Benjamin Bonine

by Jillian Brown

Picture an overgrown puddle in the south of Tennessee–largely an underdeveloped, sprawled out wilderness with occasional stucco grocery to break up the unkempt country roads. That’s how it was, “back then," before the Chickamauga Dam, Computers, Etch-A-Sketches, and Post-It Notes–when you could buy a gallon of gas with a shiny quarter. This chronic drainage puddle, which would be referred to by the local children as “the lake” or “the pond," was where young Ben Bonine learned to swim. By no means an easy place to start, he would learn to wade unbothered into the four-foot-deep water and trudge through several inches of snake riddled mud, rising sludge-covered and no doubt disease-riddled.

“My mother carried me to the doctor–my ear was hurtin’. When I got there and that doctor looked in that ear there was a piece of mud about the size of that finger,” he says, extending a pinky, “Lodged in that ear because of all that swimming.”

The pond would freeze over in the winters, which opened up a myriad of opportunities for a group of bored adolescents. Ben and friends would salvage a can (perhaps the corpse of a container of pork beans or corn from the previous day’s dinner, perhaps crushing it to be more puck-like) and, bundling up, use it to play hockey on the frozen ice. This was arguably not the safest way to pass time, because: “We’s out there running around and you could just hear that ice cracking everywhere. I’m lucky that I'm here, really."

The house that Bonine grew up in was in a lower section of Chattanooga called East Lake, off 28th St. and 4th Avenue. He was born, raised, and visited by the doctor in this house. The woman he would later marry lived–unaware, oblivious–just a block up. He had memorized every street of East Lake by the time he left it. Coming back years later, the house had been torn down and covered up and rebuilt, and, “I walked through there and just cried because the way the house was in."

On Ben’s mother, Cora, who I never knew but my mother affectionately calls “Mamaw”: She was a fiery, sharp-worded, protective individual. She chewed tobacco all her life, which poor Ben would have to bike–or roller skate, like he did to school–to the only local shop to buy for her every so often. He says she was remarkably accurate with her spitting. “My mother can take her finger, she had a can [a few feet in front of her], she could spit and hit it.” Sometimes he was taunted or mocked by neighbors at the store, and eventually Bonine’s father (“Daddy”) was put on snuff-buying duty.

Like any teen, especially in the early 50’s, Ben got into trouble. “I tried to slip it one time. I put it in my mouth, and I didn’t do right. I took a breath, I breathed all that in and boy that took my breath away. And I never did try that again.”

There was also horseshoe pitching, which was the start of it all. As a kid, Bonine was unusually tall, a height which only grew with age. He could throw a horseshoe easily with his aerial view, and competing in horseshoe-throwing tournaments, it could get very competitive. Once Ben won in a Warner Park competition against another boy, who was a sore loser. Ben rode home on the handlebars of his brother’s bike with a polished trophy cradled in his arms. Later, the boy he had triumphed against turned up at the door of the house on 28th and 4th; the boy demanded the trophy with the claim that, “He’s too old and I want that trophy back.” Mamaw replied: “Well he’s not too old and I’m gonna’ tell you one thing. You might get that trophy back but you’re gonna’ get it over your head!”

The boy left.

hahah

It was at this point during the interview that one of Bonine’s friends, a young woman who delivers the couple meals, arrived. We all decided to take a break. At a point during the conversation, my Great Papaw reached into a drawer beside his chair and pulled out, of all things, a harmonica. It was his brother’s, so old that it was no longer in production and caked with rust. He played a soft, gentle tune; everyone started swaying as if he was a snake charmer. As his next trick, he pulled from a pocket beside his chair one of those complicated coloring books marketed for adults. They were ornate quotes of scripture, and he flipped through page after page. He gives them to a neighbor down the road who’s a missionary, distributing them out like tree roots.

Baseball started for Bonine later in life, at 22. It was common for big companies to have basketball and baseball teams, and Ben worked for Standard Hosiery. At first he played basketball, seeing as he already had the height advantage. He tells me a story that sums up his success in basketball: His dad was sitting in the upper stands of the lively Standard court, next to a man that he would later learn to be mute. The man turned to him and held up four fingers–that was the number on Bonine’s jersey–and then mimed shooting the ball with a smile. Ben laughs, saying, “I could do that, I could put it in there.”

He was an outfielder–his brother in center field–before being pulled by the coach to pitch against a left-handed batter, “‘cause he know’d I could throw that ball.” Then he found an opportunity with a man who could get him into the minor leagues. At a game one day, he approached this manager, Abe Sarsgaard, and announced, “I’d like if you could send me somewhere. I’d like to start playin’ professional ball.”

Ben wanted to play close to home, so he was sent to Middlesborough, Tennessee. He made the team and played there shortly before being “sold off” to San Angelo. He comments: “I was shipped around a lot. Back then baseball if you wasn’t the top pitcher on your team and the big league released a man and sent him on down that meant somebody else in the minor league might get somewhere else too. And that happened a lot. Now it's a lot different the way they do it. You can get in the Big Leagues right out of school.”

It wasn’t always easy for Bonine to win in the beginning. The first year at Middlesborough, the newspaper commented that Bonine “had no idea where home plate was.” Later, one player in Rossville, New Mexico joked, “When Bonine was pitchin’ out there that night, there was a rodeo right behind the center field, they said that guy hit a home run offa’ Bonine and knocked that man off that horse!” Ben trained hard regardless, and at the end of the year the paper had changed its mind, saying Bonine had turned into the best controlled pitcher in the league.

hehe

From then on, Bonine also found a lot of success in baseball: by his count, he had gone five games without walking a man (“I think about that a lot. How many left-handed pitchers can throw that many innings without walking a man? I done it.”), started 30 ball games in 1953 and finished 25, in ‘54 he pitched two innings against the New York Yankees and held them. He says, “my best pitch was the way I could change up on a fast ball. And the chief scout for the Braves told me that, said, ‘The way you throw ‘at change up, Ben, you’ll keep a big leaguer off stride.’” Most of all, “I wadn’t so bad that they’d come out and get me.”

He wasn’t trying to brag. Baseball was never the most important thing to Bonine: God was.

“I guess this is the best of all. If I had made the big leagues I never would have got saved. Almost all ball players drink, smoke and cuss. Most all of ‘em. And that manager of the last team I played for he cussed and took God’s name. You know, what is ball worth against salvation? That’s the way I look at it.”

As I was getting up to leave, Great Papaw stood up and walked over to me, leaning down low. He pulled from his pocket two Werther’s and a butterscotch. “Here, Baby, take some candy home with you,” he said, pressing them into my palm with his wrinkled fingers. It’s his trademark: he gives candy to everyone, the clerk at the grocery store, the family at Thanksgiving, random strangers.

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