The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings: Keynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999

Abstract

The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red StockingsKeynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999 Daryl Brock (bio) In the summer of 1985 I set out on a two-month, 12,000-mile odyssey around the U.S. following the tour routes of the 1969 Cincinnati Red Stockings. My intention was to visit the twenty-six cities and towns where they played. I managed to get to all but Fort Wayne, which still remains on my to-do list. Why was I doing this in the first place? Well, it began with my reading Douglas Wallop's Baseball: An Informal History. Wallop, you may remember, wrote The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the Broadway hit "Damn Yankees." I was intrigued by Wallop's charming descriptions of the first ballplayers to come out in the open and say they were playing a boy's game for money. Their salaries were guaranteed by contracts, and the amounts were even published in newspapers. (By the way, the day after tomorrow, Monday, is the 130th anniversary of the start of those contracts: March 15th, 1869; they ran eight months, expiring on November 15th.) Wallop recounted how opponents called player-manager Harry Wright a "bearded boy in bloomers" and "captain of the bloody calves" because of the team's new knickerbocker-style uniform. Wallop also told of them riding across plains and prairies to play in San Francisco—which meant they had ridden the new transcontinental railroad in the very first months of its existence. Who were those guys? I wondered. What was it like to be a twenty-two-year-old playing baseball only four years after the end of the Civil War and seven years before the Custer massacre, when the West was still wild? What was society like? What was baseball like? This was hardly a new pattern. As a boy I would read, say, Robin Hood and then probe its "reality" by delving into a general history or perhaps a biography of Richard the Lion-Hearted. In college I was a double major—literature and history—and taught those subjects later along with psychology—the very elements of novel making. By spring of 1985 I had done enough research on post-Civil War matters to become fascinated by them and also to realize that little in the way of commercial entertainment had employed that era as a setting. Most of it had been focused [End Page 23] in the South, such as KKK-related stories during Reconstruction. Nothing had been set in the North except the old TV program "Wild Wild West," which I think took place during Grant's second administration. The year 1869 seemed a fabulous backdrop for some kind of story. Consequently, on Sunday, May 5th, 1985, I prepared to set out from Seattle, where my wife, Lura, was then employed as an actress. We loaded gear into my truck—Lura had purchased a camper shell as a setting-out gift. Is she a great wife, or what?—and in jumped our beagle-mix, Missy. The scouting report on Missy read: "Best position shortstop. Great natural instincts, speed, and range; can get her teeth around almost anything ever turned out at the Louisville bat factory." She would be my traveling companion in the weeks to come. We left Seattle at 6 A.M. and set out across the Cascades, passing through Ritzville and St. Regis and Saltese; through Spokane and Couer d'Alene and Missoula. By nightfall we'd gone 704 miles and found a KOA campground to our liking outside of Bozeman Hot Springs, Montana. Next morning I breakfasted at theCowboy Café in downtown Bozeman, where I caught snippets of dialogue (more accurately, intersecting monologues) that went: "Hey, Craig . . . [long silence] . . . Ah sold thet roll a bob wahr. . . ." and the uninflected response: " . . . Huh . . ."On the TV in the corner was coverage of historians combing the Little Bighorn site with metal detectors, attempting to track the 1876 battlefield movements by means of ballistic tests on shell casings. The commentary in the Cowboy Café went: "Why the hell they wanna spend money finding out what happened to Custer? He...