A Midsummer Madness Read online

  A MIDSUMMER

  MADNESS

  GUY FRANKS

  A MIDSUMMER MADNESS

  Copyright © 2018 Guy Franks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  ISBN: 978-1-5320-4691-9 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5320-4692-6 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905033

  iUniverse rev. date: 05/08/2018

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  For Mom, who shares her birthday with the Bard.

  A summer’s day will seem an hour but short,

  Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.

  Shakespeare

  The playing field is baseball’s equivalent of a stage.

  Roger Kahn

  1

  CHAPTER

  What’s in a name?

  Romeo and Juliet

  Shakespeare Louis Glover was born in San Francisco on April 23, 1939 and the church bells rang. They rang because it was a Sunday, but his mother, laboring in childbirth, imagined that they were proclaiming the birth of her first child. In her mind, they were an omen and one of many meaningful signs that attended his birth and naming. After all, it was the same day that Ted Williams hit his first home run, going four for five as a rookie against the Athletics.

  It was also the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, who was born April 23rd, 1564. The fact that Shakespeare Louis Glover was born on the exact same day as the Bard was no small coincidence, but the fact that so many elements—courting, conceiving, gestating, laboring—all had to line up to make it so bent one to the belief that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

  To fully appreciate how “Shake” Glover (as he came to be called) was christened Shakespeare Louis Glover, and why that name out of all the sensible names available to parents in 1939 was chosen above the rest, one really needs to understand a little about John and Mary Glover.

  John and Mary were married in August of ’38 at Saints Peter and Paul Church in North Beach. A little less than nine months later Shake was born, yet no eyebrows were raised about the cart before the horse and years later Mary would joke, somewhat cryptically, that Shake got a good lead and stole home while no one was looking. The two first met at St. Francis Memorial Hospital where Mary worked as a nurse. John had come to visit his father, who was suffering from kidney stones, and was immediately smitten by the red-haired, green-eyed evening nurse named Mary Bunner. On his second night there, when she entered the room to check on her patient, John boldly announced,

  O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

  Which Mary smiled at, recognizing it as a line from Romeo and Juliet without having to be told. Forward men were nothing new to pretty Nurse Bunner. Working women in the thirties did not run off to the HR Commissar, citing chapter and verse of the sexual harassment policy, but instead learned to parry such advancements. Clever women like Mary, who was also known to be “sharp-tongued,” could cut such mashers to the quick by belittling their anatomies or by comparing them to a clod of dirt. But at these words, Mary neither parried nor compared John to a clod of dirt, and instead merely smiled.

  Mary Bunner grew up in Daly City where the stiff ocean breezes and thick morning fog ingrain themselves into your DNA. She graduated from high school and later worked a part-time job at night while she attended nursing school during the day. Life at the “Top of the Hill” in Daly City was a mixed blessing; their house was small, even for three kids, and her lower middle class upbringing had its ups and downs. Her dad was a house-painter, often unemployed, but he introduced her to her one great passion (until John came along) and that one passion was baseball. On his days off, he would grab his young daughter and hop the trolley to Recreation Park at 14th and Valencia Streets and watch the San Francisco Seals play professional baseball.

  Mary fell in love with baseball the way, it could be said, Juliet fell for her Romeo—at first sight, deeply and completely. She loved everything about it: the shouts of beer vendors, the smell of fresh cut grass, Jujyfruits and lemon-lime sodas, the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd at a well-turned double play, the boos, the catcalls, and especially the ball-players themselves. She knew every player’s name and stats and would on occasion remind a player warming up in the on-deck circle to “keep his elbow up” or “look first-pitch fastball” and it was usually good advice. The Pacific Coast League in those days ran long seasons, sometimes over two hundred games, and Mary never missed a game either in the stands, on the radio, or in the morning’s sport’s section. She had a particular fondness for middle infielders, especially ones with soft hands and quick feet who could hit for average like Frank Crosetti, Al Wright, and Nanny Fernandez. She was a regular at Recreation Park and even Lefty O’Doul, their longtime manager, would smile and wave to her in the stands. When she became a nurse, she purposely took the evening shift at the hospital so she could attend day games, and it was because of this devotion to her beloved Seals that she met her future husband.

  John Glover grew up in Russian Hill, the second son of upper middle-class parents, in a family of scholars and educators. Like his parents, aunts and uncles, he was expected to become an academic and did not disappoint, ending up as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Cal Berkeley. At age thirty, when he first met Mary, he was teaching a course on Shakespeare and had his own office in Wheeler Hall.

