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'Praying For Base Hits: An American Boyhood' by Bruce Clayton

'American Boyhood' a visit to another era

Sunday, December 06, 1998

By Jon Caroulis

	Praying For Base Hits: An American Boyhood By Bruce Clayton University of Missouri Press $16.95

Who wouldn’t want to relive the best moments of youth? Moments made perfect by the crystallizing effects of memory, untarnished by the passage of time?

Bruce Clayton, a professor of history at Allegheny College, would revisit sunny April mornings in Kansas City in the 1950s, when he might skip school, play poker with his buddies and play baseball.

The subtitle of his new memoir indicates what makes the work worth our time — Clayton’s experience was steeped in the American culture of the time. His book reveals an intimate knowledge of Americana, including frontier farms, doughboys, jazz, public high school, Sunday school and, of course, baseball.

The sport is the central metaphor here. Playing the game in high school, listening to games on the radio, dreaming of becoming a big leaguer — even attending a tryout camp for the Cardinals — are all lovingly, wistfully recounted in this short, sad, funny and ultimately touching book.

Clayton puts baseball to good use in delineating the two most important relationships of his youth: With his taciturn, bitter father, Roy Roosevelt Clayton, who thought baseball was dumb, and with Mr. Jim, his next-door neighbor and hero, who worked on the construction of Yankee Stadium.

Clayton’s father worked long hours in a Ford factory, had no interest in sports and never had an encouraging word for his son. Mr. Jim drank whiskey (to the chagrin of Clayton’s pious mother) and knew baseball trivia. He also loved to tell jokes and stories, as did his wife, who — heaven forbid! — used curse words.

You almost wish Clayton had moved in with Mr. Jim. His father was so unrelenting in his discouragement that you wonder why there isn’t any rage or anger from Clayton. Eventually, Clayton provides a clue. His paternal grandfather, “Buck” Clayton, made Bruce’s father seem like Robert Young in “Father Knows Best.” A farmer in a small Missouri town, Buck also married a rigidly pious woman and was even colder and meaner than his progeny. Buck killed himself by swallowing poison in front of his wife.

Clayton, as an adult, realizes his father had no chance to be anything more emotionally than he was. One of the book’s more poignant moments is when Clayton tells how his father sailed the Pacific while in the Navy during World War I.

“Fly away, Dad!” Clayton writes in an imaginary conversation with his father. “Take off! You’ve got the wings of youth! Listen just this one time: Don’t go back [to Missouri]. You’ll never be happy there. You hate the place.”

Clayton never learned why his father returned home. He also doesn’t know much about the adults he writes about: Mr. Pierce, the hateful drugstore owner; Frank, the Italian immigrant who slaved in his restaurant; his grandfather; both grandmothers. Except for Mr. Jim, there isn’t a happy grown-up in the book. (None of his friends got along with their fathers, either.) And Clayton never knew what made these people unhappy. It gets frustrating after a while. The historian provides data, but no conclusions.

But this is a book of memories, not reportage. While Clayton did not attempt to answer the questions he raised, we find out why his emotionally Spartan upbringing did not affect him, and that more than salvages the book: He had fun. There are lazy summer days playing baseball, hot nights playing jazz at clubs (without his parents knowing), pranks played on teachers.

Of course, all childhoods end. By high school graduation, Clayton probably hadn’t read a book in his academic career. (Sport magazine doesn’t count.) The oversight landed him in Kansas City Junior College instead of Kansas University or the University of Missouri. But Clayton managed to become a historian and professor.

Clayton had rich material to work with, which is good, because he’s not a great storyteller. He’s a mediocre stylist at best, given to cliche and hyperbole. Every woman, it seems, speaks with “a lilt in her voice” when making an important statement. Ultimately, however, Clayton reconstructs a time and place that have since passed into history and nostalgia.

I might not have wanted to live in his household, but I’m glad he took me for a short ride through his adolescence. The good parts, that is.

Joe Caroulis is a free-lance writer who lives in Philadelphia.