Year-Ender, 2019

Happy New Year!

This blog continues to lose steam. I don’t post nearly as often as I once did. Various reasons. Alas!

“There’s a hormone secreted into the bloodstream of most writers,” Francis Ford Coppola once said, “that makes them hate their own work while they are doing it, or immediately after.”

The posts linked to below are trifles from the last twelve months. I don’t hate any of them, yet. But it probably won’t be long.

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Lost Genius. A book review.

My Uncle Clarence. The text of something I read at my late uncle's funeral. Not to be confused with a eulogy.

Guitar Heroes, Pt. 2. Some stuff about guitars and guitarists – Ted Greene in particular.

Ted Nugent's Army. An embryonic flight of fancy. I could perhaps whip this into something more interesting...?

Stuff A Sock In It. Answers the question: how do you play guitar while everyone else is asleep?

Lost Genius

Lost Genius, by Kevin Bazzana, is a biography of pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi.

Ever hear of him? Probably not.

You may know the names Vladimir Horowitz, Van Cliburn, and other pianistic titans of the 20th Century. But Nyiregyházi?

Whether Nyiregyházi even belongs in the class of pianistic titans is debatable. And it has been debated, ever since he re-emerged from decades of obscurity in the early 1970s. Lost Genius argues that yes, he does belong.

A lot was written about Nyiregyházi in the 1970s. A lot was written about him in the 1920s, too. In between? Mostly silence.

As a child prodigy born in Budapest, Nyiregyházi was compared favorably to Mozart. He seemed to master music effortlessly. He began composing his own stuff at four or five and played before heads of state and other dignitaries throughout Europe. A shrink wrote a book about him, and he was generally lauded as the Next Big Thing.

Nyiregyházi debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1920 when he was just seventeen. But he was difficult to work with and alienated the musical establishment, and it killed his career.

Or did it? “More plausibly, perhaps it was his unorthodox, limited, self-indulgent repertoire,” wrote a critic in 1979, in reviewing a Nyiregyházi album. Another reviewer dismissed him thusly: “For those wishing to explore skid row pianism, this album is recommended.” (The full meaning of this comment will shortly become clear.)

His style of playing turned a lot of people off. It has been described as “a free and intense ‘grand manner’ that goes back to the heyday of Romanticism as exemplified by Liszt himself – and that has come to be regarded with suspicion and/or derision in our antiseptic age.” Nyiregyházi put it this way: “The more gushing, the better.”

In any case, Nyiregyházi was basically washed up by his mid-twenties. But he liked the United States and stayed here, spending most of the next four decades living in a series of flophouses and other dumps in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He also married, divorced, married, divorced, philandered, drank heavily, married, divorced – and on and on.

Nyiregyházi re-emerged in the 1970s when a series of unplanned events thrust him back in the public eye. He recorded for several years (I have three of his albums) but never completely left his life of poverty behind him. By then in his seventies, he had his fifteen minutes of fame. Or maybe twenty minutes; he was big in Japan, for a while. But eventually he slid back into obscurity. He died, forgotten again, in 1987.

This is all described in detail, in Lost Genius. I recommend this book. The story is fascinating and the writing is fine. My biggest complaint with Lost Genius is its dearth of endnotes and other source material. In nonfiction I like to know where every last quote, every last assertion, comes from. This is how we test the veracity of any material. Some is there, but not nearly enough.

*

BTW, that last name? Pronunciation is usually rendered NEAR-edge-hah-zee. There's a Wikipedia page on him, and a bunch of stuff on YouTube.

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NOTES

“More plausibly, perhaps it was... ” Carol Mont Parker, Clavier, January 1979.

“For those wishing to explore...” Unnamed reviewer, Clavier, January 1979.

“A free and intense...” from Stereo Review, January 1978.

“The more gushing...” from Time magazine, May 29, 1978.

Finally: Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy was published in 2007 by Carroll and Graf. Later editions have a slightly different subtitle.

Final finally: According to a footnote on p. 229, Nyiregyházi “was intrigued by the Kennedy assassination, and composed several pieces about it. He was convinced Oswald was innocent and that Kennedy had been the victim of a right-wing conspiracy.” So intrigued, in fact, that he wrote an (apparently) unpublished Letter to the Editor of the Saturday Evening Post in 1967 in which he “outlined his theory.” I like Nyiregyházi even more now!

