The Real Moonlight Graham: A Life Well Lived (review)

For those who enjoyed W. P. Kinsella’s lovely fable Shoeless Joe or who felt tears well up as Doc “Moonlight” Graham crossed the white line that divides fantasy from reality in Field of Dreams (the movie version of Shoeless Joe), Mayo Clinic Heritage Films offers a short dvd about Archibald “Archie” Graham, md, entitled The Real Moonlight Graham: A Life Well Lived. (As full disclosure, my son Dan named his pet hamster Moonlight.) Narrated by Vin Scully, The Real Moonlight Graham serves as a reality check on the hitherto obscure character so sympathetically sketched by Kinsella in his novel and so lovingly portrayed by Burt Lancaster in his final film. The good news is that, for once, reality does not denigrate but rather validates a noble portrait of fiction.

Graham, born in 1879 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where he played baseball) and obtained his md from the University of Maryland in 1905. Along the way, he played minor-league baseball in Charlotte, North Carolina; Nashua, New Hampshire; Lowell, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Binghamton, New York. It was in 1905 that Graham made it to the show with McGraw’s New York Giants and to his baseball apotheosis: a single appearance for the Giants in right field in the eighth and ninth innings of a game against Brooklyn, a game that ended with Graham in the on-deck circle, never coming to bat. Once more relegated to the minors, Graham played with the Scranton Miners, where, in 1906, he enjoyed his best season, batting .336 in 124 games.

It is as Doc Graham, who practiced medicine for fifty years (1909–59) in the small town of Chisholm, Minnesota, however, that his memory is truly enshrined. The dvd projects an intense nostalgia for a vanished rural America where the town doctor manages inoculations of the school children, measures their blood pressure for a study of childhood hypertension, fits them with recycled eyeglasses gratis, makes house calls in exchange for dinner, plays baseball on the town’s team, and serves as a surrogate father to generations. In Field of Dreams, an elderly Moonlight Graham, also known as Archie Graham, md, vanished into a cornfield, beyond our ken. Perhaps Shoeless Joe and his friends needed a team doctor. The elderly citizens of Chisholm who recall Archie Graham on the dvd would argue that Doc crossed the line between myth and reality in both directions.