Pinewood Derby

Pinewood Derby & Little League

21 October 2013: East of Eden Meets the Pinewood Derby

The past week has included this story about three clowns gleefully destroying a rock formation in a Utah state park, posting the video on U-Tube, click to see one of them actually dancing a jig in celebration of their act of defacement. Apparently when they came down from their high they thought better of the video idea and took it down, as it includes a brag that they left their personal mark on the valley. Since they were boy scout leaders it has given the organization another black eye and has sent me time tripping back to my days as a scout. Which I now intend to inflict on readers of this blog.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/goblin-valley-boy-scout-leaders-destroy-rock_n_4122488.html

For the record, I am confident that all of my assorted scout leaders would have been disgusted by the behavior of these three yokels, doubly so given their lame attempts to defend the action by trying to portray it as a public service. Apparently if these guys found a highway bridge that swayed too much for their liking, they would have dynamited it in the service of public safety.

But back to scouting. Parenting is a difficult job and although a single isolated incident can have huge implications, the isolation is usually an illusion - there is almost always a lengthy pattern that causes the incident to be magnified out of proportion.

Click the link https://sites.google.com/site/tvcwrt/home/jeff-s-baby-boomer-blog/pinewood-derby to read about how a Pinewood Derby race became my "East of Eden" moment.

Iconoclast

1. 1.
   a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions.

synonyms:

critic, skeptic; More

heretic, unbeliever, dissident, dissenter, infidel;

rebel, renegade, mutineer

"in terms of the money culture in Washington, she is an iconoclast"

2. 
   2.
   a destroyer of images used in religious worship, in particular.

In an effort to consolidate some of my more "whine" stuff I give you this page.

In "East of Eden", Cal invests in bean futures just before the outbreak of WWI. He does this in the hope that he can make enough money to replace the losses from his father Adam's visionary but doomed experiment at shipping produce in ice filled railroad boxcars. But when Cal is successful and gives his father the money earned from his venture, his gift is angrily rejected by Adam. Adam has been appointed head of the local draft board and he is concerned with his image in the Salinas community; worried that he will be seen as profiting from the war at the same time that he is sending the young men of the community off to fight. He scolds Cal for exploiting the situation and for bringing him tainted money.

Adam of course has failed to grasp that the substance of his son's loving gesture should be far more important to him than its form, and certainly more important than how it "might" make him appear to others in the community. And movie viewers knew by that point of the film that Cal's explosive reaction to this rejection was amplified by years of alienation and real slights.

My "East of Eden" moment came as a Cub Scout (which I joined in 3rd grade). They had a competition called a Pinewood Derby, where each kid would build a little wooden race car from a kit. The assorted dens of cub scouts would then get together for a formal competition and race these things in pairs on two parallel wooden tracks in the elementary school gym, the winner of each heat went on to the next round, with prizes for the top finishers. The first year I did mostly my own work and was eliminated in the first heat with a car that looked pretty basic. The second year (age nine) I took the kit to my Uncle Bob’s basement workshop (Dad’s hobby obsessed brother lived within easy walking distance) and he helped me build it; in fact he insisted on doing almost all of the work but I did learn how to do the wood carving. I left it there overnight so he could paint it. When I picked it up he had put washers on each wheel (they were not part of the kit but were not illegal) and had poured lead into a cavity he carved in the body of the car.

When my father and I checked in the night of the race the officials weighed it and found it too heavy, there was a weight limit because the cars were powered by rolling down a steep ramp and the more weight the faster they rolled. So before my first race we had to find the school janitor so he could drill out a small amount of the lead, going back and forth several times to the scale until it then passed inspection. There was also some question about the extra washers but the rules did not specifically prohibit them and the car was cleared to race. From the start to the finish of this qualification process my father appeared embarrassed by all the attention, made it clear that he blamed me, and that he considered me a cheater.

But being right on the weight limit helped the car and I began winning heats, slowly working my way to the final four. It was a big field against a lot of older scouts, so my winning streak was like some wonderful dream. My first ever "don't pinch me - I might wake up" moment. But my father was clearly not sharing my joy, he watched the races with a look of disapproval, there was no father - son celebration dynamic. Then in the semi-final race I finally came up against a faster car and was eliminated in a close race. As a semi-finalist I was awarded a set of official cub scout mess utensils (an interlocking knife, fork, and spoon set in a plastic case). The first and second place cars got much better prizes but I was happy enough because I had never won a prize or received a compeitive award. It wasn’t that I was taking false pride in what I had done, it was just that for the first time I was experiencing the high of winning.

