CONTACT
FILM
At a distance, young men in uniform satisfy all our vague longings for grace and order. Bobbi Ann Mullens watched these young men from the time she was a little girl riding on her father's tractor, wedged between his knees when he sang his song to her, the song he sand when he took her to town perched like a parrot on his arm, the song he sand like a lullaby at night in her bedroom when the windmill in the backyard sliced the moon into narrow white bars of light that fell across her blankets.
Take me out to the ball game, take me out to the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjacks, I don't care if I ever get back...
He sang with a lost look in his eyes, and the years went by faster than anyone could believe, and then suddenly Bobbi Ann was singing it to her own child in the vastness of summer days on the outskirts of a small farming town in northern Maine where people gathered to watch baseball games at Veterans Park.
This was a fine wooden relic of a ballpark where the Cleveland Indians ran a minor league team for twenty years before baseball died in this town during World War II. Henry Sockabasin, a real Penobscot Indian from Perry, Maine, got his start here and then went on to become one of the big league's great stars. Babe Ruth hit five home runs once in this park in an exhibition game, and one of the Dean brothers struck out nineteen men in nine innings on a Sunday afternoon.
But then, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Northern League was suspended and Veterans Park was closed, its entrance boarded up and festooned with posters urging the purchase of war bonds.
During the years while Veterans Park was closed, the Department of Defense began buying up thousands of acres of farmland for the construction of an Air Force base. By 1961, Loring Air Base, the second largest Strategic Air Command unit in the country, was completed and 11,0000 officers and enlisted men were assigned there.
With this activity Waterboro, Maine, became a boom town and soon the Cleveland Indians dispatched a new minor league team. Wooden billboards along the outfield fence at Veterans Park began advertising the virtues of fertilizers and credit unions and announcing that Waterboro was the HOME OF THE 79TH BOMBER SQUADRON. Out beyond the scoreboard there were barns and silos and an elaborate network of radar towers. Waterboro became a small city of soldiers and farmers.
As in baseball, there have been good and bad seasons for the potato farmers here, seasons of lean and fat. Over the years the farmers have come to Veterans Park to escape the worries and the tedium of their work. They have taken their places at the ballpark and fretted about batting averages and watched the shirtless school kids chasing down foul balls in the seats, their backs as smooth as glass, as brown as the infield dirt.
But as this summer of 1969 began, the farmers didn't know what to expect. A spring drought turned their ground as hard as iron, and many of the farm boys had left home and were dying like mad in Vietnam for a reason that was hard to understand. Though they couldn't know it, the farmers were facing the strangest summer of their lives, this last summer of the 1960s, the summer when men would walk on the moon and Senator Kennedy would drive his car of f the bridge, and there would be great anger and deafening music on another farm a few hundred miles south of here in Woodstock, New York.
REVIEWS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Although the author tries to wrap things up a bit too neatly at the end, and although the heroine indulges in too many philosophical cliches, Snyder's tight and often lyrical prose more than compensates for these flaws. "
RICHARD YATES, AUTHOR OF REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
"Don Snyder writes of love, baseball, corruption, loyalty and betrayal-- all in a fresh, graceful prose that assures his future as a novelist."
Ivy Books | ISBN 978-0804102865 | March 12, 1988
VETERANS PARK
A Novel
LIBRARY JOURNAL
"Snyder has a good feel for life in small town America."
DISCUSSIONS
