Author: Brian J. Noggle

I read Bob Gibson’s From Ghetto To Glory earlier this year, so it seemed a prime time to pick up this book as I came across it in a partial book turning this autumn.

Ozzie Smith played a generation after Gibson, starting his career in the late 1970s in San Diego before being traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. I knew him twice: Once as an enemy as a member of the team that eventually beat the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1982 World Series, and a couple of years later as a favorite on the team that then lost the World Series to the Royals and then to the Twins. He didn’t get traded; I moved from Milwaukee to St. Louis, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch kept me awash in free Cardinals tickets for good grades. Between my brother and I, we got to see six to eight games a year gratis, so we became fans of the hometown team. So I’ve seen Ozzie Smith in person, and I’ve seen him do a back flip as he took the field, and I booed Royce Clayton when he appeared in the Dennis Quaid movie The Rookie (Tony LaRussa replaced Smith when Clayton in the 1990s, which caused a rift between the Cardinals and Smith that took years or decades to heal).

At any rate, this book does talk about Ozzie Smith’s race (he’s black), and it mentions he lived in the ghetto (Watts, during the riots in the 1960s, when Smith was very young). But the book focuses mostly on the business side of baseball–Smith’s dealings with the Padres, a penny-pinching team in that era who didn’t want to spend money on retaining players and vilified players who went elsewhere for more money, often beginning in their contract years if the players did not sign right away–to the difficulties and pressures of being a highly paid defensive player. The book also focuses on how Smith approaches self-improvement, including trying to become a better hitter even after he received a big contract.

So the book is more inspirational throughout than the Gibson book. I wonder how more modern sports bios written later than 35 years ago and with different generations scan. Probably not as hopeful as this one.

Not many books have sentences where I know exactly where I was when they happened. This one does.

Some of the fans may have had a little doubt in their hearts about then, but we didn’t. If anything, the Brewers’ rally picked us up as we came up to bat in the bottom of the sixth. We loaded the bases, and that brought up Keith Hernandez to bat against Bob McClure, who had been Keith’s teammate in Little League in California. Keith must have had the book on him, because he came through with a single to score me and Lonnie and tie the game.

Gentle reader, my brother and I left Boogie’s apartment, where his mother had been watching us while my mother had gone out, when the score was 3-1, and when we got to our apartment in the next building over, the score was tied. And we know how the game turned out–if not, you can read this book to find out–and I cried myself to sleep. For a long time, I called Bob McClure “Chicken” McClure, and that probably wasn’t fair. But I was ten, understand.

I also flagged a bit in the book where Ozzie Smith said about a trip to San Francisco for the All Star game where he was going to start the game for the second time, but he was more excited to meet Huey Lewis. C’mon, man, did Ozzie Smith say that, or did Rob Rains through that in because Huey Lewis was one of the biggest musicians of the 1980s? I guess we’ll only know when there’s an estate sale at Smith’s house–if we see a bunch Sports and Picture This on cassette, we will know he really was that excited.

Given that he retired a couple of decades ago, he’s still a beloved figure in Cardinals nation. We used to eat at Ozzie’s when we lived in Casinoport, and a relatively new medical center called Ozzie Smith IMAC Regeneration Center opened in Springfield a couple years ago.

Maybe someday I’ll come across a copy of Ozzie Smith–The Road to Cooperstown by Smith and Rains, written 14 years after this book. I’d like to think it has a similar tone, but one never knows when it comes to athletes who have retired and are not in the middle of their careers.

I picked this book up off of the free book cart at church. Although I check the cart every week, or at least when my beautiful wife needs to be at church early because she’s singing, playing trumpet, or ringing bells (which might only be five out of every six weeks), I do generally wait a week or two before grabbing a free book because I do have other things to read here.

This is a coffee table book that covers seven days in the beginning of April and documents various activities going on throughout the world at churches of the LCMS, its schools, and its missions. The church, from its then-new headquarters in the St. Louis area (I drove by it many times back in the day, which is right after it opened, although I, a new driver exploring the St. Louis area for the first time, did not know that), the church called (well, not called called) for members of various congregations to take photos and submit them, and then the editors up at Concordia Publishing (in the same then-new building) selected photos from every day of the week.

So, that’s it, basically. You get churches and services on Sunday, school kids, missionaries doing their things, the little old ladies of the church doing their crafts and outreach, and the people at LCMS HQ hard at work. You’ve got some photos of church members in their professional lives, and you’ve got what seems to be an overrepresentation of church members working to get the services on the radio or to record the services on video, but I guess those distribution channels would have been pretty novel in 1996. Well, except radio–church services on the radio and television predate this book, but maybe this offered a behind the scenes look? Or maybe it was new to Lutherans then.

I admit that, with some photography books, I only glance at the photos and spend most of my time reading the captions. Such with this book: the photos themselves were fairly pedestrian, although I could not help notice that most of the fashions would have as easily been at home in 1983 as 1996. Nary a bit of flannel here. But, for the most part, the engines of any church are people in their thirties, but more likely their forties and beyond. And these people would have fixed their fashion and how they thought they should look in the 1980s. The young people tend to be in their best or, even in casual clothes, in rather timeless casual wear. The people who would chase fashion would be in their late teens and twenties, the ones looking to define themselves in how they look, and they’re pretty thin in churches now as perhaps then. Not that we’ve had a “look” aside from maybe haircuts and makeup trends this century. Or maybe I am too old to know the subtle differences that youth see.

Given that this picture book showed up on our church’s rack, of course I looked for members or names from the church that I recognized, but I did not find any I knew. I also looked for churches that I have visited, which is not a large number, but we do tend to go to a local LCMS church when possible when we’re vacationing, so I’ve been to LCMS churches in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arkansas. I only have sort of visited one of the churches down the road from here a ways–my sons played basketball at its school, but I’ve not attended service there. One of its youth in 1996 has the same last name as the current principal of the school, to whom we have sent some money from time to time when possible.

I did, however, spot a confirmand named Kaepernick from Turlock, California, and I looked it up: It is, in fact, the former football player’s older sister from his adopted family. I also learned that not only was that former football player likely raised in the LCMS, but that he was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Geez.

At any rate, an interesting artifact, probably more interesting if you attend an LCMS church. Especially if you did so in 1996.

Now this book will not go on my read shelves immediately. It has been routed to my beautiful wife for her review, and from thence it shall likely go to my mother-in-law for review. And heaven knows if or when I will see it again.