03 January 2008

The Victor


The Maquee of The Birmingham Theater

I had not seen Vic for many years, though I have often asked about him when I talked to my pal John. Vic was a towering presence in our youth, and I will never forget him.

He Edna retired to Florida years ago, leaving the snows of Michigan far behind. We all have, except Kenny, who is still in the heart of the college complex the two universities that adjoin one another in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

I will never see him again, and that caused a pang of remorse when I saw the note from Paul that hit the mailbox on the first day of the New Year. I thought of Vic as I knew him, a man who wore a hat with a stingy brim, powerful in the chest and arms, stocky and attached firmly to the earth.

I was a little foggy that morning- that is something Vic would have expected from me- and it took a moment to register, since he was one of those men who was a force of nature, by turns implacable and stern, and soft inside it all.

He was born in 1921, which gave him a pretty good run across the American Century. He was a Great American of the Greatest Generation, a GI Bill Wolverine. When he went across, he was with the family, which is exactly what I would have expected. Vic was all about the family, and that was how I came to know him, as we entered the strangest years of the last century.

Vic spent a fair amount of time chasing us around Birmingham, checking up to see what sort of mischief we had managed to get ourselves into.

John and George and Kenny were all Derby kids, our powerhouse middle-school rival across the tracks from Barnum, the old brick school where I suffered the trials of early adolescence. Derby was new then, a product of the need to accommodate the baby boomers. They had the better athletic talent, and they kicked out butts regularly in football and baseball.

We came together at Seaholm High School, which combined the student bodies of Barnum and Derby into one. It was September of 1966 when I first attracted Vic's attention, and it was not uncritical. His son John was providing a new challenge for Vic and Edna, who previously had only well-mannered daughter Ruth to shepherd through the storms of adolescence.

We were a handful, we were, and I suppose it is only to be expected, since those were the strangest years of a strange century. Detroit committed suicide in the riots of 1967; that year was awful, and yet what was to come in 1968 was enough to make you think the world was coming unhinged altogether: Dr. King and RFK shot down, the Vietnam War challenging everything that was conventionally right.

Vic stood up straight, even if it meant coming home for lunch to see what the boys might be up to, cutting school.

I was a football player, as all of us were at that level of competition. Baseball was the skill sport, the one at which John and George and Kenny and little Jimmy Hagen excelled. They did so with the unwavering support of Vic, who did everything a proud father could do to inculcate the spirit of the national pastime in his sons and their friends.

There was a steady winnowing process in baseball, shaking out the kids who did not have the steadily advancing skills required to hit a sphere with a cylinder, or field a towering pop-up.

Vic was with the boys every step of the way up the great ziggurat pyramid of skills: T-ball, Little League, Junior and Senior High. Beyond that beckoned the Industrial Leagues, the first brush with the pros. Only Jimmy made it that far, since beyond that lay single A, the road through two more developmental levels to the Big Leagues.

Vic would have supported any of his sons, if they had the desire. We were lucky enough to have a real no-kidding big leaguer who grew up nearby, and seeing Ted “Simba” Simmons clout the ball the way it could be done was a thing of wonder. It was sufficient to demonstrate that there really are differences in skill, and having the ones we did was a blessing all its own, even if none of us were going to the Bigs.

Baseball was the metaphor for everything in those years. It was the 1968 Tigers and the magical world series victory that might have saved the city from additional violence,

Once we were done with High School, and relocated safely away from Birmingham, we stayed in touch. We have ever since, and so I have felt a connection with Vic and Edna.

Some of the times were hard. Vic's son Dave got caught in the end of the student deferment system and was drafted out of college, winding up in a bad situation with the Army in Korea. Vic had to intercede with a Congressman to get him home.

Going Up North was a key part of growing up the Wolverine State, crazed road trips which were the prototypes of later excursions west, starting in Detroit and ending non-stop in Park City, in the mountains above the Great Salt Lake.

While there were still ties that held us in Michigan, we used to go up to Manistee, the quaint Victorian city on the Lake Michigan shore. It was an area that had a connection not only to Vic and Edna, but to the America that was, since the Indians still returned to a camp ring in the summer, and there was the gracefully decaying Ramsdell Theatre, and the little burgs in the countryside around them, like Kaleva, settled by hardy Finns who had been induced to settle there as the timber trade began to die off.

Life was slower there, savored more fully, and with nature always close around. The in-laws had bequeathed an ancient sedan to the cousins, and it periodically ventured downstate to cruise Washtenaw Boulevard, the great connection between the colleges.

We have since scattered to the winds, Vic's son Paul sent the note, and he said that Vic would be “spending the best part of his first day in heaven helping the University of Michigan Wolverines triumph over the University of Florida Gators, and getting ready for the 2008 golf season.”

It was with great and swelling pride that I watched Vic's team kick the Gators around, winning Coach Lloyd Carr's last game with the Maize and Blue in an exciting but decisive victory over last year's national champs, 41-35.

Lloyd may think that his guys did it for him, but we all know better. He had help.

Hail to Vic. He was a champion.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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