This entry started out with:
“So is this entry about my problematic name, or my cheapskate proclivities?
“With a side trip into What My Father Taught Me?”
I’ll get to that, in another post. Somehow a reverie about my legal name change in 1978 veered to some deep-seated memories from a few years before that, in Albany, Oregon, when I was 15 or 16. The Linger Longer Tavern, mentioned below, truly does figure in the 1978 memory, which led to those from a few years before that. Memory is a driverless car that goes only in reverse …
The launch point was at a recent family gathering where we somehow got onto the topic when a sister-in-law mentioned her husband’s college-days digs as “a dive-bar house.” It’s an intriguing concept, a dive-bar house, one I leave to other scribes (for now) to explore. But that led to “every town has a dive bar” and another family member cited the Linger Longer.
I was always intrigued by the Linger Longer as a kid. We’d moved to Albany in 1972 when I was entering the ninth grade, and a year later I had a summer job with city parks keeping score of rec league softball games.
Memories took their turns like batters at the plate ... it was at a softball game I saw someone drunk for the first time. It was on a weekday at about 4 p.m. and I remember thinking, “who gets drunk on a Thursday afternoon?” (I was 15.) The guy just kind of showed up and staggered onto the diamond yelling at the batter, “SMACK that son-of-a-bitch!” and the umpire gently directed him off the field.
To get to the softball fields at Bryant Park I would ride my bike from our suburban neighborhood on the south side of town through the older areas of the north side of Albany, and past the Linger Longer.
I always thought the tavern name was funny (within about seven years I was experienced at lingering long in taverns) and the place had this air of mystery to it.
To me it still does, and the Linger Longer still has windows, and looks about the same as it did.
Which brings to mind – well, something does – a second hallmark moment, back to 1974 or so and the scorekeeping thing: we rec-league scorekeepers were also hired to do weekend tournaments. So summers meant plenty of weeknight games, weekend games, day games and night games. All four fields were fully lit and the tournaments would start Thursdays and go through to Sundays.
I recall the annual “Turkey Tournament” where someone thought it a fun idea to award each player on the winning team with a live turkey. There in the infield these guys were handed live birds. It was not pretty. PETA was nowhere in sight.
Another memory, and an odd one: the Bryant Park fields are set down in a kind of riverside basin (they flooded every year) and to get there you had to drive a quarter mile from the entrance, down a winding road that looped through the flat area of the softball diamonds. It was all shielded and surrounded by trees.
One day, during a tournament, a car horn could be heard, faintly, way up at the entrance, and it kept sounding, unbroken, louder and louder. A car was coming down the park road and its horn was apparently stuck. The sustained honk got closer, and louder, and soon it was really distracting to players and everyone else, and then we could see the source, a car cruising slowly through the park, a guy at the wheel and alone, arm out the window, casually surveying the scene like so many cruisers rolling slowly through the park.
People did it all the time during the games: creeping past at 5mph, but this guy’s horn was stuck and he looked as if he either did not hear it or did not care. The horn kept sounding, one long drone, and as the car came next to the fields all play stopped and everyone turned to look. Guy at the wheel looks neither right nor left, but slowly cruises past, takes a left at the last field and turns toward the park exit, the horn getting gradually quieter and then the car is out of sight and heading out of the park, horn still sounding, until we could hear it no more. When he was finally out of sight everyone just kind of looked at each other, the ump calls “play ball,” and everything continues. Time seemed to stop for about two minutes. It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.
In the mid-1970s Albany seemed to be a softball hotbed: we kept score for multiple divisions, four for men and two or three for women (no such thing as co-ed) as well as two church league divisions. I observed that summer two truths about church league teams: the pastor is the one most likely to chew out the umps and even swear, and The Preacher is Always the Pitcher. Every church league team: the guy at the pulpit on Sunday morning was the one on the mound on Thursday evening.
One part of the scorekeeping job I did not like was when my game was the last one finished for the night. Everyone had packed up and gone home and when ours was over the players all left and it was up to me to pull up the bases, and put them in a cabinet where the field lights were, turn off the field lights and lock up the equipment and the switch box. Then it was completely dark – no street lights or anything else. I’d then get on my bike and pedal, alone, out the dark road out of the park. I was 15 or 16 and in charge of closing things up in the city park. (Did I have sense enough to bring a flashlight? Of course not. Nor bicycle light: a policeman pulled me over one night on the way home.)
As a kid I was always prone to be scared of the dark, and there I was, alone in a big wooded park, not a soul around. It would take me all of a minute to ride back out to streetlights and civilization, but this was an unnerving experience; I was always grateful when two games got over at the same time so I had a buddy to lock up with and exit.
In any event, the Winchell’s donut shop was on the way home and usually open late and I had that stop to look forward to.
Getting paid by the tournament sponsors was what you might call ad hoc – usually a couple of 10s for a long Saturday’s work paid out next to the dugout. One local business sponsored two or three tournaments a summer and one time that involved going to this particular establishment the next day in order to get paid: The Adult Store, Albany’s porn shop. My friend Pat and I rode there together that day, not fully sure what to expect. We had been told to just come upstairs to the office. We did not go into the store itself, though we passed by the connecting door as we went up the stairwell filled with all kinds of eye-opening images.
The Adult Store is long-gone, but not the Linger Longer. It’s not far from Calapooia Brewing, a brewpub that is a particular favorite of mine, and those rare times we visit usually take us past the Linger Longer. It is still not the kind of place either of my parents would have ever visited, though that is not a knock on the Linger Longer. There are reasons taverns keep going 50 years later. It always looked clean on the outside and had few gaudy neon signs, just its own wooden one, and while it looked dark inside at least it had windows. I would forge a kind of principle at a young drinking age: avoid bars with no windows. So I expect I will be paying a visit sometime. – N.R.
You can't throw a chair or a cue ball through a wall.
Good story. Now I (partly?) know why you like baseball. Seems times have changed a lot from when a kid was left to close up the ball park.
Excellent opening line: "Memories took their turns like batters at the plate