Heroes in the Dirt, and other folk songs (a monologue)

Dick Allen, who played for the Philadelphia Phillies, was a hero of mine, and I'd like to tell you why.  When I was young, I usually fell asleep on the living room floor when my father turned on baseball games.  Still, I loved the actors of the game, and spent every penny I made, shoveling snow and cutting grass, on baseball cards.  Dick Allen had all the characteristics to be a hero for me.  He had guts, was talented, creative, and was always in trouble. 

They called him Rich or Richie Allen, since he preferred Dick. Allen was a star hitter for the Phillies in the 1960's.  He was disliked because he was the first black player on the modern Phillies team.  They were always looking for a reason to hate him.  Early in his career he got in a "fight" with another player who hit Dick with a bat.  That player was fired, and Allen was held responsible by the fans because a white player lost his job.  They were looking for a reason to boo, and always found one.  He grew a moustache; he was told to cut it off.  He was always being harassed.  But for 6 days in 1967, he did something amazing, something no one's had done before or since.  He wrote in the dirt.

Dick Allen led the American League in home runs twice.  His career batting average was .534, which no one has today.  This guy used one of the heaviest bats made, and hit home run balls 500 feet!  Pre steroids!  The joke in Philadelphia was that Phillies fans booed Allen all the time, because when he hit a home run, there was never a souvenir.  His fielding wasn't as good as his hitting, so they moved him around a lot. Still, by the end of his career, he had been compared to Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Babe Ruth.  Philadelphia was the last city to integrate black players into their team, so the treatment of Dick Allen was a sad time in the City of Brotherly Love.

Dick Allen was black.  Dick Allen was disliked.  For some reason, we could all love Aretha Franklin and the Four Tops, but we couldn't let him in.  Horrible signs were hung from the railings of Connie Mac Stadium.  They threw things at him when he took the field - ice, trash, flashlight batteries! - so he had to always wear his batting helmet. 

One day in 1967 fans were booing him because he hadn't hit a home run lately (and because he was still black), so he wrote in the dirt, in big letters, between second and third base, C-O-K-E, because he intended to hit a home run over the Coca-Cola sign in the outfield.  The next night he wrote B-O-O.  They did.  

The Commissioner of Baseball was there and didn't like Allen having his own personal blackboard, and between games of the double header, he told him so.  In the second game, Allen wrote N-O.  Later he wrote W-H-Y.  This was an amazing thing to watch.  Theatre in the middle of a baseball game!  A single man, standing in the middle of thousands who disliked him, finding a voice as loud as theirs. 

A process had quickly evolved.  Allen would write something in the dirt, which would stay there until the end of the inning.  Then the grounds crew was sent out to erase his words.  On his last night of writing, the plate umpire was asked to tell him that the owners wanted it stopped.  That was when everything changed, just a little bit.  He wrote M-O-M.  World's shortest monologue.  Corny?  Not when emotions were running so high!  The fans had to decide between the front office, who was willing to erase the word MOM, and the man who wrote it.  They sided with Dick, and feelings slowly started to change.  Unfortunately, by that time Dick Allen was tired of the constant fighting and it just wasn't fun to play baseball anymore.  That was too bad.  That night, after the inning was over, the grounds staff refused to erase the word MOM, so it remained there for the rest of the game. 

While I slept through most of the Phillies games on TV as a kid, my father did help me to stay awake for those 6 games, to see my hero make history with his toe.  There was another kid, a little younger, who was having a similar experience.  He lived just outside of town and, unlike me, was a serious baseball fan.  His name is Chuck Brodsky, and he grew up to be a Folk Singer.  I don't know anything about Folk music, but I know that Chuck wrote a song called Letters in the Dirt.  While it tells the story of Dick Allen, the song itself is about Chuck's father. 

The first line of the song is: "Me and you, we never booed Richie Allen/ I never understood why people did."  Then he tells Allen's story, and ends with: "I've since found out all these years later/ now I know a lot more than I did/ and if back then you knew, Daddy/ why all those other people Booed/ thanks for letting me have my heroes as a kid."

So thank you, Dick, for writing in the dirt for us.  You're as much a hero as those who let little white boys have big black heroes, back in a very different time.

© 2012 John Allison