When we got home Dad told everyone that while watching the races he had concluded that one track was slightly faster than the other. And that he was hoping I would get the slow track for my last race, so I would be eliminated before the finals, saving him from any further embarrassment. I remember thinking that while I understood the concept of cheating and of hollow victories, few (probably none) of the kids had built their own cars. More importantly, so far in life my victories had been pretty much nonexistent and unlike my mother, my father was so detached and clueless about my struggles that he could not comprehend the degree of joy I had just experienced. I never saw him quite the same way after that night.

This is not about throwing my father under the bus. He did come to the derby to watch me race, and whatever his flaws he was a good provider to our family. But like Adam Trask, a preoccupation with his dignity caused him to miss out on sharing a special moment with his son. So it goes.

26 March 2013: Coach Mooney & The World Without Me In It

"I remember being really small; too small to see over the edge of a table. There was a snow globe, and I remember the penguin who lived inside the globe. He was all alone in there, and I worried for him."

Below is a photo of the little league team that I should have played for and on the far right edge of the photo is the reason for my absence. There is something especially pure and true about a child's first sincere hatred of a specific adult, a "piss-on-your grave" disgust more intense than any similar feeling they will ever experience. This is because what a child lacks in perspective they make up for in uncluttered analysis.

Our team was the original "Bad News Bears". They had lost every game the season before I joined the team and lost every game my first season. Although the league plan was for a relative parity, the yo-yo's in charge were not very good talent evaluators. They probably were not as awful as the team records reflect, most likely there were political factors at work and some cherry picking by the most connected coaches.

Despite the losing I enjoyed playing at this level for two seasons, we finally won a game midway through Season Two (Tom Martinelli - the opposing team pitcher had walked the first fourteen batters and staked us to a huge lead) and the sheer joy of that moment almost made up for the chronic losing. Our coach those first two years was an old guy named Thomas, he looked to be about 70 and approached coaching in the same style as Walter Matthau's character, minus the drinking and the swearing. They typically had 12 players on a team but the advantage of our old coaches' lack of engagement was that he distributed the playing time equally - as intended by the league. Everybody sat on the bench for an inning or two each game.

I was not a superstar but I was the only left-handed batter on the team and midway through my second season had realized that I could foul off any pitch that I could reach. So that between the assorted pitchers struggling to pitch to the only lefty in our lineup, my willingness to get hit by pitches, and my ability to foul off two-strike pitches; I had an almost perfect on-base-percentage. I had reached a skill level where no pitcher could get me out if I dug in and worked to simply get on base. I was a line drive hitter, and while I had no power, my ability to go deep in the count and cause wild pitches usually meant that anyone on base would score before I was done batting.

Season Three we got a new coach, this time unfortunately it was someone whose son was on the team. At the first practice that year I learned that one of our players had not returned, something I could not understand. Running the bases was my favorite part of baseball and I was always on base so what was not to like. Yet by the midway point of that season I knew that I would not be returning, what had once been a joy was now a joke. The new coaches' son played every inning. When he struck out he would return to the bench and cry, and since he was the biggest kid on the team the rest of us would cringe from the embarrassment and wish we were somewhere else.

A small portion of his extra playing time came at my expense but his father stole playing time from all of us. Those being ripped off by this low life were coachable, respectful, mentally tough and resilient kids who were always trying their best.

I did not cry (in our culture no boy with a hint of self-respect cried after age six), I did not even complain, but each game I seethed with an anger and disgust I had never before experienced. It was in retrospect an interesting dynamic, each time he ripped off someone in this fashion my contempt for him grew a little bit more, and that someone so vile was permitted to openly carry on this theft only fed my fury.

I credit to this experience my strong connection with Colin Smith in "The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner"; and my lifelong refusal, even at my most timid, to buckle under to authority. In the climatic race Colin has a comfortable lead with a sure win; but just yards from the finish line, he stops running and remains in place, despite the calls, howls, protests. Colin looks directly at The Governor as a rebellious sneer plays on his face. The expression remains there as another runner passes him and crosses the finish line to victory. When we saw that film in Junior High a lot of my friends did not understand the ending, but I got it - I understood it as if I were my biography.

Less obvious but more interesting is that this established another of my lifelong personality characteristics. My contributions as a hitter were subtle rather than flashy. Flying way under the radar of an ego threatened rummy like our coach. Rather than my being diminished by the lack of recognition I reconciled it as being the result of my dealing with a low wattage observer, a person unworthy of any effort by me to claim credit or seek approval. And while all this questioning of authority is very satisfying, indulging in this stuff tends to make you quite a shit magnet.

Funniest part was years later when this clown's obit appeared in the paper full of euphemisms extolling his virtues as a youth leader, the euphemisms a huge inside joke for me.

I would return to baseball in high school and as a college freshman; even getting hitting lessons from Ted Kluzewski, see https://sites.google.com/view/2013babyboomerblog/photos for a Jeff-Ted photo.