  The subject of his lectures was no coincidence, and if Mary’s passion was baseball, John’s passion was William Shakespeare. He pursued his passion the way, it could be said, Romeo pursued his Juliet—exuberantly and nearly to the point where virtue itself turns vice. It shouldn’t be surprising that a young boy growing up in a house full of academics would kno
w his Shakespeare. The Bard, along with Tennyson, Keats, and other great poets, was often quoted around the dinner table, but at age six John felt that passing fancy morph into something more when the family went to see the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seeing and hearing a play acted for the first time turned on a light switch and soon John was staging his own plays in the living room and pestering his parents on the meaning and correct pronunciation of words like “horning” and a “coxcomb.”

  But John was not quite the dutiful son he appeared to be. His consuming passion for Shakespeare was just one thing that troubled his parents, along with a bohemian streak that frankly baffled them. He wore a white fedora and yacht shoes to work, and he avoided dating the girls his family navigated him towards—staid, academic types—and instead found himself ineluctably attracted to street-smart, sharp-tongued dishes. And it was this same bohemian streak and his penchant for Betty Davis-types that caused him to speak so boldly to Mary.

  John pursued—writing numerous love sonnets—and Mary let him, and their first date was the movie Lost Horizon at the Roxie. From there love blossomed and they were engaged six months later. And as for their fixations—one for baseball and one for Shakespeare—it never became an issue: John was not a big baseball fan (his game was tennis) and Mary could barely sit through Richard II without nodding off, but they made no demands on the other to share their passion. Instead, they appreciated each other’s endowments the way one might appreciate another’s musical talent without having an ear for it themselves. No better evidence of this broad-mindedness could be seen than the exchanging of their wedding vows when John spoke of “hitting one out of the park” and Mary quoted Juliet’s boundless bounty. They were married for forty-two years and it could be said that they grew together

  Like to a double cherry, seeming parted

  But yet an union in partition,

  Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.

  There was much debate about names leading up to Shake’s birth. They had settled on William for a boy’s first name until John realized there was an increasing chance the birth date might fall on April 23, the date he and many Shakespearian scholars believed to be the Bard’s true birthday. In early April he announced that if, indeed, his son happened to be born on the Bard’s birthday “William” would simply not do and his first name would have to be “Shakespeare” to appropriately honor the portentous event. Mary smiled, called him a “silly ninny” but agreed. Being the one with common sense, she knew that any boy with the first name “Shakespeare” would choose to be called by his middle name, and it was up to her to find a good solid middle name. That it had to be a favorite ball-player went without saying, but as a Catholic she knew it had to be a saint’s name, so a challenge confronted her.

  Her sister suggested Louis, which also happened to be a favorite uncle’s name, but Mary resisted at first. There were only two Lou’s who had played for the Seals—Lou McEvoy and Lou Koupal—and they were both over-the-hill pitchers and she’d be damned if she’d name her son after an over-the-hill pitcher. But her sister reminded her of 1927 and everything fell neatly into place for Mary. In 1927 the great players of their day—Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig—had come barn-storming into Recreation Park and Mary had begged and pleaded and redeemed every soda bottle she could get her hands on to get herself and her dad a ticket. And her dad—through connections she had no idea he had—took the young teenager down on the field after the game and introduced her to Lou Gehrig. The big man had smiled at her, shaken her small hand, patted her on the head, and called her “kid.” It was one of the greatest days of her life.

  So Louis it was and Lou it would be. Lou Glover even sounded like a second baseman. Lou Glover, starting second baseman for the New York Yankees. Any lingering reservations over the name were forever dispelled once her sister pointed out that Shakespeare Louis Glover’s initials were “SLG” which also stood for “Slugging Percentage.” She told John and there was no argument from him given the fact that Shake-speare Lou-is Glo-ver scanned nicely at three trochaic feet.

  In 1939, expectant fathers paced nervously in the waiting room. There was no Lamaze, screaming recriminations or clenched hand-holding. Instead the nurse came in, called your name and gave you the good news. Upon hearing he had a healthy son, John hurried to the maternity ward anticipating his wife’s first two questions: “Shakespeare Louis Glover?” (which was more a confirmation than a question) and “Did the Seals win?” He answered yes to both. With that he kissed his wife, held his new-born son, and couldn’t help but rejoice and say,

  Why then, the world’s my oyster,

  Which I with sword will open.