My Uncle Clarence

My uncle Clarence Hill died on November 2, 2019. An enormously popular teacher, he taught history and psychology at Valle Catholic High School in Ste. Genevieve, MO, for thirty years. Of course, that was outside my direct experience. He also served in the United States Marine Corps. Below are my remarks at his funeral service in Ste. Genevieve, along the Mississippi River, on November 9, where I was the last of five speakers. (It’s tempting to clean the text up, but I shall resist.)

Most of my memories of my Uncle Clarence center on when I was a kid.

We used to visit Missouri during the summer, and I would look forward to the places my Uncle Clarence would take us. I always knew he would have something interesting for us to do, and he never failed to deliver.

What I most remember are the utterly unique places he took us to, like Johnson’s Shut-ins. Of course, Clarence was not the only person to know about such places, but it seemed that way to me. I was probably eleven or twelve the last time I was at Johnson’s Shut-ins. I remember it as an incredible place to swim, what amounted to a natural waterpark: large rockpiles worn smooth by the river running through it. 

The river and all those rocks formed small pools and natural slides. At some point the river emptied into a sort of lagoon walled in on one side by a high cliff. From way up at the top, older kids with more nerve than I had would jump into the deep water. I looked up Johnson’s Shut-ins the other day – which is to say, I Googled it – and learned for the first time that it’s a state park on the East Fork Black River.

Another time, Clarence took us on a hike up a long trail climbing to something called Pilot’s Knob which, thank you Google, is a mountain that was heavily mined more than a century ago. I remember a scorching hot day. As we went up the trail, Clarence assured us that before reaching the top we’d get relief from the intense heat. And sure enough we began to feel drafts of cold air, long before reaching its source – which turned out to be an old mining shaft, a spot known, Clarence said, as the Devil’s Icebox.

These were the kinds of places, it seemed to me, that Clarence, and only Clarence, knew about in abundance.

•

The memory that really stands out occurred on a summer evening one of the years we came down here from Michigan. It must have been soon after dinner. Clarence either had a horse, or had access to one, and took us to a nearby farm to see it: my sisters and me, and his two sisters, Norma and Helen, Helen being my mom. My cousins Robin and Kelly, and Greg and Amy, were probably there, too.

Clarence showed us the horse, but soon enough saddled up and began riding around a meadow. We kids occupied ourselves the way kids do, and my mother and Norma stood along the fence enclosing the meadow, talking quietly to each other.

It was that perfect time of a late summer day: all quiet, dusk just taking hold, the day’s heat finally easing. I was probably looking at bugs, or something like that. But suddenly the early evening stillness was broken by the thunder of pounding hooves: I looked up, and saw Clarence galloping across the meadow. He extended one arm, formed a pistol with his forefinger, and cried out: Pow pow pow pow pow!

He must have seen a rabbit. Whatever it was, my mother and Norma fell against each other, laughing so hard they might have wet their pants. One of them, I don’t remember which, said to the other, “I don’t care if he lives to be a hundred, Clarence is never going to grow up!”

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I do now: that’s a pretty good way to be.

Years later we visited Clarence again. This time I had my wife and two kids with me, and we were pleased to also meet Donna and her son Brian. And wouldn’t you know it, Clarence took us to another utterly unique place, which is probably not too far from here. I’m sorry to say I can’t remember the name; it may have been a private farm. It was a beautiful setting, nestled into a clearing in the woods, but what made it so wonderful were all the animals. My son Marshall likes animals, but was happiest seeing Brian, another kid his age. But for my daughter Dana – she’s never met an animal she doesn’t like. Clarence, of course, was the same way. Here were ponies, goats, chickens, roosters, a peacock, and many others – a menagerie of the type my daughter might have wished for in her dreams.

So, thank-you for that, Clarence. And thank-you for all those places you took us as kids. I know you had a million of ’em. And thank you for always remaining so young at heart – as Norma and Helen put it a long time ago, for never growing up, at least not any more than necessary.

Trumpgate?

For nearly half century the gate suffix has been a convenient shorthand for scandal. Any scandal, from mild to extreme.

It began, of course, with Nixon and Watergate, but rapidly entered the popular lexicon. Here is a small sampling of -gates, from vintage to more recent:

• Iran-contragate
• Deflategate
• Bridgegate
• Billygate
• Nipplegate
• Penisgate
• Pussygate

That last, one in a trio of body part-gates, relates of course to the Dumper’s “You can ... grab ’em by the ...” remark.

