In 1956, failed minor league infielder Earl Weaver was sitting in a bar in the south side of Chicago wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life when the managing editor of the Sun-Times saddled up in the next stool and ordered a triple bourbon. Having lost Ruth Crowley, the author of one of the paper's most popular features, Ask Ann Landers, to the grim reaper and wondering where on earth he could find her replacement he opened his heart to the kid. Earl was in a listening mood and honest that he didn't have the answers to anything in life. The editor was so impressed with Earl's candor and hard ball realism that he hired him to replace Crowley under the same pen name.
Earl's first advise columns proved so popular that the dozens of inquiring letters turned into hundreds within a few weeks. The editor fearing that adoring readers desperate for direction might hunt his writer down lined up a minor league coaching job for Earl with the Knoxville Smokies. The editor then hired first two and eventually four assistants to go through the soon thousands of letters Ann was receiving. The most promising letters were then given to the editor who either mailed them to the Smokies clubhouse or during baseball season, when Earl was constantly on the road. read them over the phone to him.
Earl proved as proficient at focusing pitchers and correcting bat swings as he was at mending broken homes and hearts. Within a year he was moving up the minor league coaching ladder while his column faced syndication. With his readers now spread across the United States the editor feared Earl would not be able to keep his identity secret so in order to dilute the column's popularity the editor proposed that Earl accept a contract from a rival newspaper syndicate as Ann's twin sister Abigail Van Buren. Now Earl was faced with writing Ask Ann Landers and Dear Abby while managing in the minors for the Baltimore Orioles organization.
As the readership of both his columns grew to millions worldwide, Earl moved up the Oriole's farm system with winning seasons and three championships. Twin sisters from Ohio were hired for their hair to portray the twin sister columnists as major magazines and television demanded exposure. Finally, in 1968, Earl became the first base coach of the major league Orioles and took over as manager in July. Even big league baseball coaches were little noted in the late 60's but managers saw lots of air time and press. The question was could Earl make the same mark on major league baseball as he did on the hearts and minds of over 110 million readers.
Major League Baseball has since its explosion in popularity at latter part of the nineteenth century to the national pastime just a few decades later been mired in corruption and conspiracy. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was originally formed to try to keep the rampant gangsterism of the growing sport in check and its MBL "Pinstripe" division to this day is still its largest department approximately twice the size of the Anti-Terrorism unit. Earl had agreed to take the coaching cover to his advise column writing career only if he worked for the recently formed Baltimore Oriole organization, which alone among the major league mobs was run as a legitimate business.
As the country weathered radical social and political changes in the late sixties, Earl strived to advise his readers to hold to the American ideals of tolerance and decency while steering his adopted Oriole farm team through a league of Ponzi pennant schemes and payola. The major league Orioles had already succumb to public pressure to win a pennant in 1966 by trading true American Milt Pappas to the Cincinnati "Commie" Reds for the country's most feared hit man, Frank Robinson. The Cincinnati mob knew that Pappas was in decline but as one of the many KGB fronts in Ohio baseball they wanted their agent Robinson closer to the nation's capitol during that chilly period in the Cold War. The Orioles won the World Series that year sweeping the heavily favored Los Angeles Draft Dodgers in four games.
Working closely with the FBI, Earl threatened his way to first base coach on the Orioles major league team in 1968 and by July had collected enough evidence to have the manager led off in chains. Newly installed as manager or Godfather of the Orioles, Earl took his own advise and decided to face down every element of corruption in the game. Beginning with neglecting the "tip envelopes" traditionally distributed to umpires before "Play Ball" was called, Earl would pat down batters for the "Jacksons" they had grown used to slipping the plate umpire in order to shrink the strike zone to somewhere within reach of their bats.
The Umpires Association, which was taken over in 1934 by a special unit of the Third Reich's Gestopo or Secret Police, became an independent criminal espionage organization after the end of the Second World War. Holding personal dossiers on all the top players, coaches and owners in the league, the umpires ruled ruthlessly and imperiously over games calling balls and strikes, fair and foul and safe and out without any regard to the play on the field. The Association's Fuhrer was Marty "the meat grinder" Springstead who after pummeling the Oriole outfielders with bricks in the Toronto Blue Jays bullpen caused Earl to pull his team out of lawless Canada and forfeit the game. Earl refused to return his players to the sub colony until the State Department provided a detachment of plain clothes marines to provide them security.
All while holding the hands of the country's beleaguered populace. The change Earl was fighting for in major league baseball was revolutionary. A clean game- an honest contest fairly officiated by unbiassed professionals between exceptional talents well coached and sensitive to the needs of the fan base and hometown. Children and adults idolized the stars and Earl wanted his players to be worthy of the adulation. He wanted to remold professional baseball players into a multi-race of American heroes.
While cleaning up the late to the game corruption in the Oriole organization, Earl was confronted as a columnist with the systemic changes in the society. Writing under his wigs in support of legalizing homosexual acts in 1973 while championing the rights of women and minorities, Earl invited criticism and scrutiny that seemed sure to blow his cover. His original editor/sponsor/co-conspirator begged Earl to sidestep the gay issue arguing that he would alienate global support for his other causes but that was not the Weaver way. Turning his cap around to more closely confront the bullies, tyrants, big wigs, gangsters, rapists, murderers and Nazis that controlled society and baseball was an impulse Earl never considered suppressing. The orange, black and white knight through pen and bullpen charged at the enemies of freedom and humanity without consideration for his career or personal safety.
A number of newspapers in the Bible Belt tried dropping his columns but quickly reinstalled them after tasting the wrath of his devoted local readership. Where his editor pleaded for baby steps on hot issues, Earl decried the "small ball" tactics of incremental change when it came to freedom, rights and baseball. "We didn't bunt after Pearl Harbor," Earl was often heard to say. "We swung for Tokyo and Berlin and we homered."
Nervous publishers and naive sportswriters continued to underestimate Earl as Ann/Abby and manager of the Orioles. They feared the controversy and rage but readers and fans alike rallied to his cause knowing all along in their hearts that Earl/Ann/Abby was the real deal. Society was changing, becoming more inclusive with hints of equality, while baseball was evolving into a sport that even children could watch and play.
As the tumultuous Sixties came to a close in the Autumn of 69, the New York mobsters had pulled their support for the Bronx Barbarians and thrown all their money and muscle into the Amoral Mets in Queens. Extorting and arm twisting their path to the pennant, the gangsters got their puppets to the World Series where even the umpires under the close scrutiny of the the television cameras couldn't swing the calls enough to keep the series from going to a fifth game. Vegas and the Big Apple families had bet the farm on a New York sweep. Weaver had lost the series but won the battle. As reprisals littered Broadway and the Vegas strip with bodies, the Justice Department armed with ammunition provided by Earl began to sweep up the surviving thugs.
Earl took his Orioles back to the World Series the following season and won. He would return two more times in his seventeen years at the helm while shaping American opinion and attitudes through his columns. When the actress Eppie Lederer who portrayed Ann Landers died in 2002 Earl ended the column and continued to write Dear Abby. Then, on Wednesday, January 16th 2013 Pauline Phillips, the surviving actress twin who portrayed Abigail Van Buren of Dear Abby, died. With his last cover lost Earl quietly passed away that Sunday without ever revealing his ghost writing career.
*The following piece is dedicated to the memory of Bruce and Mike, two Northwood boys no longer with us.
Don Arrup
Satire1
