Parker Field by Howard Owen Read Free Book Online

belief. They’ve sold the company cars. This was no hardship to me, since I’d rather rent a bicycle than drive most of our rolling stock. The rumor is that our latest fleet was bought from some wholesaler who got them cheap after they were flooded during Hurricane Irene. They ride, and break down, like they were sitting in salt water for a few days.
    It is scary, though. If I owned stock in this fine media empire and heard that news, I think I’d be giving my broker a call.
    “How the hell are we supposed to cover games in Blacksburg and down in Chapel Hill?” Bootie wails. The man is 260 pounds of pink and righteous indignation. “They kept two cars, two of the Sonatas, I think, for Grubby and the big cheeses.”
    I commiserate with Bootie and then steer him back to the proposal. Bootie wasn’t here in 1964, but he’s old-school enough to realize that there might be some merit in my idea.
    In general, I don’t like the long-winded tree killers that upper management used to be so fond of before a diminishing herd of reporters and the cost of newsprint made the bottom-line guys rethink the whole five-part series thing, our epic on the city’s riverfront notwithstanding.
    This time, though, I’ve made an exception. For one thing, I love baseball. For another, I’d like to do something that would make the people living around Les Hacker aware that he once was something more than an old fart who’s dropping brain cells faster than I’m losing hair. Like Bootie, I can be driven by my own interests.
    “It’s a buffet,” Sally Velez observed right after the last cuts. “Serve yourself.”
    “The ’64 Vees, huh?” Bootie says, when I bring him back around to the purpose of my visit to Toyland. “Huh. That might be interesting.”
    It’s quid pro quo. If I can tap into the sports department’s budget for a little travel money, sports can get something that might win them the national awards the executive sports editor covets. It shouldn’t be too hard for Bootie to sell the ESE on that. I don’t flatter myself when I tell you that whatever I write will be above the usual standards of our sports department.
    “I’ll take care of it,” he says, winking at me in a way that lets me know it won’t be aboveboard. What a surprise. Bootie once bought a jacket in Baltimore when it turned suddenly and unseasonably cold at The Preakness. When the bean counters rejected it on his expense account, he didn’t argue. Instead, he turned in another expense account, complete with receipts for meals and lodging, whose bottom line was equal to the penny to the one he’d turned in originally.
    “Let the sons of bitches find the jacket,” he famously told our managing editor.
    My idea is pretty simple, like most good ideas. I’ll do a story on the 1964 Richmond Virginians, then and now. It’ll be full of interviews with the old guys who are still upright, lots of memory lane crap for our core audience. It’ll give what few under-forty readers we have a glimpse at what the world was like before free agency made multimillionaires out of utility infielders. (Not that I don’t usually side with the multimillionaires with bats and gloves over the billionaires who arm-twist ragtag cities into building new stadiums instead of schools. But for Christ’s sake, couldn’t you spare a few nickels for the fans?)
    I can do a lot of it in my spare time and take vacation days, if Wheelie won’t swing for a paid sabbatical. Yeah, I’d be working for free. The suits love that. But sometimes, it’s the only way.
    Once, back when Bob Parks was city editor, I was railing about what I considered an injustice: We were only given 3 percent raises because corporate had decided we didn’t turn a big enough profit.
    “That’s it,” I said after I’d stormed into Parks’s office. “From now on, I work to the contract. Forty hours and not a minute more.”
    Parks laughed.
    “Bull.”
    I asked why he thought it was bull.
    “Willie,”