  To review the box score, Shakespeare Louis Glover, born on the Bard’s birthday and the same day Ted Williams hit his first home run, was named after the greatest poet/playwright in history and after one of the greatest ball-players of all time. Even “Glover,” which Professor Glover loved to point out to his students, was Middle English for a maker of gloves and, yes, the Bard’s father had been a glover. On top of that, the Bard’s father and mother’s names had been John and Mary. Many years later, a close friend of Shake’s—Dark Lucy, who fashioned herself a witch—revealed more signs to him: Based on his birthdate, his Life Path Number was four. Lou Gehrig was four. Shake as a player wore number four (for most of his career) and played second base which is the four in a 4-6-3 double play. Scouting reports on Shake during his career always noted his speed on the base paths and his willingness to “get dirty.” According to Dark Lucy this was predestined given his Chinese astrological signs were Rabbit and Earth.

  If you remain a skeptic and don’t believe that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow at least you have to admit, confronted as you are by these irrefutable facts, what Hamlet in similar circumstances pointed out to his battery mate Horatio—simply that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The Bard would have seen it as clearly as a fat pitch down the middle of the plate and roped it for a stand-up triple. He would have seen the stars at work, laws of attraction and manifestation afoot, and all the auspicious signs attending his namesake’s birth would have inspired him to say,

  There is a tide in the affairs of men,

  Which taken at the flood, leads onto fortune

  Shakespeare Louis Glover rode on this tide, to a kind of fortune and father’s pride.

  2

  CHAPTER

  Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it.

  Whitey Herzog

  Shake Glover became a Bard-loving professional baseball player and later a Bard-quoting minor league manager. His success at the first endeavor was less than spectacular while the second—as the manager of the Double-A New Britain Kingsmen in the Eastern League—was where he found his calling. It was there that the seemingly disparate passions at work within him, one the olive oil of elegant poetry and the other the balsamic vinegar of dirt and grass, blended together to make a heavenly vinaigrette.

  But it wasn’t as though those two passions had warred within him while he was growing up. On the contrary, they had always seemed complementary to him in the same way his parents seemed to complement one another. He did not intellectualize it; he simply felt it. The music of Shakespeare’s metered verse, his cutting wit, his insight into the human soul, paired nicely with the perfect distances of baseball, with its theatrics and homespun wisdom. When Shake listened to Leo Durocher he heard Prospero. When Coriolanus offers his services to his enemy Aufidius it reminded him of Jackie Robinson getting traded to the Giants. But this kinship and all its merry parallels did not become a harmony of purpose, a symbiotic whole, until Shake found coaching.

  How he got there is worth noting.

  When Shake was four his parents bought a house in Daly City. He was already being called “Shake” by this time despite the efforts of his mom to stick him with “Lou.” Family legend varied on
its origin, his sister claiming it was because he used to shake presents under the Christmas tree to figure out what was inside, while his droll Uncle Lou said it was merely a common beheading—Shake lopped off the body of speare. Either way “Shake” seemed to fit the active and somewhat precocious boy.

  If his mom and dad each harbored a secret dream of turning their first born son into the next Lou Gehrig or into a famous playwright, respectively, it was never openly admitted by the other or allowed to become a skirmish of wills. When it came to their passion, neither was a fisher of men, but each shared their enthusiasms with their son—as they did with all their kids—and only proselytized if one of them showed true desire. At six, Shake was playing catch and taking grounders. At eight, he saw the movie Henry V (the one with Olivier) and, carried away by its marshal spirit, promptly went home and read the play so he could re-enact the St. Crispin’s Day speech in the living room (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!”). This twin desire was constantly nourished: If he wasn’t being peppered with grounders by his uncles he was being peppered with couplets by his dad in a game he called “come-backers.”

  The game “comebackers” tested Shakes’ knowledge of the Bard and his works. At any given time, but usually at the evening dinner table, his dad would throw out a quote and Shake would have to come back with the play, the speaker and, if he could, the Act and scene. He enjoyed this as much as he did sitting next to his mom at a Seal’s game helping her keep score (“that was a single and an error on the left fielder, E7, and an unearned run”). “Comebackers” kept him on his toes and made for lively dinner conversation. Only once, when he was ten, did it lead to any kind of trouble with his mom. She was setting down plates of chicken and dumplings: