Infield squeegees and the Doolittle Raid
A journalist in Washington contacted me a while back to do an article on Black Tulip. "The local baseball pitcher becomes a history writer" was his concept. I wouldn't have thought of that, but I wasn’t going to argue.
Along the way, he contacted my old high school baseball coach for quotes. Such nice quotes they were, too.
I was a little surprised they were so nice.
Back in 11th and 12th grade, Coach Hultberg would have me skip his own history class to go squeegee the baseball infield. There really was a device, a little larger than a push broom, that had a rubber "blade" on the bottom and would move standing water off the kitty-litter dirt of our infield very efficiently. On those Pacific Northwest mornings when we were all hoping for sun and wind to dry out the field for an afternoon game, squeegeeing was mandatory. Classwork? Well.
Soon after the article was published, Hultberg sent me an email, I shipped him a signed book, and we reconnected for the first time in many years. A few weeks later he told me that he had read Black Tulip over a vacation in Cabo, and he’d loved it. Imagine my delight to have this former history teacher of mine (with significant history chops, I should say) share a bunch of happy thoughts about my book and how it made him remember his WWII veteran father's ability to identify axis and allied aircraft at a glance, decades after the war.
Hultberg made me throw smarter, not harder. He also helped me decide to do what I loved regardless of other folks’ estimations of my ability.
I think Hultberg was surprised when, in that newspaper article, I’d credited him for helping me become a writer. I wrote a paper for him on the Doolittle Raid, and I remember that his feedback was, essentially, "A+. Keep writing, Schmidt. Don’t screw it up by quitting.”
This was high praise from a guy who never exuded feelings (nor did he exude to many “A” grades) and didn’t bother protecting ours. When I was a junior he cautioned another student not to overestimate the velocity of my fastball.
“Is it, like, 85 mph or something?” the student asked him.
“Hell no. Schmidty's lucky if he hits 78 with a tailwind.”
The class laughed around me.
But you know what? Hultberg made me throw smarter, not harder. He also helped me decide to do what I loved regardless of other folks’ estimations of my ability. I’ve made it further with a keyboard than I ever did with a fastball, but that’s what good coaching does for you, isn’t it? It teaches you one thing but makes all the other stuff better along the way.
They clocked me at 93 once in college, coach.
Just FYI.