Hero stuff

Once again, our favorite success story, From Farm Boy To Fame And Fortune, or the swift rise of the amazing Brothers Dean

PAUL GALLICO

■ The Dean Brothers, Jerome and Paul, the two greatest living baseball pitchers, possess, each individually, in addition to a skill that amounts practically to virtuosity, the two characteristics most liable to endear them to American hearts. It is true hero stuff. Jerome, otherwise known as Dizzy, has the homespun, boyish humor that is completely indigent to the country. Paul, now teamed with his brother under the co-nickname of Daffy, never says anything. Any country that made national heroes out of Will Rogers and Calvin Coolidge is simply a set-up for the Dean boys.

Really the only thing they missed for complete deification was to have been born in a log cabin. As it was, they were modelled with clay from a poor Arkansas farm, and when Dizzy first started to pitch, which was at the age of twelve, he pitched barefooted in farm boy rags, which means overalls with one shoulder strap and a ragged cotton undershirt. The ball that he used was a stone wound with yarn unravelled from a pair of his father's heavy woolen socks. His brown hair hung dankly over his eyes in the Arkansas heat, and he was probably already chewing tobacco.

There is something about a farm boy, an American truly sprung from the soil, that appeals to the sentimental heart almost as strongly as a red-headed Irishman. Add to this, desperate poverty, no mother, little schooling, native wit, a generous heart and a fantastic impishness of a character out of Mark Twain or Bret Harte, and your biography of a great personage is half written. The Dean boys, and especially Dizzy, fit into this picture.

You know, of course, that to-day Jerome and Paul Dean are the property of The National Baseball Club of St. Louis, nicknamed the Cardinals, that they are the most skilled and highest priced pitchers in either league, that between them and practically singlehanded they won the world's championship for St. Louis over the Detroit Tigers, last fall, that they are on the road to a spoil fame and national notoriety that will replace that of the fading Babe Ruth, that they are now quiet, civilized citizens who wear store clothes that fit, live in the best hotels, ride in Pullman trains, own houses in Florida, act on the vaudeville stage and have signed articles in the newspapers. They are the latest members of the eternal national scene, along with Dempsey and Huey Long and Max Baer, and Lindbergh and Bob Jones. And you know, too, or should, that in their profession they are truly great. It is a form of snobbishness and literary affectation to compare an athlete to a musician or a painter or a sculptor. But certainly, whatever art there is to throwing a league baseball over a small, five-cornered plate, sixty feet away, and fooling a batter posted there waving a small wagon tongue, they have mastered. They are immense, superb, superlative. And what people! What a family, what a background ! What copy! . . .

Those humble beginnings. When you hear the word "farm," you must not imagine green, rolling country, red barns and tall silos, white fences, brooks and lush country. This was Arkansas, gray, dusty, pinched, probably a small, weatherbeaten, nondescript house, a few scrawny chickens and razorbacks, a few cultivation-resisting acres, and poverty, poverty of the kind where pennies are not used to buy newspapers or book-matches, but food.

The father's name was Albert Dean. He was Scotch Irish. The mother was Alma Meadows. She was of pure Swedish stock. The boys have the high cheekbones of the Norsemen. There were three boys, Paul, Jerome and Elmer. The mother died when Dizzy was four, It is hard to arrive at just what it was that Albert Dean did to support his family, because the boys won't talk about it much. But it seems that he was a sort of a junkman. When he was seven years old, Elmer, the eldest, had a brain fever and when he got up again he was not quite right in his head. He didn't remember very well. Many years later, when Paul and Jerome were famous, Elmer was cruelly and shamefully taken advantage of, and ridiculed. He was brought to St. Louis to sell peanuts in the grandstand, with a sign, "Elmer Dean, stuck in his white candy butcher s hat, until Dizzy made them stop.

What had happened was that, years before, the Dean family had migrated from their home. Elmer was driving a small farm truck. Paul and Jerome and their father were up ahead in the Ford. They came to a grade crossing and the Ford clattered over it, but when Elmer reached it, a mile long freight train was clanking and rattling along, and when it finally passed, Elmer never caught up, because he could not remember where he was bound for. He took the wrong fork in the road and was separated from them for more than four years until last summer when lie sat down and scrawled a letter to Dizzy Dean in St. Louis to ask him if he was the brother from whom he had been cut oil by a freight train.

Jerome Herman (Dizzy) Dean was born Jay Hanner Dean. January, 21 years ago, apparently in three places, Holdenville. Lucas, and Mansfield, Arkansas. This calls for explanations which are characteristic of Diz who gives a different birthplace, that is. one of the three, each time he is questioned but rationalizes it by declaring that the great Dean is really entitled to three birthplaces. Actually, Mansfield, where he was born, is just a wide place in the road to Holdenville, and Lucas is its postoffice. Dizzy's father had a great friend, and the friend had a boy named Jerome Herman. Jerome Herman died. Dizzy went over with his father to visit the bereaved parent, and Dizzy said that he reckoned even though Jerome Herman was gone he was going to make the name something in the world. And so Jay Hanner Dean became Jerome Herman Dean. And he did make the name a famous one. Except that everyone calls him and knows him as Dizzy.

