It’s February, when the boys of summer, the big league pros, start showing up at spring training camps, first pitchers and catchers by mid-month. It’s also when fathers, sons and daughters start conditioning the gloves, whipping down bats and shopping for new spikes. It’s the glorious American ritual before baseball season begins. Bubble gum sales explode, and player trading cards burst on the scene. It’s the best time of the year with spring, magnificent spring on the horizon.
Little League practice follows, and that’s where the magic starts. It’s where I learned the basics, including how to spit athletically. My nightly boyhood dreams were assaulted by what the new season could bring. Organized team play gave me some of the finest friends of my lifetime. All those splendid youngsters now celebrated in this old geezer’s everlasting recollections. It was also when I learned to properly cuss myself, following an error at 2B (Get your *#%&*@! butt down on a grounder, boy!)
Hello out there. I wanted to say hi to my readers and thank you for reading these chronicles for the past six years. It has been 72 monthly stories since I started the “Looking Forward to Yesterday” column in the Arizona Daily Star’s Saddlebag Notes. Thanks to all the folks who write to me with kind comments, corrections, suggestions and those remarkable grammar and punctuation tutors. My, you are sticklers. All are my heroes, and I am forever grateful.
This month’s column is a personal inside baseball tale. It’s about a neighborhood butcher in my hometown who became a big-time major league ball club owner.
Once upon a time, a butcher worked at a store in my old Glen Park neighborhood in Gary, Indiana. The shop was near Lew Wallace, the school I attended on the south side. My grandmother bought meat and poultry from the man. His name was Charlie. He was a born salesman and went on to found, at the time, the largest national insurance company in the country. In late 1960, with his success, Charlie bought the Kansas City Royals, which became the Oakland Athletics. Singlehandedly, over 20 years of ownership, Charlie O Finley changed baseball forever.
In Oakland, Finley and the A’s signed such celebrated players as Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers and Bert Campaneris, and became baseball’s dominant team. The club won five straight division titles (1971 to 1975) and three consecutive World Series (1972 to 1974). His legacy includes Charley O the mule, orange baseballs, mustachioed players, hot pants night, green and yellow uniforms, white shoes, the designated hitter, designated runners, and playing World Series games at night, so people like his dad, a 47-year steelworker, in the Gary mills, could watch the game.
He had cookies delivered to the umpires made by A’s employee Debbie Fields, who became the Mrs. Fields cookie empire maven and a Batboy who developed into rapper M.C. Hammer.
Long before all this, well before fame, Charlie struggled with many vocations in the ’30s and ’40s, settling on insurance sales in the evenings in Northwest Indiana. During the day, he worked at the Kingsbury Ordinance Plant, where my mother labored to make bullets and bombs during the war. With two jobs a day and little sleep, he was stricken with tuberculosis. It almost killed him. While hospitalized with the disease for two years before being cured, Finley developed a strategy to sell disability group insurance to doctors. That business plan made him a millionaire before he was 40.
In the early ’70s, I held an Indiana real estate broker’s license, and a friend had a property for sale just down the highway from Finley’s sprawling farm in LaPorte, Indiana. Taking a play from the Finley Showman playbook, I called Charlie at his Chicago insurance company office building at 130 South Michigan Avenue, said I was from Gary and asked for an appointment. Two days later, I was on the 40th floor, standing before his secretary’s desk. She pointed, “Walk up those stairs to Charlie’s office.”
I made my pitch. “Na, son, I’m not interested in real estate,” he told me. Thanks, and I started for the stairs. Then I quipped, “My mom thinks you’re Gary’s most colorful person ever.” “ Does she now,” he said. I added, “She says you’ve got more brass than a Chinese gong factory.” He came around the desk and handed me a ticket to an MLB banquet honoring him the following week in Chicago. Adding that I should wear a nice suit because I’d be sitting with his friends in front of him on the dais.
Years later, in the early ’90s, when I was Police Commissioner in Michigan City, Indiana, I would drive to LaPorte for meetings at the county courthouse, passing Charlie’s farm and his renowned party barn on Highway 35. Once, I spotted him on a porch swing, looking aged and so lonely. I recalled that grand day long ago when I met the man at his office in Chicago. The stairs I climbed to the pinnacle, into his lion’s den, the top floor of his building facing Lake Michigan. Charlie was in all his grandeur, with a sunny sky of azure blue and the expansive turquoise lake filling the windows behind him. The man with that thick white mane, furry sideburns and bushy eyebrows looked like the jungle king. Little did I know at the time he, indeed was a king, and the business of baseball is still a jungle.
Charles Oscar Finely died on February 19, 1996, at age 77, and is buried at Calumet Park Cemetery just down Taft Street from where I lived in Merrillville, Indiana, after moving south from Gary and later, elected to the first Merrillville Town Board.
Aldi is opening its first Tucson grocery store
