A Picture is Worth a Book of Words

The Toronto Star, July 20, 2002

I don't remember who sent me the photograph, only that it was a copy of an original from the Toronto Archives. It was back in 1990, a few months after my father died.

It was a black-and-white photo with four teenage boys in the front row, two each seated on either side of a man in a suit - you could tell by the suit it was from a long time ago - and another six boys standing behind them. That was when my jaw dropped, because one of the boys in the back was him .

Here was a photograph taken when my father was all of 15. A shot of the city's champion bantam basketball team of 1934. Imagine that. Never before had I seen a picture of him as a boy.
He was tousle-haired, thick-lipped and floppy-eared. Strangely enough, several boys in that picture had floppy ears. And he was wearing a T-shirt with number 3 on the chest.

I didn't even know he played basketball, but I did know about the baseball. Once, many years ago, he had shown me the blue velvet pouch with his baseball medals from 1930 and 1932. Again, city champions. The medals were there along with an award for four years of "Good conduct, punctuality, regularity and diligence" from the Toronto Public School Board, his World War II dog tag with serial number and "GNR. (for Gunner) L. AMERNIC, HEB. CDN." and other keepsakes.

I recognized one of the boys in the photograph as his friend Shorty, but the others were just faces of Depression-era youngsters. There was little uniformity in their dress. Four had white T-shirts, two with numbers and two without, while another pair had darker shirts, one with a big C on the chest and the other with nothing. The remaining four all had the word "Lizzies" across the front, three of them in the same style of shirt (but only one with a number) and the other in a sweatshirt sporting the same name.

I immediately framed the photograph and put it up on the wall right above my computer, and every day I stared at it because I wanted to get to know these boys. And I did.

Around the time that I obtained the photo, I was reading a biography about Babe Ruth and discovered to my surprise that the famed Bambino hit his very first pro home run in Toronto in 1914. It was the only minor-league home run he ever hit and he did it at an old stadium at Hanlan's Point on the Toronto Islands. A plaque marks the spot today.
And something happened. The faces of those 10 boys from that 1934 photograph started coming to life.

There was my father, Lipsy, which was, in fact, his real nickname when he was a kid, and his buddy Shorty, whom I had met. The others were all strangers to me. But not for long . The big muscular Adonis type at the far end of the back row became Bronzeman. The smug boy with the mischievous grin next to him became Pancake. And there was Jack, alias Bananas, along with Noser, Airbrain, Holler, Slav and Hoodlum.
Where did I get these names? From the way they looked.

Hoodlum, for example, wore a smart-aleck sneer across his face, so he'd be the local tough. Airbrain? He looked like he had just woken up and maybe tried to temper that sleepy demeanour by slicking his hair back with a pre-war version of Brylcream. It didn't work. And what about the coach, the gentleman in the dapper, for then, three-piece suit? He would be the Iceman because of that cold steely visage.

They were called the Lizzies, and the Lizzies were an organization of boys' baseball and basketball teams in Toronto from the first half of the 20th century.

And that's how it happened. The words just came. It would be a novel - about baseball, not basketball - only I would juxtapose the years to incorporate these boys into the life and times of Babe Ruth. Over the next nine months, 454 pages poured out. It was a story about a young boy and his grandfather and the special bond between them.

I called it The Southpaw - a terrible title in hindsight - and showed it to someone in publishing. He loved it, but said it was too long and needed an editor. I got one. We trimmed it down and changed the title to Gift Of The Bambino.

That began a long arduous journey of trying to get a first novel published. No easy feat. One publisher liked it, but said it was too literary. Another one also liked it, but said it was too commercial. A literary agent said it hovered precariously between the two poles and yet another agent said if it wasn't my first novel, he'd represent me.

For a while, I was wondering if I'd be a grandfather myself before my novel ever got published. But this past spring, in a much trimmer version than the original, it was published, with the first copies arriving at the house on the anniversary of my father's death.

The thing is, it's not really my novel at all.

It's his, and if he we re alive today, I know as sure as I'm sitting here that he'd sink those deep blue eyes into the pages and come out smiling.

"I like it," he would say. "You done good."

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe so. But sometimes it can be worth a lot more.