`They don’t use those anymore,” said Paul Dickson as he was handed an old, wooden softball bat and asked to take a few swings for the camera. It was a bright, windy spring day when Dickson, the author of “The Worth Book of Softball,” just published by Facts on File, took to the northwest softball diamond in Grant Park. “If they see me with that bat, they’ll think I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
That would be serious, given the huge investment in the $22.95 book by the sporting goods company Worth Inc. of Tullahoma, Tenn., in exchange for its name in the title. The Worth money took Dickson and photographer Russell Mott all over the nation. Mott alone went farther, even flying to Cairo in his pursuit of the 10,000 photographs he and the editors would winnow to 120 for publication (together with 60 historical photos).
It would be especially serious were Dickson to strike out in Chicago, the city where in 1887 softball was born.
Unlike baseball, whose purported invention by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., has been reduced to myth, there is no dispute about the origin of softball. It was late in the cold afternoon on Thanksgiving Day that about 20 young men had gathered in the gymnasium of the Farragut Boat Club at the edge of Lake Michigan in the 3000 block of Lake Park Avenue on the South Side, where Michael Reese Hospital now stands, to read telegraphed reports from the Harvard-Yale football game back East. (Commercial radio broadcasts would not begin for another 32 years.)
According to Dickson, “When the final score was announced-Yale 17, Harvard 8-bets were paid off and, as one historian of the moment put it, `Animal spirits came to fore. Horseplay was rampant.’ “
At one moment during all that, one of the Yale boosters tossed a stray boxing glove at one of the Harvard fans, who saw it coming, grabbed a pole and whacked it back across the room over the pitcher’s head, Dickson said.
That gave one of the horseplayers, George Hancock, who worked at the Board of Trade, an idea. “Let’s play ball,” he said, and bound the glove in its own laces to resemble a ball, then chalked a diamond on the gymnasium floor. A broom sacrificed its handle to provide a bat. “They really started something,” Dickson said. “And they kept it going. They even went out and copyrighted the rules.”
Soon the game was being played all over the city, “not only in gyms but also in lodge halls and even in dancing halls,” Dickson said. “It got to be this huge thing, where they were using major-league players in Chicago during the off-season.
“Hancock was Mr. Indoor Ball-that’s what they called the game-for years to come.” He kept records and wrote about the game in official softball guides that were published well into the 20th Century.
Perhaps having established himself as knowledgeable in at least the eyes of his immediate companions, Dickson agreed to wield the wooden bat after all. Besides, as he likes to say in advising aspiring authors about dealing with book publishers, newspapers and magazines, “Always be kind to people who buy ink by the barrel.”
“The new bats are really amazing,” he said of the aluminum and graphite bats now used in the game. “When they hit the ball, it puts a dent in them, which in turn springs back and acts like a catapult, so you really get some power into the swing.”
Dickson, who stands 6 feet 3 inches and weighs 230 pounds, looks like a power hitter anyway. He added to that impression by assuming a classic Babe Ruth stance. He’s also expert on baseball, having propounded “The Dickson Baseball Dictionary,” “Baseball’s Greatest Quotations” and, with William Meade, “Baseball: The President’s Game.” He’s working on yet another baseball book called “The Joy of Scoring.”
Just then the rattle of a low-flying kite turned his head. Didn’t Dickson also write a book about kites? “Yes,” he said, ” `The Mature Person’s Guide to Kites, Yo-Yos and Other Childlike Diversions.’ “
Seasonal solution
Departing the softball diamond, Dickson noted that the invention of softball filled the need for something athletes could do indoors between the football and baseball seasons (it is only recently that the two seasons last so long that they nearly overlap).
Elsewhere, for that reason, basketball was invented four years later by a coach at the School for Christian Workers (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Mass., named James Naismith.
“The guys he coached played football and baseball,” Dickson said. “They were real jocks who had nothing to do in the winter, so Naismith was asked by the president to find something for these energetic guys who were creating disciplinary problems. Naismith started by hanging peach baskets in the gym.” Soccer balls became the first basketballs.
“At Holyoke, down the road,” Dickson went on, “they were looking for a game for businessmen that wasn’t violent, so they invented volleyball. Then somebody invented steel skates, and hockey took off. So you had this period of burgeoning recreation. Before that, what you did in a gym was calisthenics with Indian clubs.”
43 million can’t be wrong
Settled in a booth at Riccardo’s for lunch, Dickson added to his recollections of softball’s growth in Chicago, noting, “I found a WPA (the federal Works Progress Administration) thing from the Park District on how to build a field. The New Deal social planners used softball as an instrument of social policy, because you could build a field for almost nothing. So it’s the middle of the Depression and they’ve got recreation.
