Pete Rose: An American Dilemma by Kostya Kennedy Read Free Book Online

Susquehanna.
    Clinton’s damming is a seminal moment in Cooperstown history and is recounted by James Fenimore Cooper in his 1823 novel The Pioneers . The son of the town’s founder, William Cooper, Fenimore Cooper remains Cooperstown’s most famous citizen— The Last of the Mohicans is also among his books—and he’s buried along with other members of the Cooper family in a small church graveyard on a shaded street, just off Cooper Park and the outer grounds of the Hall of Fame. The Coopers lived for a while in a log cabin on this site, a flat, tamed piece of land they found rich with fruitful apple trees planted and then abandoned by the routed Iroquois. Tourists now stroll into the park to look at a bronze statue of James Fenimore Cooper seated in thought, as well as at the neighboring statues of Dodgers lefthander Johnny Podres letting fly a pitch to catcher Roy Campanella in a rendering of Game 7 of the 1955 World Series. The baseball statues stand in an open-ended courtyard of the Hall of Fame and the Fenimore Cooper statue is 80 feet away on a grassy island. On the driveway between them members of the Hall of Fame’s staff park their cars for the day.
    Throughout his Leatherstocking Tales , Fenimore Cooper refers to Otsego Lake as the Glimmerglass, a name that stuck. Visitors camp in Glimmerglass State Park and picnic on Glimmerglass beach. The Glimmerglass opera has become one of America’s premier opera companies, attracting to its summer festival enthusiasts from all over the world—among them Charles Parsons, a music critic and reviewer for the American Record Guide , a bimonthly music publication with its office on the same dead-end street in Cincinnati, Braddock Street, where Pete Rose grew up. Parsons was raised nearby, off River Road, and he attended the Sayler Park School, where from first through fourth grade he was a classmate of Rose’s. Parsons is no baseball fan but on his trips to the Glimmerglass opera festival, he might engage with baseball-mad families at the bed-and-breakfast where he stays. When he reveals that he went to elementary school with Pete Rose, noisy excitement follows and “everybody all of a sudden wants to talk to me.”
    “I was a kind of an intellectual as a child and kids picked on me a lot,” Parsons recalls. “But not when Pete was around. He wouldn’t let anyone bully me. I don’t know why he took a liking to me. Maybe he saw I was vulnerable. I just know that nobody wanted to mess with Pete and so no one bothered me when he was there.” This is the kind of thing, both the childhood humiliation and the gallantry of a classroom savior, that a man will remember his entire life. Parsons is 72.
    Pete and Charlie were not close friends, though, and after elementary school they hardly saw each other at all. Many years passed. Yet when they ran into each other as adults around Cincinnati—at Frisch’s restaurant or at River Downs racetrack, Rose, by then a major league star, recognized his old classmate immediately. As Parsons recalls: “On at least two occasions I was suddenly surprised by Pete with a hearty ‘Hey Charlie! Charlie Parsons!’ across the crowded room. Peter then barreled over to say hello.”
    Another time, in the 1980s, Parsons was working at the public library in downtown Cincinnati when he took his evening break and went to the nearby Cricket Lounge for dinner. There in a booth was Rose, sitting with two Cincinnati Bengals, quarterback Ken Anderson and offensive tackle Anthony Muñoz. “Pete hailed me over,” says Parsons, “and invited me to join them and I agreed.”
    For Rose, the notion of asking a local librarian to sit and join a bull session with himself and two NFL superstars seemed completely natural. He was happy to talk with all of them; it would never occur to him that anyone might feel uneasy. Said Parsons, “Sitting in that booth, Pete treated all of us just the same.”
    Though he has never been to the Baseball Hall of Fame, nor