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Did you know that an Eskimo star nicknamed "The Walrus" played semi-pro, along with his village of Eskimos? Did you know that Paul Bunyan was brought in as a pitcher and nearly changed the entire game? A grab bag of the poignant and riotous, this collection is a must for baseball fans who want to read some literature-and for literati who want to read some baseball, too.

    Back in the 1930’s and 40’s, when the Charlotte Whips were top dog in the Carolina Triple A League, we had a player on our roster called “The Professor.” Barrett Conley was his real name, but I never heard nobody ever call him that because a kid named Barrett has already got two strikes against him in life and that’s what I think. We called him “The Professor” because he was the only one of the Whips who had ever seen the inside of a college and recognized it for what it was. I mean he was reading all the time, not comic books either, but real heavy stuff like novels, books that didn’t even have no pictures in them. I tried stuff like that once or twice myself, but I don’t see the sense in it, life being what it is. One picture is worth ten thousand words. That’s what Abe Lincoln said. Or Ted Williams. One of those guys. And who’s going to argue with them?
    Anyway Conley hung up his spikes with a .294 lifetime batting average and with a trunk full of stolen bases, and so there he was looking around for something to do, because even with all that education he didn’t know nothing about working, so he goes to Spike Kellings, who was the manager of that Cinderella team, the ’41 Whips, and Spike suggests that The Professor handle the Public Relations side of things. The Professor thinks that over for a while and he says OK, and so Spike puts in a word with the management, and so that’s how it happened that Conley became the Public Relations man for the 1946 Charlotte Whips. It made sense to us because Conley was always studying How To Win Friends and Influence People. He studied that book real good like some folks study the Bible because he always had a lot of friends hanging around him, asking him for tickets to the game or going out with him for drinks. He loaned the book to me once, but it didn’t do me all that good, because I’m not really into reading, and I am really not into Public Relations. The way I look at it, people either like me or they don’t, and if they don’t, they can just lump it.
    During the war years, the Charlotte Whips, like most sports teams, had a pretty rough time because there really weren’t enough good players to go around. Anyone who could walk was called off to War, and the rest of us walking wounded had a difficult time getting hopped up about a ball game when we were thinking about old Adolf getting his. There were even a couple of years in there when the League had to close down all together, and if you don’t think that made some of the owners hopping mad then you don’t know a thing about owners. All the ones that I came in contact with would just as soon trade the silver out of your teeth as would look at you.

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