The Game Must Go On by John Klima

Author:John Klima
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466871083
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 16

One Man Short

In the spring of 1944, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis finally made a concession to age. He moved out of the Chicago hotel he had lived in since becoming commissioner and into a small house in Chicago, where he and his wife planted a victory garden. In the summer, while the radio was tuned to the local broadcasts of the Cubs and White Sox games, Landis spent more time outside than he had in many years. He fell quite in love with tending his soil, raising vegetables to eat, just as millions of other families did during the war. It was difficult to imagine the old Judge out in the sun babying his tomato vines, but that’s just what he did, taking in the hot and humid Chicago summer in relative peace.

He was pleased with the direction of the game, satisfied even in its less than perfect wartime state. Landis was proud of the two large checks baseball had presented to the war effort, one for $362,000 in 1942 and another for $308,000 in 1943. Landis never lost his public scowl, but in private he was as worried as any other grandfather. Both World Wars were intensely personal to the old man, who had once volunteered to surrender his seat on the federal bench to serve in World War I before President Wilson told him he was too damn old.

Landis’s son, Reed, was a decorated pursuit pilot in World War I, becoming a twelve-victory ace for the famous No. 40 squadron of the British Royal Flying Corps, made famous by aces Mick Mannock and George McElroy. Reed survived the war and quietly helped his father build baseball by serving as the chairman of the American Legion, which for years sponsored thousands of baseball teams that produced hundreds of future pro ballplayers. Reed served stateside in the Army Air Corps during the war, where he and the old man worried about Reed’s son, Keehn Landis.

Something about flying was in the blood of the Judge’s boys. Keehn Landis was a P-51 fighter pilot in the European Theater, serving in the red-and-yellow-checkered-nose 363rd Fighter Squadron of the famed 357th Fighter Group. The pilots called themselves the Yoxford Boys. Among the pilots in the 363rd were two well-known Mustang aces. One, Bud Anderson, flew a Mustang nicknamed Old Crow and became a triple ace. The other was a country boy from West Virginia named Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, who in 1947 broke the sound barrier.

Worrying about his grandson in the skies over Europe did not help the old Judge’s health. He stayed out of the public eye during the war years, so it was not common knowledge that his health was gradually declining. There were signs, though; rumor had it that Landis had declined a new five-year contract extension offered by the owners. Turning down guaranteed money wasn’t like the Judge. Then, something was wrong when he didn’t come to the World Series for the first time in twenty-one years. The last

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.