I thought of a few of these, then googled it for a more thorough accounting. There are some I never even heard of. Wikipedia has an extensive list.

But the gate suffix is obsolete. Not even Trumpgate encompasses the vileness, the malignancy and corruption and moral rot of Donald J. Trump, so-called president.

“Scandalous” is too kind a word, too soft, to apply to him. Dishonest is too kind, as is venal. The present Ukraine (et al) scandal far surpasses anything that could be summed up with a word ending in gate.

Everything about trump is wrong, and always has been. Even as he blusters and spouts increasingly bizarre shit, he remains what he always has been: a transparently corrupt fraud, and a grotesque parody of a politician.

Early in his term I wrote here that this will not end well. That has been patently obvious all along, of course.

I think trump is nuts, and there are times when I look at him with pity. You don’t blame someone for getting cancer. But he is dangerous, and should never have been elevated to the presidency (he was not elected). Impeachment is long overdue. Conviction in the senate, of course, is highly unlikely.

He may wiggle out of this somehow. There is nothing this cornered rat will not do to save himself. He may even win reelection, and heaven help us if he does. But he deserves heavy-handed retribution.

Unclear on the Concept

Trump is such a dimwit – is so dense, so out of touch, so perverted, so all of the above – that he genuinely thinks hugging the flag demonstrates love of country.

Or so it would appear. Has there ever been a better illustration of patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel?

I want to see this presidency destroyed. I want to see trump publicy disgraced. But he is so focused on what he calls winning – so compulsively focused, this driven psycho-sicko – he will stoop to things decent people cannot even imagine, let alone actually do, to save his own thin skin. So I probably won’t get my wish.

Removal from office will have to suffice. By any means necessary.

The value of Robert Mueller’s testimony to Congress will be taking the dry legalese of the special counsel’s report, which few have actually read, and converting the best bits to sound bites that show up everywhere from the nightly news to comedy programs to YouTube.

Here’s one line directly from the Mueller Report, already widely quoted, I hope to see in sound bite form:

“...if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

Of course, we’ve already got that in sound bite form. Mueller said much the same thing in his May 29 press conference, and it hasn’t made much difference: “...if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

Be that as it may, another quote from the Report:

“Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel’s oversight of investigations that involved the President’s conduct – and, most immediately, to reports that the President was being investigated for potential obstruction of justice.”

And another:

“Recognizing that the President would not be interviewed voluntarily, we considered whether to issue a subpoena for his testimony. We viewed the written answers to be inadequate.”

There are lots more. I eagerly await Mueller’s July 17 testimony, but am simultaneously prepared to be disappointed.

A trump supporter recently attacked me online as a “hater.” Rather than engage, I deleted this remark. Hate is a strong word. I do not hate trump. But I recognize him for the fraud that he is, his transparent corruption, his being such a poor excuse of a president and a human being, and the very real danger he has represented since the day he assumed office.

So very much has already born this out. The worst, I suspect, is yet to come.

Distractions and Sound Bites

Robert Mueller is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on July 17 – about two weeks from now, as this is written. 

According to a report in the Associated Press, trump has scheduled a rally for that evening in North Carolina. It’s billed as a campaign rally, but it seems pretty clear to me its real purpose is to serve as a distraction from Mueller.

It won’t work.

Of course, Mueller is not expected, at this point, to say much of anything that isn’t already known. “Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report,” he said at his May 29 press conference. “It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself.”

But the value of Mueller’s testimony, as I see it, is in reducing that lengthy report, which most people have not read, to a series of easily digestible sound bites – sound bites that will be seen and heard by many millions. Having the words spoken by Mueller himself will give them added weight.

Not likely it will make much difference, in the long run. trump, that charlatan and lowlife – a man so out of touch, he thinks love of country means hugging the flag – will ramp up his distraction, and his abuse on Mueller, the Constitution, the American people, and common sense. This villain must get his comeuppance. His guilt, his corruption, his incompetence, and his lack of human decency are already plain as day.

Guitar Heroes, Part Two (Ted Greene)

Update, Sept. 2019. Last spring I wrote the following “Guitar Heroes” post after discovering the work of the late Ted Greene. I described how a creator of YouTube tutorials had used, without credit – stolen, that is – Greene's arrangement of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” In revisiting this video the other day, I see he now gives credit (in the notes beneath the video) where it is due. No thanks to me; but in fairness I am drawing attention to it. No changes to the post, though; only this update/preamble.

