Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams’ Doc Graham (review)

Archie “Moonlight” Graham led a quirky American life that would be well worth documenting even if he hadn’t played two fateful innings in right field for the 1905 New York Giants. In 1909, Graham, a newly-licensed physician from a prominent southern family, took a train to Chisholm, Minnesota—about as far north as the tracks extended. He would stay in Chisholm until his death fifty-six years later, serving as doctor to the Chisholm public schools.

In Chasing Moonlight, Brett Friedlander and Robert Reising have produced a book as unusual as its subject. Their biography breaks into two disparate halves, leaving one wondering what odd psychological forces sent Graham in the direction of Chisholm. Born late in 1879, Graham spent the early years of his adult life overachieving at two professions, medicine and baseball. Hence his nickname: whether on the diamond or on the ward, he was always moonlighting. After he turned thirty, Doc Graham abandoned his peripatetic, brush-with-stardom life for a career bound by institutional routine.

Like many school athletes of the late nineteenth century, Graham was a multi-sport star. He excelled at football as well as baseball. In the latter sport, he was a speedy outfielder. Though he had little power even by deadball standards, Graham hit well enough to win a batting title in the Class B New York State League in 1906. Academically, he made steady progress from the University of North Carolina to the University of Maryland’s medical school, and on to postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins—even while absenting himself every summer to play minor-league baseball.

Chasing Moonlight doesn’t shed much light on Graham’s stint in the majors. Big-league rosters were smaller in 1905 than they are today, and farm systems did not exist at all. Only eleven position players saw more than the briefest of action for the Giants that year. Why would such a great team tap a dime-a-dozen B-league star like Graham to sit on their bench? John McGraw, like other managers of his day, occasionally picked up a minor leaguer to serve just in case an emergency substitute was needed. During Graham’s few weeks with the team, he was needed only once. Many years later, W. P. Kinsella transformed that appearance into legend in the novel Shoeless Joe, and Burt Lancaster amplified the legend by playing Graham in the film Field of Dreams.

Graham’s baseball biography could be anybody’s. The serendipity of literary invention, plus a pretty good nickname, are the only differences between him and hundreds of other men who had a cup of coffee in the bigs. So the most interesting part of Chasing Moonlight comes after 1909, when Graham left the East Coast for the Iron Range. Graham evidently became eccentric fairly quickly in this small, isolated community, and stayed eccentric till the end of his days.

Lots of people who grew up in Chisholm still remember Graham. He cared for the children of the town until his 1960 retirement, and many of his patients are not yet retired themselves. They tell odd stories about their beloved doctor. Engrained in a daily routine, Graham was also provokingly absent-minded. He bought up real estate in Iron Range towns, and then forgot to cash his tenants’ rent checks. He would prescribe eyeglasses for any kid within reach—but at random, so that his specs made the child’s vision a lot worse. He would “test” children’s hearing by hollering words into their ears, so forcefully that every kid waiting in the hallway for the test could hear the words they would have to repeat.

And he took kids’ blood pressure. Every child who came through the Chisholm schools faced Moonlight Graham’s sphygmomanometer. He built an impressive database of blood pressures. Graham published the results in the one scholarly article he ever wrote—the medical...