Johnny Bardelli and The Oregon Coast

I played American Legion baseball 1970-72 for the Kellogg-Wallace Miners. The 1971 team is picture above. I look at this picture andI don't see a lot of joy. I am in the front row, third from the left, and while I don't look miserable, I'm surprised that neither I nor my teammates seem particularly happy. It's not like we have our game faces on, either. We look scrawny, undersized, not very intimidating. We lost a lot of games in the summer of 1971. Coeur d'Alene, Sandpoint, teams from Spokane with names like Banner Fuel and Simchuck's Sporting Goods, Moscow, Missoula, all beat up on us pretty good. I'm thinking that each of us, posing here in the southwest corner of Teeter's Field, the concession stand behind us, looks out on our field of play and is embarrassed that unlike the other places we played, our field has no turf. It's a dirt field. We called it Astro-dirt. What did those Spokane teams think? What did teams touring around North Idaho and Western Montana think, when they came from The Dalles or Lake Oswego or Lake Chelan, and arrived in Kellogg? The air, even if it was clear, always held at least the aftertaste of sulfur dioxide. The hillsides were scrubby, tiny pines stunted. Most of the hillside was bare. Did these teams look at the Coeur d'Alene River, grey with pollution, and wonder about our lives in this Valley? Did they laugh? Were they frightened? I've never known what they thought.

These thoughts jumped around in my head two days ago while I was at Haceta Beach on the Oregon Coast with my dog, Snug. I thought back to 1970, my first season playing American Legion. The previous year, Kellogg-Wallace had a stellar team, but Valley legends like Danny Carrico and Grant Julefs and Al Fulton had graduated from high school and we weren't nearly as strong a team as they'd been. Our coach was a firey man, Johnny Bardelli. Bardelli loved an aggressive style of baseball. He loved well-conditioned players who could take an extra base on a ball hit to the outfield, loved hit and runs, stolen bases, strong defense, and, above all, alertness. For Johnny, baseball was about getting an edge. He loved to pick at our opponents, bait them, and, if he had to, he'd punch someone out, an opposing coach, a parent, anyone.

Johnny was a high school English teacher. It was on his recommendation that I read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" that summer. He was a Wallace native, but had left the Valley to teach in Astoria, Oregon. Consequently, when we gathered for preseason training, Johnny wasn't back from his job yet and his brother, Fred, guided our team. We won some games with Fred and then won some games when Johnny returned. But somewhere, things went sour. Maybe if I think more about it, I'll figure it out.

Here's what I know. Johnny had put together an ambitious schedule of games for our team. Because several players, Jim Byrd, Starr Kelso, Rick Gilles, and others were returning from the terrific team the year before, Johnny thought we'd be pretty good, too. So he scheduled a road trip to Oregon and southern Washington. We travelled to The Dalles, Yakima, Lake Oswego, and ended our trip in Astoria. We lost every single game on this trip. Every game. It was a disaster.

But, when we travelled to Astoria, we took a trip to Seaside, then a small, unassuming town, and I saw the ocean for the first time. I wasn't prepared for its grandeur. I gawked. The sounds of the waves bellowing from what seemed like miles out silenced me. While Jimmy Byrd scraped out a confession of love for Natalie Wood in wet sand, I tried to take in the ocean. I never wanted to forget it. Later, while in graduate school, I would read Moby Dick where Herman Melville refers to the ocean as a wilderness and I know now that that's what I experienced at Seaside. I was looking out at a wild, untamed, howling, powerful, humbling wilderness. I felt the same way watching Snug gallop after seagulls and splash his way a few yards into the tide.

Johnny Bardelli was a self-righteous man. He was one of those coaches who lectured us about the value sports had to help us deal with life outside the fields of play. He also hated to lose. When we returned to Kellogg/Wallace, one of the American Legion officers gathered our team in the stands at Teeter's Field and announced that Johnny had quit as our coach. He also announced that the trip scheduled for Montana where we were going to play Missoula, Helena, Great Falls, and Butte/Anaconda was cancelled. Self-righteous Johnny, as I remember it, didn't have the decency to face us. He couldn't tell us the truth. He never said: "I'm too impatient and proud and front-running of a coach to shepherd through a tough year. I'd rather quit on you than suffer with you." He just disappeared.

I was never serious about baseball or any other athletics again. I played. But, mostly I played the part of a clown, doing anything for laughs and mocking myself for being a crappy player. Before Johnny Bardelli quit, I'd had dreams of being on a great team and learning how to play scrappy, agressive, hard-nosed baseball. With his departure, those dreams vanished, but not the Oregon Coast or the Pacific Ocean. It has remained a powerful source of constancy and an embodiment of eternity in my life ever since. Not so, Johnny Bardelli. He quit.