One of my earliest childhood memories is of the first time I was ever sent away to summer camp. It was June 1970 and I was just ten years old and was driven to and then dropped off at the Chandler Baseball Camp in the budding metropolis of Chandler, Oklahoma … where about all you can do is play baseball. They had a camp there that apparently closed for good in 1995 after opening in 1958, but it had a glorious 37-year run of producing many outstanding baseball players including even a few major leaguers of which all of us dreamed of becoming. It was there that I hit my first true home run to left field on a screaming line drive that was lashed so hard it actually broke off the top of the picket fence as it left the yard. It was also the first time I had ever played baseball on fields that actually had an outfield wall. Prior to that I had always played on playgrounds with just a backstop, three bases and a home plate, and you either had to crush the ball so far that the outfielders had to run for days to retrieve it or be so blazingly fast running the bases that you could outrun the speed of the thrown baseball. Well, I was never a guy who could really do either of those things, so I mostly hit doubles and triples … a lot of doubles and a nice number of triples, but never really a true home run that did not feature a mixture of one or more errors on the defense. But not on this day … and I still remember what my coach Red Dog had written on my end of camp report card to my parents … “Steve hits with good power!” It felt so good to actually read that as a budding young baseball player with his whole future ahead of him … but I digress, because in reality, I did not actually sit down to write stories of my prowess on the baseball diamond.
You can probably surmise that my future did not include stops at any of Major League Baseball’s Thirty Glorious Ball Parks as a big league player. No, just those as a fan with a Bucket List of dreams of visiting every big league park at least once in person during my life time. And sadly, so far they seem to be razing these stadiums faster than I can get out to visit them. No, this is a story much grander and much more terrifying than that of simply playing baseball every day, and one could never compare the glory of the Chandler Baseball Camp to the absolute majesty and splendor of the Cooperstown Dreams Park in Cooperstown, New York, a place my son Andrew and I got to call home for two glorious weeks split between July 2007 and July 2008. These two camps are as different as the night is from the day. And while the daytimes and even the evenings at the Cooperstown Dreams Park are magnificent in so many ways, not even considering the National Baseball Hall of Fame is just right up the road in Cooperstown proper, the nights actually belong to the Chandler Baseball Camp in unbelievably horrifying ways.
This story goes that back to the summer of 1961 [or was it 1962? No one ever seems to know these things with certainty … and memories can most assuredly get a little foggy with the passing of fifty years] but there was a young boy named Johnny who was a twelve or thirteen year old camper at the park back then. He was a pitcher but they would use pitching machines to help with batting practice because we basically practiced baseball all day from 9 am to 12 noon and then again from 1 pm to 4:30 pm and had basically an hour to eat dinner in the chow hall and then get dressed out for that night’s game against some all-star team from some small or large town in either Kansas or Oklahoma that would roll in for the 7 pm first pitches. The night games were most certainly a spectacle as we would don those glorious pin-striped uniforms that looked all the world like the New York Yankees home uniforms except for interlocked NY being replaced with a capital C. Each Chandler team would charge on to the game fields simultaneously as thunder bomb fireworks both lit up the skies with fire and blasted them with sound, quickly followed by piped in Stars & Stripes Forever music playing on all the loudspeakers scattered throughout the park. This was the big time for a ten year old little boy, but was a pretty big deal even for junior high schoolers and high schoolers as well, as their stadiums were bigger, seated more people and of course the fields were much larger as well. This is where both Oklahoma’s and Kansas’ best baseball teams came to lose and lose they usually did, as those Chandler teams were both well-coached and hard to beat. And maybe the umpires helped us out a bit as well … who’s to say? But this is not a story about those nights either.
No … this is a story of both mystery and mayhem that occurred during every camp, usually during it’s last week. As I recall our camp sessions lasted three weeks and this night was usually somewhere around either Wednesday or maybe Thursday of the last week, and occurred a few hours after last out was made in the last baseball game of the night. This is a story about Johnny. A funny yet terrible thing happened to Johnny during that Summer of 1961 [or was it 1962?]. Did I mention that Johnny was a pitcher? Yes and a very, very good pitcher from the tales I was told, and his job that afternoon was to field his position as the pitcher and feed baseballs into the pitching machine while the rest of the campers played a game called “Work Up” where basically every camper took turns playing each defensive position on the field while he “worked his way up” to being the hitter. Every time a hitter made an out he had to go out to right field [position #9 in your scorebook] and then work his way back up to being the hitter again by getting each successive batter out. And every time an out was made the ball was slowly rolled back toward Johnny on the ground beside the pitching machine. This day, however, was not to be Johnny’s day.
Sadly, Johnny both made a terrible mistake and he was the victim of awful timing as he reached down to pick up a baseball lying just in front of the pitching arm of the machine just as the arm came firing downwards with a fast ball. If you’ve ever seen these machines they have a vertical piece of metal shaped kind of like a rounded arrowhead protruding downwards from the metal cradle that the baseball rests on as it is pitched which is located at the business end of said pitching arm. And it just so happened that through either fate or the worst of timing that metal arm came crashing down just as Johnny’s right arm [his pitching arm no less] was outstretched reaching for said baseball. There was this awful sound of ripping human flesh and sinew, crushing bone and the ear-splitting shrieking of Johnny screaming in agony. Copious amounts of blood were now spurting from his shoulder both onto the pitcher’s mound and well as soaking his Chandler Baseball Camp t-shirt … and his now severed arm lay just beneath the pitching machine.
