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.