“What really got me interested was not the sport itself so much as the fact that nearly 43 million people play the game (thus the book’s subtitle, “The Real American Pastime”) and that the last book on softball of any substance was written by Lowell Thomas. And I kept finding all this great stuff, like bribery.
“In the early days, where they would bribe players to jump leagues. And ringers have always been part of the game. (President Franklin D.) Roosevelt’s team used to play Lowell Thomas’ team, and Roosevelt would bring in some special Secret Service guy who could really play. Jimmy Carter had ringers. He would bring in somebody like Georgia’s state champion.” And out in the Hamptons, on Long Island, N.Y., the George Plimpton types would get some unbelievably fast woman pitcher, dress her up like an editor from Doubleday and bring her into the game.
(The gloveless, 16-inch variety of softball became a Chicago institution in 1934 with the formation of the Windy City Softball League. A year earlier, the first 16-inch national tournament was held before 70,000 fans at Soldier Field.)
Although Dickson did mention at one point that he plays golf, his principal recreation appears to be writing. His business card reads, “Paul Dickson, freelance writer. Practice limited to subjects of interest.”
That limited practice has since 1968 produced 28 books on a diversity of topics that ranges from “Think Tanks” (his first book) to “Chow: A Cook’s Tour of Military Food,” from “Out of This World: American Space Photography” to “The Library in America,” from “Toasts” to “There Are Alligators in Our Sewers & Other American Credos,” from “No Two Snowflakes Are Alike” to “The Electronic Battlefield.”
A way with words
Perhaps his best-known book was “The Official Rules,” published in 1978 and followed by two sequels, “The Official Explanations” (1980) and “The New Official Rules” (1989). The series took Murphy’s Law-“If anything can go wrong, it will”-and ran up thousands of variations, corollaries, addendums, adjustments, tenets, doctrines, principles, postulates, maxims and advisories. “It’s a form of humor that’s indigenous to the late 20th Century where people make up these mock-scientific rules,” Dickson said.
To start his collection and keep it going, Dickson created the Murphy Center for the Codification of Human and Organizational Law, naming himself director. The center began as a shoe box and a set of alphabetical dividers in Dickson’s office in Garrett Park, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1976.
“The Official Rules” was never on the best-seller lists because it took off slowly, eventually reaching 80,000 hardcover and “a couple of hundred thousand” paperback copies, more than enough to place it high on the non-fiction lists had it achieved those figures in weeks instead of years. “In the book business,” contrary to Aesop’s Teaching, “the tortoise seldom beats the hare,” Dickson said.
Dickson says he’s ready to combine the three books into an encyclopedic edition, to which he has another several more shoe boxes full of additions. “I still get a letter a week with new rules.
“I saw another one the other day,” Dickson said, “Any sentence that starts with `No pun intended’ has an intentional pun.” Another is “Any sentence that begins, `Not to change the subject’ intentionally changes the subject.”
Language is Dickson’s passion, and the topic about which he’s written the most books. Besides those already noted, they include “Slang,” “Words,” “Family Words,” “What Do You Call a Person From . . .,” “Names” and “The Congress Dictionary” (with Paul Clancy).
Touching all the bases
New York Times political columnist and language maven William Safire invited Dickson to take part in a series of Library of Congress speeches, asking that Dickson speak on inside-the-beltway lingo, a topic one might have expected Safire to reserve for himself.
“I was really honored,” said Dickson, who already was impressed with Safire, having noted in his review of Safire’s book “Wisdom,” he said, that “any man who writes a book on wisdom and quotes his mother at length has got to be respected.”
It is no surprise, then, that Dickson’s “The Worth Book of Softball” contains a 40-page glossary, from “aboard”-a player on base is said to be aboard-to “zone”: (1) Over the Line slang for one’s mind set when hitting well, (2) A pitcher’s good area: the area or zone where his or her delivery is most effective.”
“Over the Line”? That’s a “three-player game that, depending on who you talk to, is either a form of softball or a cousin to it . . . created on the beaches of San Diego in 1954 by a group killing time waiting for a volleyball court.”
At the moment, the prolific Dickson is competing with himself. His “War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases From the Cold War to the Gulf War,” a Pocket Books hardcover, was published within days of “The Worth Book of Softball.”
That figures. He worked on them simultaneously and discovered as he researched them that World War I helped spread the game of softball, because many variations on the Chicago game were played in the camps. In World War II, he found, softball was the favorite sport of American’s fighting men, and, back on the home front, professional women’s softball teams flourished.