And then the most awful thing happened … his teammates began to laugh at and mock Johnny … some even called him “Johnny The One Arm” … and no one rushed to his aid save for his coach who couldn’t make it out of the dugout quickly enough. For a moment in time that seemed like forever, Johnny stood there frozen in horror, fear and agony only to be humiliated by those he thought to be his friends. Some said Johnny was cocky, conceited, stuck on himself, not a team player, many a thing like that. Some even said that “he had it coming” that it was “karma,” or “schadenfreude,” etc. But there were things about Johnny that everyone did agree on … he was the best player at his age level and perhaps even in the entire camp, he was the fastest runner on his team and many thought he had major league potential. And in the blink of an eye, all that seemed gone forever with a single pitch. Then things got crazy in a hurry … just as time had seemingly come to a complete stand still for that ever-lingering moment, it then sped right back up and abruptly went into overdrive. Instead of Johnny waiting for his coach’s help, he took off like the wind into the woods behind that field … never to be seen again as the young boy he was at the time. And he left his severed arm right there on the pitcher’s mound for the staff and the emergency personnel to deal with.
An ambulance and the police were called but no one could find Johnny. I am told that bloodhounds were even deployed and there was certainly a bloody trail to follow, but then … nothing! It was like he had completely vanished into the wind. They expected to find a young dead boy’s body in those woods in the coming days but no body was ever recovered. And then strange things started happening around the camp beginning the next summer and they became progressively more frequent and more disturbing with each passing year. A couple of years later the metal frame of an old barber’s chair mysteriously appeared right at the edge of those same woods that Johnny disappeared into two or three years before, and in the seat of that chair rested the skull of a cow. Camp officials began to worry that the camp had become haunted with the ghost of Johnny! Then different camp items began to mysteriously disappear from the camp at night only to sometimes be found out in those woods or, even creepier, on that same mysterious barber’s chair. Then people started seeing Johnny at the outfield walls during night games … he only came out at night … but he would always outrun the camp personnel back into the woods and could never be found. He never said anything either. Most people just chalked these tales up as ghost stories with no basis in truth, but over time, so many unexplained things kept occurring that people soon ran out of coincidences with which to assign them. Could Johnny have really survived that trauma? Is he now a ghost doomed to haunt the camp forever? Would he become violent and hurt some camper like he had been hurt so many years before? No one knew anything with assurance anymore.
Finally, probably in 1967 or 1968, the camp formed a posse to go out on the first of what would become these grand and glorious camp-ending missions searching for Johnny, or “Johnny the One Arm” as legend and folklore had began calling him. All the campers gathered together just outside the mess hall and nearly every one had his own flashlight and we then marched off together into the woods to find Johnny. Johnny was none too pleased with this development, but if he was actually threatened by our searches you could never really tell. No, Johnny knew the woods far better than anyone at the camp, and he knew the camp at least as well as anyone on staff and better than everyone else. No one had the upper hand on Johnny … and, if you recall, Johnny only had one hand. And did I mention that Johnny was blazing fast as a runner??? Well … he never lost a step with his arm injury, and what he lacked with that missing right arm he more than made up for with his swiftness of foot.
And did I mention that Johnny also had an attitude? He was right to be aggrieved with how awfully he was treated that day way back in ‘61 or ‘62, but now he took offense to a new level. It was finally time for Johnny to get even. That barber’s chair just past the left field fence and at the edge of the woods would also have what appeared to be human bones show up on them from time to time. Some would say they were animal bones but none of us campers ever really knew for sure and none us dared to venture much past that barber’s chair deeper into Johnny’s woods and certainly never alone. Well, except on those nights when the posse would form and we would go on our great annual hunt for Johnny the One Arm. Like I wrote earlier just about every one of us would go on this hunt, but if the truth were told, there would be a lot us who would have just preferred to stay safely in our bunkhouse on those particular nights. After all, life has no shortage of mayhem involved in it … and who really needs to go looking for more?!? But most of us were afraid of our fear being exposed and “there was strength to be had in numbers,” right? After all, there were probably 300 of us campers plus the staff and coaches involved in these hunts. What really is the chance that Johnny would actually kidnap me or any other single camper? And that my bones would turn up on Johnny’s barber chair in a few weeks? There was no denying the risk … yet the risk seemed manageable enough. After all, Johnny only had one arm!
So we grouped together and marched out towards Johnny’s chair and every camper had a buddy that he was watching over and who was watching over him. We were all excited, very nervous and quite worried all at the same time. Most of us thought it would all go for naught. Many campers didn’t even believe that any of what I’ve written before was true or could possibly even be true. Those that did believe never expected Johnny to let himself be found, let alone captured, but no one really had any idea of what would actually come next. Because as we all quickly learned … this was Johnny’s camp, this was Johnny’s show and this was Johnny’s night. Out of no where, he suddenly appeared, running like the wind … here, there, seemingly everywhere … all at the same time … it was like he was defying all the laws of physics and nature and all at the same time. In an instant no one was marching toward Johnny’s chair in the woods any longer … No! We were all now running for our very lives as quickly back toward our bunkhouses and just as fast as our feet could fly. I don’t know if I’ve ever run faster or been more terrified in my entire life. But my foot speed was no match for Johnny’s. No, Johnny quickly caught up to me in probably 300, maybe 400 yards and then I felt this incredibly strong push in my back and I went tumbling head over heels to the ground rolling several times before coming to a stop. And then just like that Johnny was gone … knocking over dozens of other campers and then seemingly disappearing into the shadows of the night. No one had seen that kind of foot speed ever in their lives before that night. And so many campers had stories like mine that we all shared together between ourselves the next morning. As best as I can recall, no camper turned up missing that night. Johnny had just been toying with us. But he did leave a note on his barber’s chair that if we came back out looking for him again … at that time he would be playing for keeps. And I literally took his words to heart … after all, Johnny never said much … he didn’t have to really. But I was safe for now … at least until baseball camp next summer.
