Frankie Hawkins, at 5’4″ and 120 pounds soaking wet was the smallest amongst our band of adolescents. With hair like new-mown hay, blue eyes of winter and freckles from ear to ear, you would expect he would have friends with names Huck and Becky.
Frankie had stepped straight out of a Normal Rockwell painting in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. Being the smallest in the gang at that age meant always playing right field and suffering ragging, usually well-meant. But, Frankie was not only small but a scrapper well beyond his size. He was a scrapper and brooked no teasing. His temper was as short as he was and as big as the world around him. He may not have won all of his scraps, but he won the respect of his friends.
In the early 1940s the small island community of Alameda, next to Oakland in the San Francisco Bay area, was deeply committed to World War II production and home to the Naval Air Station, the adolescents and early teen-agers lived in a Mark Twain world.
Little Frankie and I had every fruit tree in the West End of Alameda scoped and mapped. It was a cornucopia of kumquats, cherries, peaches, apples and oranges, even an avocado tree. After a pickup game of baseball or hoops Frankie and I would ride off on our bikes in search of some sun-kissed sweets.
Or on Saturday afternoon after a City Park Baseball League game most of the team would ride by the Skippy Peanut Butter plant to have our caps filled with freshly roasted hot peanuts. Oh my, the gods were smiling on us. Frankie and I would harvest some of the tree-laden treats and find a shady spot for a feast of fresh peanuts and tasty forbidden fruit.
No television, little time to spare from our recreational activities to listen to big time baseball on the radio, our sports muses were all local. With no major league team west of St. Louis, big time baseball in the Bay Area during and after World War II meant the Pacific Coast League and the Oakland Oaks (1903-1957). At the time the PCL was just a tweak below major league status and we had our heroes, many of them becoming big leaguers and Hall of Famers.
The Oaks nurtured Billy Martin, Casey Stengal, George Metkovich, Vince DiMaggio, Jackie Jensen, Mel Ott, Andy Hexom, Dolph Camilli, Charlie Dressen, Cookie lavagetto and a host of others – most of whom became New York Yankees. Across the bay, the San Francisco Seals (1903-1957) was a gold mine of big league talent led by Vince’s brothers Joe and Dom DiMaggio, slugger Lefty O’Doul, Ferris Fain, Paul Waner and Lefty Gomez.
The Oaks ballpark was a from downtown Oakland up San Pablo Avenue in red trolleys complete with the clang-clang of the brass bell. Like most sports franchises, city lines were blurred and the park was actually just across the city line in Emeryville. The vintage ballpark was right out of “Field of Dreams,” small and intimate holding 10,000, its wooden frame slowly surrendering to old age and public abuse. Frankie and I would pay our 75 cents and grab a seat along the right field line as close to the dugout as we could get. Sometimes, when we were short of cash, we’d wait behind the fences waiting for a homerun ball that would get us in free.
The modern day gigantic parks holding tens of thousand fans are unfriendly and depressing. How many big league teams today have players with names like Nubs Klienke and Cookie Lavagetto?
On warm summer days, with school out, there would be pickup baseball games played in the grassy far corners of the semi-pro baseball park at Washington Park of Alameda‘s West End. Because we could seldom find enough for a full 9-man team on each side, we would devise imaginative rules and positioning of players to overcome this handicap. Frankie loved this setup as it put him in center field.
Although the broken bats and beat up balls were the tools of the game, it was our personal equipment that was treated with love and respect. This was particularly true of the nurturing time we spent on our gloves. Playing first base in regulation games, I was the first to show up with the new Rawlings trapper first base glove. Big and professional grade, I lovingly massaged it daily with Neatsfoot oil, wrapping it around a ball overnight to form its pocket. As each day passed, the new glove gloss slowly turned to a mahogany patina, its stiff leather now soft and flexible.
Summer Sundays would find us populating the fences of the Washington Park ball field where the semi-pro double-header baseball games were held. Our goal was grabbing the foul balls for our pickup games and after the semi-pro games the players would give us their broken bats. Most of them simply needed to have the fractures bound with electrical tape and were (almost) as good as new.
Down the street from Washington Park the Baptist Church had a full-blown gym with a regulation basketball court complete with the shiniest parquet hardwood floor you have ever seen. One of our guys also knew a window with a broken lock and on certain days we would hoist Frankie on our shoulders as he squeezed his way through the window, drop to the floor and open the door for us. We would choose up sides and spend the day glorifying our stumbling and bad shooting in basketball paradise. Some time later we found out the pastor, who lived next door in the parish house, knew full well of our transgressions, but let us play our hearts out as long as we didn’t disrespect the court or his church.
During football season we had our own “outlaw league” of neighborhood teams with its own rules of play and conduct. Most of our ragtag uniforms and equipment came from the Salvation Army, but served us well. Some of our equipment, though, were too important to our performance to accept second best. Our football shoes were always purchased new and supplied with both dry field and rain cleats.
Because the city parks did not allow tackle football, the teams would show up at their allotted park at 7 a.m. before its opening for the day.
What fun it was to watch Frankie play the scatback as his size and scrappy nature made him a slippery and tough competitor. To this day I still remember in wonderment of the hideous hits he took only to get up and trot back to the huddle. Even more awesome were the hits Frankie laid on a runner or receiver, no matter their size.
Our fanaticism for sports, and football in particular, was so deep-seated we spent many a week night playing tackle football on the lighted beach at the edge of Washington Park and San Francisco Bay. Summer vacations were spent playing ping pong for hours on end or just “hanging out” with the guys.
My home was centered in a one-block neighborhood where everyone knew every family. Our parents were the precursor of the “soccer moms,” only our moms and dads played with us. The warm summer evenings the street would be filled with the sounds of kids and adults playing kick the can, hide and seek, or just sitting on the steps and talking of the day, the war, whatever. No one excluded the kids from any of the conversation.
We were a diverse and rag-tag bunch, visually straight out of Norman Rockwell, but personally a complicated combination of characters that populated the pages of Twain, Floyd Salas, JD Salinger, Booth Tarkington and William Golding. I can’t go back to the world of Holden Caulfield without remembering Frankie Hawkins. Long before affirmative action, we constituted an easy-flowing, unconcerned miscellany of colors, backgrounds and ethnicity that seems too difficult to match today.
And, like all constructs of long ago memories, they show brighter than they could have truly been, but nothing can dim the memories of Frankie and me.
Al Auger is a veteran journalist with umpty-umph years as a staffer and now a freelancer specializing in travel, skiing, automotive, jazz and blues. Al writes a weekly automotive column in The Reporter of Vacaville and a monthly travel article in Siliconeer Magazine.
