Wednesday, October 17, 2007 12:22 AM CDT
AUTHOR Q & A
Deaver discusses memories of Tuscola, love of baseball
By JOE GISONDI
Phil Deaver, who grew up in Tuscola during the 1950s-’60s, loved to listen through the static to the Cardinals on a small transistor radio each summer night, hearing Jack Buck, Joe Garagiola and Harry Caray describe the players who became his boyhood heroes.
Today, he teaches creative writing at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. His short story (“Arcola Girls”) earned a Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction, and his work has been cited in the Best American Short Stories series. He has also published a book of poems (How Men Pray) and an anthology of fiction (Silent Retreats). He’s currently working on several manuscripts.
Q: What are your memories of sports growing up in Tuscola?
A: Ha! You don’t have time! It fell to me to grow up in a sports town — small town America its very self. My high school classmates, those interested in baseball, divided between the Cubs and the Cardinals — we were in a border region.
Baseball, however, wasn’t a high school sport. Basketball, football, track, those were the traditional high school sports then. Baseball was a community game, and drew a different mix.
Our coaches weren’t the high school coaches, at least many of them weren’t. Instead, one of the guys at the gas company coached, and the fellow who owned the dairy, and a couple of farmers, and some young guys — one of whom was a future county sheriff — several folks from the nearby chemical plant, USI, coached kids in baseball after work.
Happily, one of the main coaches of kids in baseball in those times was also the editor of the town paper, the Tuscola Review. So we got the coverage even if we weren’t a high school sport.
This was in the days of sandlot baseball. Until about sophomore in high school level, the boys, many of us, talked on the phone and pulled together baseball games, met at the park on a summer morning and played until evening. We rode our bikes downtown and had a hamburger at Gus’s, rode back, kept playing.
With six players, you could get a good game going. Eight was perfect. We played a game called Indian ball (I don’t know where the name of the game came from). Of course, we didn’t appreciate it then, but those were some happy times.
I’m confining myself to baseball. There are legends and great stories from all of the sports from back then.
Q: Why did you take on this book project?
A: I’m a baseball fan, particularly the Cardinals, though the game itself pleases me very much. And I’d met the writer John McNally a few years ago, who had the project started, but, due his own writing success, was having to make some decisions on commitments.
I’d had a story in a previous anthology of his, of baseball fiction, and he knew my work, and it seemed to make sense to both of us. He’d leveraged his contacts and had a great start, and best of all, he’d sourced out a publisher (U. of Nebraska Press).
I added a fresh set of writers to finish out the list, then did the editing. It was a lot of fun, and my son Dan helped me which made it even more fun.
Q:. Why do you believe baseball, a more pastoral sport, continues to thrive?
A: Truth is, I don’t know that it is thriving. I’m afraid it’s becoming more of a spectator sport, like NASCAR. I think now the excitement is mostly nostalgia. But that can carry us for a while, and maybe some day kids will be free to go out in a field and play ball again.
Q: Why do you suppose so many writers wanted to explore their relationship in baseball for this book?
A: I think each had his or her own reasons, and the variation in their connections to the game gives the book its wonderful breadth.
Q: Orlando seems like a paradise to many, especially in the winter. What do you miss most about living in East Central Illinois?
A: It’s home. What can you say about home? Sometimes I go back and stare at my house (it isn’t my house any more, but it’s still there). I don’t know what to say about it. It’s in me, that place, the house, the school, the brick street, the ball diamonds, Flesor’s candy store, Forty Martyrs Catholic Church, the courthouse, friends still there who go all the way back with me.
You know, when my mother left there, in the ‘80s, local EIU hall of famer and Tuscola attorney (at the time; now a judge) Mike Carroll bought and restored our house. Well, Mike was the pitcher on my Little League baseball team, the K of C Cardinals, and I was the shortstop. He took our old homestead under his protective wing and saved it, and became a permanent family hero as well as friend.
I only wish I could have raised my kids in a town that would remember and embrace them like Tuscola has me.
Two years ago, Garrison Keillor, on Writers Almanac, read a poem of mine called “Flying.” The real pleasure of that for me was calling home and alerting everybody. Garrison Keillor himself was going to say “Tuscola, listen up!”
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