Monday, August 6, 2012

Beginnings Part III



No word yet from the Town of Hawthorne on someone to contact regarding history. The workday went by so fast I didn't remember to grab a moment to call the Superior Telegraph, either, so that needs to go on the to-do list.

You might ask, why all this focus on Chuck's early life, instead of diving right into the parts about he and the first London?

Mostly because I feel like if I'm writing this book, I want to get as close as I can to understanding Chuck Eisenmann. I think a lot of that will come in time as I talk to more people who knew Chuck, but I also want to angle in on his boyhood. He was an ambitious boy, a boy who dreamed—but who worked at making his dreams reality. He didn't just daydream about being a pitcher—he worked at it. That ethic is deep in the roots of what made Chuck successful not just as a pitcher or officer or athletics program coordinator, but what made him successful with his dogs.

The way that Chuck taught them was a total departure from the way everyone else thought about dogs. Sixties, seventies, eighties, dogs were animals who needed to be babied or bullied into learning something. Heck, the techniques he developed were a departure from the way even he had thought about them. I remember a quote—I'll have to look it up, it's in one of his books—where he talks about, early in life, he just didn't really take notice of dogs other than as another sort of animal on the farm. I'll see if I can find that for you and post the actual quote.

So—an ambitious farm boy from northern Wisconsin, with dreams in his head and an idea of how to get where he wanted to be. An area that wasn't really growing, a strongly rural area, and a pretty boring place to grow up if it was anything like my own upbringing in southern rural Wisconsin (some will say that boring is better than the dangers kids can face these days—but it certainly does make us independent sorts want to strike out on our own).

I have put together an impression that Chuck didn't have really strong family ties, that he was strongly independent, a bit of a loner, and that he made his own way in things. As soon as he could he got himself into the minor leagues and away from home. And he was reluctant to go back to Wisconsin, even when life dealt him a poor hand.

To illustrate this, here's another quote from London: the Dog Who Made the Team, after recounting Chuck's release from the White Sox--his one stint in the Major Leagues:

     "In all the world he could think of no single person he cared to face. He might have flown north to his mother. She lived in a Wisconsin town, now that Pa had died and the farm was gone. Ma would give him boundless sympathy.
     'Poor Cholly.'
     He could see her rock back and forth, regarding him.
     'Cholly, better you settle down. With Emil a nice job in the garage. Here at home with Emil. Here with George.'
     The last thing Chuck wanted was to become 'Poor Cholly'."

Emil I have no idea on (a friend of the family maybe, or a nickname for Chuck's eldest brother William?) but George almost certainly refers to Chuck's second brother, who had enlisted in the peacetime Navy before the war and presumably had returned to his hometown afterward.

Next: I am noticing some discrepancies in the timeline between Malcolmson's somewhat romanticized account and Gary Bedingfield's excellent Baseball in Wartime blog entry on Eisenmann (with material drawn from an interview given in 1995). Given that, my task will be to break down Chuck's movements from team to team and in and out of the Army as given in Mr. Bedingfield's account, and then to attempt to fit into them the large amount of anecdotal material I'm collecting.

1 comment:

  1. STOP! SIT! AND THINK
    Chapter 15: Selecting Your Dog, page 165:

    "I was one of fourteen children born into a farming family. As a farm boy I don't remember having any special affection for our big Airedale, Bob. I recall his barking at the cows and chickens and following the manure spreader, or chasing field mice that had found a temporary home under a shock of grain. But there was no special niche in my heart for Bob, as far as I know, and when he died I shed no tears nor do I recall any shed by my brothers and sisters.
    Today, I know that Bob, despite the fact that he appeared to have no special talents, served a very vital and a very useful purpose. He was the one who filled that missing link to a family of fourteen children. Not by deed did he accomplish this task, but rather by the mere fact of being present and being just a Dog. To think that is took me almost thirty years to become aware of the job which Bob did! Like everything else in life, we as humans are too wont to accept someone and something at face value and not truly understand their worth until they have left us."

    I love that you're working on this. The opportunity to read more about Chuck and his life would be amazing. I only wish it were more easily possible to read all of his books.

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