He was born in 1931 and raised in one of those small, pinched, hardscrabble Midwestern towns so well delineated in the stories of Sherwood Anderson — a town where people tend to remember a native son's failures more than his successes. When Herzog returned to his hometown as a big-league baseball player in the '50s, people would say to him, "Your brother Herman was a better player than you." Herzog would snap back, "Why don't you ask him? He's carrying mail right here in town."So I was in Whitey's old neighborhood visiting a friend from college right after we graduated. It so happened that we were hanging out on Saturday evening at a campground with his friend from high school, his folks and a bunch of people he grew up around. We had a good time drinking and shooting the shit. Finally, at 11:00, he loaded his friend and I in his car to go to the liquor store in town and meet up with his girlfriend. She left work and we drove for a couple of blocks, then my friend got out of his car, went up and talked to her, then came back and told me to have his friend give me directions to his grandma's house where I could crash out until he got done "visiting' with his girlfriend.
New Athens (pronounced Ay-thens), Ill., population 2,100, lies 40 miles east of St. Louis. Sixty years ago, much as it is today, New Athens was a farming and coal-mining town with two lumber mills, strip mines, a foundry, a brewery and 16 bars. Its inhabitants, mostly descendants of German immigrants, were neat, clean, orderly, punctual, hard-working and hard-drinking people who, inexplicably and proudly, referred to themselves as hard-headed Dutchmen. They saw the daily sameness of their lives as comforting, not confining. A day in the mines. Shots and beers on the way home. Checkers on Saturdays at the barbershop. The big Sunday dinner. Laundry on Monday. When Herzog passed through town with a U.S. Army baseball team in 1953, he took his teammates on a tour. He told them who would be sitting where in which bar at what time, and they were. Thirty-four years later, Herzog would write in his autobiography, "White Rat": "And unless they're dead, that's where they are right now."
Herzog is reticent about his parents. He says only that his mother worked hard in a shoe factory and was so fanatically strict about cleanliness that he preferred to stay away from home as long as possible, playing sports and working at the Mound City Brewing Co., where he learned to drink beer like his father. Edgar Herzog worked at the brewery, where he had the distinction of never having missed a day of work. Herzog remembers his father telling him: "Be there early and give them a good day's work, so when it comes time to lay someone off, it'll be the other guy."
I took the wheel of his car, and followed his friend's directions to my roommate's grandma's house. When I got there, I parked the car and started to the door, his friend asked if I wanted to head back to the campground for a while. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I went back out there with him. After way too many beers, I was arguing politics and sports with one of the boss men from the campground (and I was hitting on his wife). He found out I was a Reds fan, and made some snide remark about Pete Rose.
That was game on. I told him that Pete was the best player ever, and when the guy kept giving me shit, I looked at him, and told him that Whitey Herzog was a homosexual. Now most likely, that wasn't the thing to say about Whitey. But somehow, I was able to keep the guy from punching me, and then hanging out with him for a while before my roommate's friend and I had to head back to town. Needless to say, when my roommate and I were sober again, we had a few good stories to tell.
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