RIVER VALLEY and OZARK AREA — Robert Reising of Conway is an authority on Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century, but Reising spent six years co-authoring a book about a man whose entire major league career amounted to a single line of fine print in the Baseball Encyclopedia.
That line covers both innings played in June 1905 by Archibald “Moonlight” Graham of the New York Giants. It also inspired W.P. Kinsella to create a secondary character called “Doc” Graham in his novel Shoeless Joe, the basis for the 1989 film Field of Dreams.
Reising, a former college catcher and head coach, wrote Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams’ Doc Graham with Brett Friedlander, a sportswriter living in North Carolina. The two of them hatched the idea to write the true story of Graham’s life and career at a banquet honoring Thorpe in 2003.
“I was at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke for an event marking the 50th anniversary of Thorpe’s death,” Reising said in his office at the University of Central Arkansas. “Brett, who covered sports for The Fayetteville [N.C.] Observer, was there, and he asked if I knew about the other major league player associated with Fayetteville, Moonlight Graham.”
Reising, having seen Field of Dreams, had indeed heard of Graham. Millions of moviegoers also know the story of the part-time medical student who made it to “the bigs” but never got to bat. Not long after that June day, Graham was sent back to the minors — the dustbin of sports history. Decades later, Kinsella ran across Graham’s nickname (“Hollywood couldn’t have made up a better name than Moonlight,” Reising said) and batting average (.000) in the Encyclopedia, and Graham — years after his death — escaped the dustbin.
Because Graham was born in Fayetteville, N.C., (the same city where Thorpe played professional ball in 1910), Friedlander, at Reising’s suggestion, published an article about him in The Observer. Reising liked the story so much he encouraged Friedlander to write a book.
“He’s a newspaper guy, used to writing against a deadline,” Reising said. “He told me he didn’t know the first thing about writing a book. I’d already written a couple of books on Thorpe and a dissertation on sports literature, so I suggested we team up.”
The two embarked on a years-long “chase” of Moonlight’s career, following the young player “from the sunny South,” as Reising put it, to a small town not far from the Canadian border — Chisholm, Minn.
“We wanted to find out why Graham would go to a town like Chisholm and live there the rest of his life,” Reising said.
Graham became the school doctor and treated most of Chisholm’s residents for 44 years. He died in 1965.
“We made three trips to Chisholm,” Friedlander said by phone from Wilmington, N.C. “Every time, it was just like stepping into the movie.”
He and Reising interviewed dozens of Chisholm residents who were Graham’s patients as children.
“It didn’t take much to get people talking,” Reising said. “No one in Chisholm knew what he’d done in baseball. He was reluctant to talk about it.”
“Anybody in town over the age of 40 had a Doc Graham story,” Friedlander said. “Doc had become a legend, and some stories had grown exponentially.”
One legend the two checked out was the claim that Kinsella had first come to Chisholm to research Graham with none other than reclusive novelist J.D. Salinger, who was a character in Shoeless Joe. (In the movie, James Earl Jones plays a Salingeresque character named Terrence Mann.)
“Veda Ponikvar will swear to you like it happened yesterday that Kinsella and Salinger showed up in town looking like the Blues Brothers,” Friedlander said. “We showed her a picture of Salinger, and Veda said, ‘That’s him.’ I called Kinsella to ask him about it, and he laughed and said he brought his wife.”
Separating fact from fiction, and presenting a clear picture of Graham’s life, was the goal of Reising and Friedlander in Chasing Moonlight.
“Graham had his idiosyncrasies,” Reising said, “but most who knew him in Chisholm loved him. They remembered him as a truly compassionate, generous person. As a medical doctor, he was unequaled in terms of kindness and service. His life showed that one can experience painful disappointment — and I can’t help but think Graham was [disappointed] by his major league career — but still be helpful to mankind.”
Though he lived and died in Chisholm, Graham was buried in Rochester, Minn., beside his beloved wife. Reising described the gravesite as a “place of worship” for fans of Field of Dreams. Fred Worth, a member of the Society of American Baseball Players, visits the graves of major league baseball players around the country. He said it is not uncommon for visitors to leave mementos at graves.
“A friend of mine left a note at Babe Ruth’s grave,” Worth said. “A few months later, he found his note on display at the Babe Ruth museum in Baltimore.”
Worth said Graham’s single-game status in the major leagues is “unusual but not unheard of. There have been at least 127 such players. There are some with even shorter careers. I’ll catch myself thinking, ‘He must not have been very good,’ but then realize, ‘He played one more major league game than I ever did.’ Anyone who made it [to the majors] is worth remembering.”
After its authors spent years writing, researching and editing the book, Chasing Moonlight came out in hardcover in 2009 and has seen two printings. It was a 2009 CASEY Award Finalist for Best Baseball Book of the Year and won three other national awards. The biography will come out in paperback next month, and Reising already has a number of signings planned.
“I’d like to do a film script of this book,” Reising said, “and I’m still planning a third book on Thorpe. I’ve always liked books. Sports and books. If I ever write an autobiography, it will probably be titled ‘Books & Balls’. That’s all I know.”