•

Late last fall, as the holidays approached, I went in search of guitar arrangements of secular Christmas tunes. With no particular song in mind I came across a YouTube tutorial of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

The chords and harmonies the instructor played (on electric guitar) sounded pretty good, so I downloaded the tabs in PDF. After working on it a day or two I went back to the video to review a tricky passage. Then I scrolled down to read some of the comments.

“Great playing,” someone wrote. “But you really should credit Ted Greene, whose arrangement it undoubtedly is.”

Someone else agreed. “This is pure plagiarism,” he stated flatly. “Sorry, Lesson Dude, but you’re big a piece of douchebag for not giving credit to Ted Greene.”

Additional comments developed this theme. “This arrangement is Ted Greene’s. Maybe you should credit him somewhere.”

“No credit to Ted Greene = thumb down,” a fourth guy chimed in, adding a thumbs down emoji for good measure.

Ted Greene

“What kind of pickups are those?” someone else asked – and the thread turned to more pragmatic issues. The “Lesson Dude” did not acknowledge any of the Ted Greene accusations.

Ted Greene. I did not know the name, so I googled it. And sure enough, I found “Merry Little Christmas” on tedgreene.com, under “transcriptions” – virtually note-for-note what that lesson dude had on YouTube.

Ted Greene, it turns out, was a legendary figure in guitar circles – which means most people have never heard of him. Me, for instance. He died too soon, at age 58 in 2005. His website is maintained by admirers who want to preserve his legacy, which is largely as a teacher.

Ted Greene wrote several books, one of them Chord Chemistry. I had twenty-five bucks on a Powell’s Books gift card from my friend Janet, so I bought it. It has been eating my brain ever since.

A few years back I wrote a post for this blog called “Guitar Heroes.” Ted Greene is now among these heroes.

There are lots of Ted Greene videos on YouTube, most of them home videos shot by fans. He recorded one album, just one, many years ago. It is primarily show tunes. “A lot of what America listened to [when I was a kid] was Tin Pan Alley’s product,” he told an interviewer in 1995. “And a lot of that was inextricably bound up with show tunes. The Great American songbook.”

Scott Tennant

Other Heroes

That first “guitar heroes” post centered on William Kanengiser and Ralph Towner. Kanengiser is a founding member of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. Another founding LAGQ member is Scott Tennant, a great player (originally from Detroit) with some interesting solo stuff (check out his arrangement of “Wild Mountain Thyme”).

Andrew York

Andrew York is also on the new Heroes list: a former member of the LAGQ, author of the Jazz Guitar for Classical Cats series (another Janet gift card purchase), and a composer and soloist of note. Pardon the pun.

Tommy Emmanuel is a great player, even brilliant, and I’ve found some of his stuff useful. He even recommends Chord Chemistry in a video somewhere, and gave a very interesting TED talk. But some of his playing is a little too showbiz for my taste.

Of course, no decent list of guitar heroes would omit people like Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, and Jim Hall. Maybe I’ll talk about them another time.

Meanwhile, I continue with Ted Greene arrangements. In cycling parlance, a few of them seem beyond category. But “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is doable. The holidays have come and gone so I practice it out of season.

Ted Greene must have had hands of rubber. In guitar parlance the song is a bear, a bitch, a total challenge. It’s coming together – but slowly.

Look simple enough? This is one of the more difficult Ted Greene passages in Merry Little Xmas.

Tommy Emmanuel

Ted Nugent's Army

After Trump won reelection in a landslide he declared himself president for life and suspended all civil liberties. Resistance leaders contested the election, alleging massive voter fraud. Trump called them fake news, and ordered their public execution on the White House lawn.

After that, everyone shut the hell up.

All over the country, disparate bands of men and women sprang up in support of the president. The most aggressive called themselves Ted Nugent’s Army. They were loosely affiliated and heavily armed, and wore camouflage jumpsuits with their logo silk-screened on back – an electric guitar fashioned into an ArmaLite AR-15 assault rifle. Or maybe it was an ArmaLite AR-15 fashioned into a guitar. Whichever, a great cleansing began.

We fled beyond the outskirts of town carrying short supplies of food and water, the few clothes at hand, a portable solar panel, and little else. We took refuge in the ruins of a concrete foundation, pulling a sheet of corrugated metal over the top. At night we slept huddled together covered by winter coats, afraid to build a fire.

