis. Still, it was a memorable rite of passage to drink a Bud at the ballpark with your old man.
No. 4: Standard Products ballfield, early 1970s: Dad spent most of his career in management at an auto-parts plant; on the grounds of that factory stood a ballfield, mostly hidden by trees and largely forgotten. I suppose it was intended for hosting youth-league games or perhaps an industrial softball league, though I never saw an actual game played there.
But on many sultry weekend afternoons, Dad took me there to play catch or shag fly balls. Stripped to the waist, the sun ripening our shoulders, we would take turns hitting balls out to the outfield for the other to run down.
It wasn’t like playing in a real game. Still, we loved it.
No. 3: 10 runs with two out, June 9, 1968: In the first game of a Sunday doubleheader at Crosley Field, things weren’t looking good for our Cardinals, which trailed the Reds 8-0 midway through the game.
But with two out in the top of the fifth inning and a man on second, nine consecutive Cardinals batters reached base safely, culminating with a towering home run by future Hall of Famer Lou Brock. Improbably, St. Louis scored 10 runs with two out, my first lesson that in baseball, anything can happen so long as you have at least one out left.
No. 2: Big Mac breaks the record, 1998: No one hit 60 home runs in a season until Babe Ruth did in 1927; no one hit 61 until Roger Maris in 1961. Would anyone ever hit more?
In the late summer of ’98, it appeared that not one, but two players might do so: The Chicago Cubs’ Sammy Sosa and Cardinals’ slugger Mark McGwire. On Labor Day that year, I watched on TV as McGwire slammed a 430-foot homer to tie Maris’ record.
By sheer coincidence, Dad was on a guided baseball bus trip that was to include a stop in St. Louis the following night. I had bought four tickets so my wife, our daughter and I could watch the game with Dad. Our seats were on the very top row of Busch Stadium.
At 8:18 p.m., during the fourth inning, McGwire swung at a sinking fast ball and struck a rope — a line drive — that narrowly cleared the left-field wall, and he became the first big-leaguer to hit 62 homers in a season.
Every Cub infielder congratulated him as he jogged around the bases. McGwire stepped on home plate and hoisted his son, dressed in Cardinals red, into the air. After his teammates congratulated him, they parted so Sosa — who had trotted in from right field — could greet his rival, who hugged and lifted him into the air as fireworks exploded overhead. Then McGwire climbed into the grandstand to greet the gracious Maris family.
No one who was there will forget that night.
No. 1: Summer of 2008: Ten years later, Dad invited Donna and me to join him on a bus tour of ballparks in the Northeast. We hit eight parks in 11 days — Dad visited nearly 50 big-league fields over his lifetime — plus the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
But the most memorable experience came in Boston’s classic Fenway Park, opened in 1912.
Once Dad had been an athlete, standing six feet tall with broad shoulders and hands like Vice-Grips. By 2008, at age 83 he was beginning to fail physically. His vision was unreliable, his balance uncertain; his footspeed was plodding.
We were seated in Fenway’s outfield bleachers, and our bus was parked at least a mile away. We knew we needed to leave well before the end of the game.
Old Fenway hadn’t been equipped with handrails along the bleacher steps. I walked beside Dad, holding his left arm, helping him down each step, but still he felt uncertain. As we crept downward, he sought the security of each row of seatbacks with his right hand.
One fan at the end of an aisle felt the nudge of that hand against his back and, in an instant, sized up the situation. He stood and took Dad’s right arm, joining me in guiding him.
“I don’t want to take you away from the game,” Dad protested, though only mildly.
The Red Sox fan just kept helping me get my father down the steps.
“This,” the guy said, “is much more important.”
It was a touching moment that I remember even more fondly than record-setting home runs, first beers and even a 10-run inning.
Guest columnist Chuck Stinnett can be reached at chuck.stinnett@gmail.com.