The man was Arkansas' own Bill Veeck--not just the general manager of a baseball club but promoter, crowd-pleaser, everybody's buddy but nobody's toady. Only he managed a team in the minor leagues, and not just any minor league but the classic Texas League, where baseball is still baseball instead of an overpriced Broadway production that lost contact with the real America long ago.
For years--31 of them--Bill Valentine bestrode old Ray Winder Field like a rotund Colossus in suspenders, a smiling Buddha of good cheer, homespun wit-and-wisdom, and whatever else it took to pull in We the People, and pulled in we were. Not just by the greatest game on dirt but midget rasslers, clunker cars, kids not just allowed but encouraged to run around the base paths between innings, and enough eccentric attractions to fill up a carnival side show--including Captain Dynamite, the poor fellow who regularly blew himself up at second base.
Lest we forget, this was the same Bill Valentine who brooked no nonsense from front-office types or local investors who tried to tell him how to run his team, and there was never any doubt that the Travs were his team. Just as when he was an American League umpire for five years, he didn't hesitate to throw the likes of Earl Weaver and Mickey Mantle out of a game when they got a little too big for their star britches. Attendance swelled during his reign at Ray Winder even as the old field crumbled underneath him and crowds of ever-loyal and ever more numerous fans.
No, maybe it wasn't pure baseball but it was pure Americana, just as Bill Valentine was. And he stuck around to supervise the Travs' move across the river to their still new little jewel box of a baseball park in North Little Rock, crowning his years of keeping the past alive by shaping the future. There was just no telling what Mister Bill would pull out of his Travelers' baseball cap next.
We loved Bill Valentine (who wouldn't, even those he put in their place?) and will miss him. No, we can't say there was no one like him. On the contrary, he represented a whole American type. Here's hoping that type goes on and on, like America itself.
Editorial on 04/29/2015