A few hundred others lived as we did, in hidden encampments scattered through the area. None of us were armed. I remembered all the gun control petitions I had signed. We could hear distant gunshots and spoke warily among ourselves. For news we had a laptop hidden in our hovel, but Internet service became spotty after Ted Nugent’s Army disrupted its infrastructure. Of course, no one really knows how the hell the Internet works. But they burned data centers to the ground, and this proved very effective.

Next they began building a big beautiful wall with forced labor, to keep out the likes of us.

Food was a finite resource but we had options. In Never Cry Wolf Farley Mowat described surviving the Arctic wilderness by eating mice he caught and cooked. Similarly I once saw a documentary about a man who fled society to live off the land as a hunter-gatherer. He ate nuts and berries. He set traps. And he ate forest slugs: flip a rotten log and dinner is served, a timberland haute cuisine. They taste like bacon, he said.

Then there was that woman who trekked across the Australian outback and ate much the same thing. Hers did not taste like bacon. To make this voyage, she explained, you must learn to like ’em. Or at least learn to choke ’em down without puking.

Ted Nugent’s Army roved the frontier day and night in jeeps, and soon enough began closing in. The sounds of automatic gunfire and agonized screams grew closer and more common. Then came word that Trump had choked to death on a Quarter Pounder with cheese. This was not fake news, but Ted Nugent’s Army continued the slaughter. Ivanka was sworn in amid great pomp and circumstance: the nation’s first woman president!

The Grounds Crew

This story dates back to the summer of 2013. It first appeared on a personal website my ISP has since obliterated. I now present it here, six years later and without updates, although plenty has changed – so much, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I am, however, adding the last names of several people, left out of the original for various reasons.

•

There is nothing left of Tiger Stadium, nothing at all, unless you count the flagpole that once stood in the deepest part of center field.

Now the flagpole is in an empty Detroit lot, and everything else is gone. The grandstands, the dugouts and bullpen, the outfield fences and the enormous light towers that once turned night into day – all gone. The club houses are gone, the broadcast booth where Ernie Harwell called the play-by-play, the press booths built into the stadium’s very top tier, and the massive rolls of waterproof tarpaulin the stadium grounds crew pulled over the infield when it rained. All of it is gone.

And yet, there is still a grounds crew.

Or at least, there’s a version of the grounds crew, a self-selected, volunteer corps that over the last few years has reclaimed the abandoned field at Michigan and Trumbull. This handful of Detroit-area fans remember Tiger Stadium with great fondness.

“This is sacred ground,” one of them said to me, the day I stopped by. “I love it here.”

That was Joe Michnuk speaking. Joe is a onetime Detroit Tiger employee whose tough appearance belies a basic friendliness. “How ya doin’, man?” he greeted me earlier, as I first approached the field. He walked barefoot from an entrance along Michigan Avenue, and I began to think of him as Shoeless Joe.

There’s also a guy out there named Tom Derry. By all accounts, he is the driving force behind this loosely-affiliated group known as the Navin Field Grounds Crew. Disturbed by the weed-infested remains of the playing field after a visit in 2010, Tom took it upon himself to return with a tractor-mower and start the laborious task of bringing ten overgrown acres under control. A few others joined him, including his girlfriend Sarah.

After several years of hard work, it’s a baseball diamond again.

Its dimensions are as accurate as can be, short of getting official league input. The Navin Field Grounds Crew located anchors in the field where the bases used to go, and another for the pitcher’s slab. They have set the field up accordingly.

Tom is a mail carrier, presently sidelined after an on-the-job accident. The day I met him he hobbled around on crutches, wearing a Tigers home jersey bearing Norm Cash’s number 25. Cash, the Tigers’ slugging first baseman during the 1960s and 70s, was his favorite player.

The Navin Field Grounds Crew has had a lot of publicity since forming. Tom told me all the local TV stations and the local print media have done stories, and national outlets like ESPN and NPR. And that’s to name but a few.

Tiger Stadium met with a wrecking crew between 2008 and 2009. By then I had lived out of state for many years. But during a trip back to Detroit in August 2008, I couldn’t resist spending a few hours at Michigan and Trumbull to witness what I could of the stadium’s dismantling. An unpleasant sight: big chunks of it were already gone. Heavy machinery occupied rough dirt where the center field bleachers and left field stands used to be.

From time to time, as the stadium gradually came down, people snuck in for a last look around. I’d have done so myself that day, if my wife hadn’t been with me. And if I’d been able to summon up the necessary chutzpah.

