Scud

In the summer of 1925, my father played baseball in the little prairie town of Balaton, Minnesota. He had just finished his senior year as captain of the Golden Gophers, who won the Big Ten championship that year. Hoping to make it to the Major Leagues, he had gone out to Marshall, Minnesota, to eradicate the infamous barberry plant, which is the winter host for the even more infamous wheat rust. While he went looking for barberry, he also went looking for a host baseball team that could harbor his catching talents until he made it to the Big Leagues. The Balaton Braves Baseball Club was eager to sign him on for $20 a game, and that summer he rooted out weeds and played baseball.

In the summer of 1992, my brother and I drove from Minneapolis to Balaton to poke around the prairie town where our father had played baseball over a half-century earlier. There isn't much today in Balaton. The main street is 3rd Street, featuring the red brick facade of what was the old M & G Chevrolet Company, next to the Gem Theater (closed now, but photographs show the marquee with "Your Best Entertainment" inscribed on it, the "Y" of the "Your" tilted and falling onto the "o"), and next to that Johnson's Cafe, with a sign imploring us to "Drink Coca-Cola." In front of the café sits "The Bench," roost most of the day for Balaton's retired farmers and senior citizens—half a dozen old men who can sit for hours. The only other memorable structure in Balaton is the grain elevator, with a small doghouse cupola at the top. From a distance, the elevator looks like a giant football player with box shoulders and a button head watching over the town.

We found the old Balaton Baseball Park just as it was in 1925, with a wood grandstand painted green and shaded by cottonwoods, and room in the stands for about 100 fans to sit on four, steeply escalated rows of crude bench seats. The right-field fence (330 feet) was a thick hedgerow of tall lilacs. About 280 feet down the left-field line, a fairly steep hill rose for another 50 feet up to a buckwire fence.

Finding the park still pretty much as it must have been in 1925, we were inspired to dig a little deeper into history. So we found the small office of the Balaton Press-Tribune, where a short lady (appropriately named "Judy Wee") invited us to go down into their "archives," a dark, dank-smelling, dirt-floor basement, which probably stood a foot deep in water in the spring, and along the walls of which moldering, yellowed, moth-eaten copies of the Press-Tribunewere kept in bound volumes in shelves made of boxwood and peach crates. In minutes, we located the volume for 1925, and we found stories from that summer, one of which showed that on July19, my father had led the team, hitting .619!

Having discovered that he hit at a prodigious clip for at least part of the season, we pulled out other stories, including the exciting account of the Braves' victory over the Flandreau Fairies. We made copies of the stories, then bought the Balaton 1992 Centennial Book, which contained a picture of the Braves team of 1925.

When we explained to Judy Wee that my father was in the picture, she said, "Oh, you should talk to Scud."

"—Scud?" I said.

"He played with the Balaton Braves. Everybody calls him Scud." She pointed to him in the picture.

"My God," I said. "How old is he today?"

"Ninety-four. But he's as clear as a bell about the past. He's just hard of hearing. You have to shout. Here," she said and wrote his address down: 420 Central.

There aren't that many streets in Balaton, so Central was easy to find. It was three blocks...