Sunday, August 5, 2012

Beginnings Part II

I have been doing some internet delving today, trying to find a newspaper local to Hawthorne (in the hopes they might have an archive) but have only found the Superior Telegram, which serves all of Douglas County. Their online archive looks like it goes back only to around 2002, and I'm not sure how old the paper itself is.

If they have been around long enough and have an archive, then that's something I'd have to try to visit in person. I do have their phone number and address so I can call them this week and make some polite enquiries.

I'm going to need to re-read all of Chuck's books, hunting for those little anecdotes that pop up here and there in his writing. That should be fun; when I find a really neat bit I can quote it here for those of you who don't already own the material.

I also own David Malcolmson's London: the Dog Who Made the Team, a biography written as a  narrative and published in 1963. The writing style is of a sort that's fallen out of popularity today, but there are some great tidbits and stories in there (and many excellent candid photos of London that I haven't seen anywhere else, I assume from Chuck's personal collection). I'll likely be scanning some of those and putting them up here as the work goes on.

Here's a quote from Chapter One of the above book, about Chuck's boyhood, that gives some perspective on the ambition and drive of this small-town Wisconsin farm boy:

"As a boy on a dairy farm he had dreamed of a great pitching arm. Milking cows was but a way of building strength into his right hand and into his right forearm. He threw stones. He threw balls. Always he aimed at a target. As he threw a rock, a clod, an apple even, he planned for each finger to do its part, to give a ball a needed twist. ... Putting mind and soul and body into his right arm, he built an arm he could take to any manager in the land and say, 'Step out on the diamond and see for yourself.'"

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Research: Noted down the contact info for the Superior Telegram for future enquiry, did some archive searches online and found out there are still Eisenmanns in the area (though who knows if they are related, or even if they know about Chuck if they are?).

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