You wouldn’t think it takes much chutzpah to mow the lawn, but technically the Navin Field Grounds Crew is trespassing. Tom told me the cops threw them out a few times over the first year or so. Now they pretty much leave them alone.

I should have, but didn’t, ask how they settled on the name “Navin Field Grounds Crew.” But it’s easy to see. Professional baseball was played at Michigan and Trumbull from the late 19th century on, first at a wooden structure called Bennett Park, and later at the concrete-and-steel Navin Field, which opened in 1912. The original grandstands extended from about first base around to third base. By the 1930s there was an upper deck, and the ball yard became Briggs Stadium. It became Tiger Stadium in 1961.

“How you folks doin’?” Shoeless Joe greeted visitors on that June morning I was there. He’d been working with a shovel around the home plate area. Back in the 1980s Joe worked clubhouse security at Tiger Stadium. “Best job I ever had,” he says today. “It was never like going to work.”

The visitors were a middle-aged man with a couple of children. “I just had to bring my kids down here,” the man explained. He lives near Adrian in southern Michigan and was on his way to a game at Comerica Park, the Tigers’ home now for more than a decade.

Tom says this happens all the time. People on their way to a home game stop by to see where Tiger Stadium used to be. The Adrian man and his kids began an improvised romp around home plate and the pitchers’ mound.

I met a guy named Dave Mesrey out in right field. During the week he’s a copy editor. Now he was bent over, stuffing a big plastic bag with windblown trash. Like everyone else I met with the Navin Field Grounds Crew, Dave is a friendly fellow with an obvious love for not just the Tigers and Tiger Stadium, but the very grounds on which the stadium once stood.

He described to me the incredibly overgrown condition of the field when the nascent NFGC first began clearing it. “I shudder to think what would have happened to this place if Tom hadn’t come along.” A picture on Dave’s smart phone shows him standing in chest-high weeds.

There’s an openness about this crew, an unassuming, all-in-a-day’s-work attitude I found very appealing. I don’t deserve any credit, several said to me. It’s guys like Jerry, who drives all the way across the state just to be here. It’s the guy who paid for our three rider mowers out of his own pocket. Or the guy who picks up trash in the outfield. Or all the other volunteers who show up every single Sunday to weed the infield and mow the outfield and rebuild the pitcher’s mound or lay down the white lime lines from the batter’s box at home plate all the way down to where the foul poles used to be. They’re the ones who are interesting. They deserve all the credit. Not me.

As the morning progressed I wandered all over the field, from home plate to the flag pole in center, to the left and right field corners. I went beyond the field to a service drive outside the gate (the corner of Kaline and Cochrane), to a pedestrian bridge over the Fisher Freeway, where fans once streamed to the stadium on game days.

This is, indeed, sacred ground to a lot of people. Shoeless Joe asked whether I’d seen the ashes. When I said no, he led me to ashes laid out like a foul line and adorned with roses. He didn’t know who left them there: someone’s cremated remains.

One of the crew told me they mark birthdays – a little celebration in left field for Willie Horton, and another on the pitcher’s mound for the late Mark Fidrych. They had one in 2012 to observe the centennial of Navin Field.

At the beginning of this essay I said the flagpole was the only thing left of Tiger Stadium. I lied. There’s a rather fancy gate running along Michigan Avenue, and it’s still there, too. But Tom said it didn’t go up until the early 1990s, when management moved the player’s parking lot and created a new spectator entrance. By then I had left the Detroit area. I’m glad the gate is still there, but to me it doesn’t really count.

I retain a powerful, if sentimental, attachment to Tiger Stadium, and this grassroots reclamation of what’s left – dare this curmudgeon say it? – is one of the most heartwarming things I’ve seen in a long time. As I looked around the day of my visit I imagined the previous condition of the field, the way Dave and Tom described it: overgrown, unruly weeds where the likes of Ty Cobb, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg, Babe Ruth, and Shoeless Joe Jackson once played.

Tiger Stadium, Briggs Stadium, Bennett Park, Navin Field – in spite of our best efforts we know it won’t always be there, not in the form of a baseball diamond. We know nothing lasts forever. But for now a group of self-appointed groundskeepers have reclaimed a small piece of Detroit’s heritage, and of Major League Baseball’s heritage. They did it because they love it and because it was the right thing to do. And that is a very noble thing.