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Old Leaves and Autumn
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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259 Umpire Johnny Kumornik is surrounded after the game by angry fans. Old Leaves and Autumn We went to see In the Good Old Summertime, starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson, one night that September. Days later my parents presented me with a new RCA Victor AM-FM Radio to take to school. I also took Lloyd Douglas’s new novel, The Big Fisherman. Later that fall a group of freshmen, myself among them, would regularly take in the radio program Hopalong Cassidy at a prof’s house once a week, and I would think back to the opening-day parade with Warren riding a white horse, and I would wonder whatever became of him. T HE SCENT OF OLD LEAVES BURNING IN AUTUMN WAS THERE that night. As Brantford’s celebration waned, to be continued in the Telephone City, more than seven thousand fans dispersed for the last time that year, anonymous seeds in the wind. They scattered in all directions. Groundskeeper Jack Spencer hit the switch to kill the floodlights for the last time that decade. Winter would come. The season was over. During the long cold months, the lights would remain dead. The velvet green would change to white. Then spring. Baseball reborn. For Brantford, the victory had advanced them to the championship final against Waterloo. They played superbly, upsetting the Tigers to advance to the all-Ontario finals, where they won the coveted provincial title. It was truly a dream season. That was several weeks after Dickson Park saw its final game of the season. The last guy out of the park that night was Kumornik. He was easily the most overworked umpire in the league that season and had worked the entire Galt-Brantford series behind the plate. “No one else wanted the job,” he explained. The crowds for that series were the biggest in Intercounty history, and all the umpires knew that there would be a lot of witnesses on hand if a bad call was made. And they were rabid fans. At no time during the season could Intercounty fans be described as sedate, conservative, or mild. Years later, with the advent of the Blue Jays, it became fashionable for American writers and commentators to say that Canadian fans were quiet and reserved compared to their U.S. counterparts. Canadian fans had to learn about the game to know how and when to cheer, the thesis went. There may have been some basis for this, but it was also largely a piece of fiction that Americans seemed to want to hear. Canadians were so quiet and well-behaved during games because baseball was new to them, they would say. They didn’t know the game yet. Give them time. But oldtimers who had played in the Intercounty in the 1920s—there were still a few of them left—and ’30s and ’40s would cringe when they heard that. Fans back then got into the games. They yelled at the umpires, the players, the players wives and mothers, the coaches. They started fights with players and umpires. Intercounty rivalries were some of the most poignant, and rough, of any in the country. And the baseball was good. Kumornik could attest to that. The seasoned Kumornik was never afraid to take an assignment, nor was he hesitant to work behind the plate; it paid three dollars more than working the bases. He had been a player himself and believed that fans and players alike respected him more as an umpire because of it. But this final game between the two old rivals had been so close and exciting that it brought out the worst in fans. It was the second time in the series when he was threatened with bodily harm by spectators. Brantford fans were ready to kill him when he backed up the other umpire who called Gibbs out. And then Galt fans wanted his head. Why? Because we had lost. Warren, rightly, should have shouldered the blame. It was his missed catch that lost the game. But he had made a big stink over Kumornik’s umpiring and had gone after him following the game. Kumornik and the other two umpires that night, New Hamburg principal Norm Hill and Jimmy Tait, retreated quickly to their room under the stands. “The fans blamed the loss on me,” remembered Kumornik years later. At the same time as Brantford fans were flooding down from the stands and out onto the field, Galt fans, seeking someone...