It's cold outside as I walk into Stoby's in Conway to meet Robert Reising for lunch. It's the kind of day that causes baseball fans like Reising and me to dream of summer.
One of the nation's foremost baseball historians has called Arkansas home since 2010. That was the year Reising came out of retirement a second time to help run the academic success program at the University of Central Arkansas.
"We did research on the effectiveness of tutoring, and I also worked with the athletes," says the 88-year-old Reising, who later retired a third time but has continued to write about baseball.
The man known by fellow researchers as Dr. Bob is a Connecticut native who was recruited to Michigan State University to play baseball. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1955.
"It wasn't on the field where I found my greatest success," Reising says. "It has been 70 years, but I can still remember the teachers and mentors who made an impact on my life as a writer and academic. I returned to Michigan State as a part-time instructor from 1958-60 as I worked on my doctorate in English. I returned again as a visiting scholar during the fall semesters of 2003 and 2004."
Reising, who's wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers cap at lunch, was a catcher on a Spartan team that finished third in the College World Series. His father, who also had played baseball, had only an eighth-grade education, but Reising says he had a lifetime commitment to reading and writing that was passed on to the son.
After obtaining his bachelor's degree, Reising went back to Connecticut to teach in the public schools at New Haven. He later taught English at the University of Connecticut while earning his master's degree. His doctoral dissertation was on the literature of sports.
Reising was a mentor to hundreds of aspiring writers during his teaching career while also serving as head baseball coach at Duke University, Furman University and the University of South Carolina. At South Carolina, he coached the late Dan Reeves during Reeves' lone season of college baseball in 1964.
"Dan was my regular right fielder and a fascinating fellow," Reising says of Reeves, who was head coach of the NFL's Denver Broncos from 1981-92, the New York Giants from 1993-96 and the Atlanta Falcons from 1997-2003.
Jim Yeager, a fellow baseball historian and former head women's basketball coach at Arkansas Tech University, says of Reising: "I don't think we've taken as much advantage of him living in Arkansas as we should. Dr. Bob helped write the definitive work on 'Moonlight' Graham's life. He has lived a baseball life, but like Archibald Graham, his story goes far beyond the game."
Reising spent much of his teaching career at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where he landed in 1971. He received a grant to prepare an introductory course in Native American literature. By the end of the decade, he had developed a second course titled "The Native American Literary Renaissance" and published "Jim Thorpe: Tar Heel" on the famous Native American athlete's two summers of baseball (1909-10) in North Carolina.
Reising later teamed up with Thorpe's great-grandson to write "Between Warring Worlds: Jim Thorpe, the Rest of the Story." Reising is recognized as the top authority on Thorpe's life.
In 2003, sports columnist Brett Friedlander of the Wilmington Star-News approached Reising to ask for help on a book about Archibald "Moonlight" Graham. The result was "Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams' Doc Graham," which was published in 2009.
Graham played in the major leagues for only two innings on June 29, 1905. About 2,000 people were at Brooklyn's Washington Park that day. No balls were hit his direction, and he never got to bat. Graham was in the on-deck circle when the game ended. A week later, he was sent down to a minor league club in Scranton, Pa.
Graham, however, was immortalized in W.P. Kinsella's 1982 novel "Shoeless Joe" and the 1989 film "Field of Dreams" that was based on the novel. A film crew came from Japan to create a documentary about Graham. He was the inspiration for a foundation that awards college scholarships. On June 29, 2005, more than 24,000 people gathered in Minneapolis to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his game in the majors.
Graham grew up in North Carolina. Rev. Billy Graham was a distant cousin. During his minor-league career, "Moonlight" moonlighted as a medical student. He earned a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and spent more than four decades as a doctor in Chisholm, Minn., a mining town near the Canadian border.
"On trips to Minnesota to do research, I met people who had been treated by Graham," Reising says. "He was kind of the father of sports medicine. He would travel with sports teams on the road. He had no kids of his own, but he loved the kids on those teams."
In "Shoeless Joe," Kinsella describes a doctor who quits baseball in order to serve a remote mining community. Actors Kevin Costner and Burt Lancaster (who played Graham in "Field of Dreams") were fascinated by his story as they prepared for the movie.
The dust jacket for "Chasing Moonlight" reads: "Kinsella rescued Moonlight Graham from the scrap heap. 'Field of Dreams' made him famous. Now, 'Chasing Moonlight' establishes him as a man. The good doctor would be pleased."
In the movie, Lancaster's character is told it's a tragedy to leave baseball after "just five minutes" in the majors. Lancaster replies: "If I had only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy."
Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.