Dizzy then was raised on a scratchy little Arkansas farm and when the weather permitted attended the little red schoolhouse on Chiekahah Mountain, forty miles from nowhere to read a few lessons but mostly to play. He quit after the fourth grade and went back to working at ploughing, chopping wood, raising cotton and pecans, milking cows, feeding the hogs and making himself useful. But he always liked to throw things and lie loved better than anything else to play ball. He could always kill snakes and squirrels by throwing rocks at them, and so naturally when they played their ball games with their home-made balls and hand-whittled bats, Dizzy was the pitcher.

When lie was twelve years old, a man named Dean, no kin to them, came over and asked young Jerome Herman whether he would pitch for his high school team at Spalding, Oklahoma, five miles from Holdenville. The boy allowed as how he would sure enough like to pitch for them, but he couldn't go to the school. But the man said that that would be all right. And so for three years, he pitched barefooted for the Spalding high school team. When he was a little over twelve, he shut out the team of the Oklahoma City Teacher's College, allowing them two hits and striking out fourteen. The Teacher's College pitcher had a cap with an initial mi it, and spikes and a toe plate, but Jerome Herman was still in bis bare feet. At sixteen, he enlisted in the 12th Field Artillery at San Antonio, at Fort Sam Houston. His motives were practical rather than patriotic. They discovered, as he had intended, that he was a terrible soldier, but a great baseball pitcher. It was in the Army that Dizzy received his first pair of shoes.

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His ball playing attracted so much attention that his father was able to buy him out of the Army and be went to work for the Public Service Co., in San Antonio, reading meters so that he could play on their ball team. The following spring he wras working out with the San Antonio team in a game against the Chicago White Sox who were training there. These are his own quotes. ... "I was going so good the White Sox coaches got sore and started yelling I was a big, awkward, dizzy kid. Some of the sports writers heard it, and for some reason or other, they started calling me Dizzy."

Ring Lardner invented his famous character, the Busher of "You Know Me Al," and died before he really saw him come to life. It was, of course. Dizzy Dean. His first year in training camp with the big leagues, in a training game, they filled the bases on the big rookie. Gus Mancuso, a noted veteran catcher started for the mound to confer with him. Diz waved him back. "Hey," he shouted, "you catch. I'll pitch." He then struck out Dykes, Cochrane and Haas in a row, three of the greatest hitters in the game.

Yes, come to think of it, it was Lardner and no one else who invented Dizzy. Stories come drifting hack from his minor league days with St. Joseph, and Houston and Charleston, Mo. When he first joined St. Jo, he had no clothes. He went along until a shirt got dirty. Then he bought a new one and stuffed the old one in a bureau drawer. He didn't understand about laundries. He didn't understand about hotels either. He slept in three places, the "Y", the St. Francis and the Robidoux. He registered at each place, and when nightfall and fatigue overtook him he just went to the one which was nearest at the time, pulled off his coat, trousers and shoes, and went to bed. He was upset when he drew a bill for a month from each place.

He went from small team to bigger team, to bigger still, and finally to the St. Louis Cardinals. His adventures, his escapades, born of ignorance, inexperience, pride in his ability, contempt for other pitchers, would fill a merry hook, but, alas! Lardner is no longer here to write it. You would have to see him on a sweltering day in August, in a fur coat and blanket, solemnly lighting a little fire in front .of his dugout in the hall yard and warming his fingers over it. Or, as solemnly, instructing a wide-eyed boy to bring him a piece of ice to he delivered after he finished pitching Cincinnati into subjection to win the pennant, so that he might cool off the plate, red hot from his pitching, and then doing just that, when the youth showed up with it.

He is big, and easy going and lovable and loyal. Remember the time he went on strike for more pay for his kid brother Paul. Paul .... Paul? Wait a minute, there are two Deans, aren't there, Dizzy and Daffy? Paul is Daffy. But this has been a story about Diz, just the way all stories are about Diz. Why? Well, I told you in the beginning. Paul never says anything. He is as quiet and sober as Dizzy is gay, sparkling, playful and noisy. He just comes into the park, goes to the mound, pitches a one or two-hit game, like as not, or even a classic no-hitter, takes his shower, and goes away. And he never does or says anything.

But he grew up as Dizzy did, playing ball. He even played shortstop for that same Spalding high school team until the pitcher's arm went lame one day and he stepped in and pitched. Paul used to pitch with an overarm motion, until Dizzy came home from the minors one summer and went out behind the barn with his brother and taught him his fine, sweeping side-arm motion. Now Paul and Jerome pitch exactly alike.

Paul has Jerome's speed. When he acquires his change of pace he will be even a greater pitcher than his brother. Dizzy married Patricia Nash, a lovely, motherly girl who looks after him, nurses him and keeps him from signing things. Paul married recently, too. The four play bridge together.