The Mystery of Place Memory and Rock Kicking

The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture and the American West
by Jim W. Corder
Edited and with an afterword by James S. Baumlin and Keith D. Miller
Moon City Press (February, 2008)
185 pp. $15

Those who heard the voice of the late Jim Corder, professor of English at Texas Christian University, will hear it again in these five essays and one poem contained within The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture and the American West

The voice and accent are from West Texas, as was the man. West Texas also provided the bedrock of his view of the world. The pen and ink drawings illustrating these essays are also Corder s doing.

The poem is a quiet tribute to Mickey Mantle, written three days prior to Mantle s death. In five stanzas Corder captures the contradictions of the hero s life, and the melancholy of his death, which is then juxtaposed to the poet s continuing life. It says as much about Mantle, life, death and heroism as the combined efforts of all the obituary writers of a nation.

The opening essay, The Glove, starts with Corder s recollection of his first baseball glove and the circumstances of its Christmas appearance in the later years of the Great Depression. Over the course of some 80 pages, Corder walks through his childhood, commenting on most everything imaginable out of his West Texas life: his parents, his brother, his hometown of Jayton (pop. 638), and, of course, his first glove later gloves, his brother s glove, and other gloves he came know and see.

That is but the surface. While commenting on the books he read as a child and the world revealed by the local newspaper, Corder seeks the sources of his values, his perceptions and misperceptions of the world in which he was living and growing into an adult. He writes of baseball and language and his heroes, and what they may have taught him about life. He reflects on his wife and their relationship, his two daughters with whom he did not play catch, and his son with whom he did. He talks of softball and his preference for slow pitch over fast pitch, his views on basketball and football, and his feelings about the 1994 baseball strike.

In the end, all this is much more than the sum of its parts. It is a marvelous meandering through memories, some real, some distorted, and some without any perceived grounding in reality. It is an attempt to find the stuff of one s identity that is about as puzzling a task as a human can take up. Or so it seems.

In Making Las Vegas, Corder talks of his many trips to that city with his wife. He ponders what his love of Las Vegas may say about himself and about the human attachment to place. In Vegas he has his rituals, favorite places, even his favorite slot machines. He avoids the poker tables as he finds the people at them too serious. He finds the poker machines much more congenial.

He asks: What makes a place a place? When does a place become a place? How do you know when you get there?

By the time you digest all the descriptions of Vegas and think about all the sociology, geography, theology, and Eastern philosophy that Corder cites, you begin to understand the significance of these questions, not to mention the significance of the title of this essay.

In World War II on Cleckler Street, Corder recalls the war as he saw it as a child and contrasts it with the war he came to understand as an adult. He spent most of the war years on Cleckler Street in Fort Worth at a time when comic books occupied a central place in his life. He saw the war through the actions of the superheroes and through the movies he watched. It was a war of simple truths and obvious villains fought with courage and precision by decent American boys, and it was without consequences for the civilian populations.

When Corder served in the military and spent several years in Germany in the post-war years, he saw the consequences of the war for the ordinary people who were caught in its path. He learned that the war he had seen in the comics, and in Time, Life and Look, had no relationship to reality, unless it was an inverse one. He came to regret that he was ever attracted to war stories or to war. As an antidote, Corder tells us, he repeatedly turned to accounts of the Battle of Verdun, the horror chamber of the First World War.

Corder revisits the meaning of manhood that he learned as a boy and finds that he never measured up. He never learned to face pain stoically, to prove himself in athletic competition, or to accept the notion that the best place to prove yourself as a man is in war. He tells us that these failures always embarrassed him, but that he had a determination to leave competition, war and these distorted definitions of manhood behind. And he tells us he s not sure he can.

In The Heroes Have Gone From the Grocery Store, Corder seeks to solve one of the great mysteries of his life: Why is it that he clearly remembers that Dizzy Dean was on a Wheaties box, describing the details of his greatest day in sports namely the final game of the 1934 World Series? Why does he remember cutting that narrative off the box and placing it in his scrapbook? Why does he remember it so clearly? In point of fact, Dizzy Dean was never on a Wheaties box and Wheaties never had a feature on their boxes titled, My Greatest Day in Sports. The quest to solve this mystery is a marvelous exploration of memory and its deceptions.

The first time I ever laid eyes on Jim Corder and heard him speak was at a meeting of the Sport Literature Association, perhaps in Fort Worth but perhaps not. I am certain, however, that I remember what he was doing. I sat in the back of a room and listened to Corder tell the fantastic story of The Rock Kicking Championship of the Whole World, Now and Forevermore.

I had never heard rock kicking described as a sport or described as Corder described it. I had done my share of rock kicking over the years, and indeed I miss it living in Florida where there are no rocks. As to the concept of a World Championship of Rock Kicking, well, it was simply out of my range of experience. But who was I to doubt its existence, as everything else in the universe seems to have developed a world championship event to validate its existence and credentials as a sport.

So suspending belief and discarding all doubts I sat back, relaxed and laughed myself silly listening to this fellow with a West Texas accent describe an absurdity in quiet and measured terms that seemed eminently sensible, while of course being the quintessence of silliness. It was a delight to hear then, and a double delight to revisit it in this marvelous collection of essays.

Today, after returning home from Panama to a telephone call from overseas, an old friend, his assignment has been eight years, the Cayman done in four years, Panama has done in four years. All in all Central and Latin America did not come out of this circle. Phone, chat about how the domestic half-day Chinese New Year, the two sides and recent work experience. Linked to the phone, I can not help think of that from the experience of the United States to Brazil. January 2000, just over the millennium New Year s Day, accompanied overseas and the Department of the Ministry of Manpower of the two departments ...

Nevada in the southwestern United States, the United States is the seventh largest state. Its reputation in the global tourism industry, the annual reception million visitors over 6000, tourism income accounted for 60 percent of government revenue. On the famous Las Vegas in the state. Nevada rich tourism resources: 24 national parks, over 100 world-class golf course. In addition, there are Huasha, parachuting, downhill, and other colorful live ...

New York. New York Hotel, the students have said that you look at Las Vegas travel photos, I feel Henluan very vague. . . . . . . . I also saw once again that is the case. Introduction unclear, the order is not disorder. A lot of photos or in a hotel room or a night of shooting, inadequate lighting easily blurred; addition, the photos were SIZE I shrink to only 100 K, and not clear enough. To be honest, Las Vegas is not very photogenic city, where the main ...

Sands Expo and... 2008 United States (Las Vegas) kitchen home appliances exhibition The Gourmet Housewares Show Show title: U.S. family kitchen supplies exhibition The Gourmet Housewares Show exhibition time in May 2008 on 6-8 exhibition period: the annual session of exhibition Venue: Las Vegas Sands Expo and Convention Center Sands Expo and ...

Las Vegas is at AN EVERYBRIGHT CITY. Whenever Huadengchushang, it would become the world s most dazzling fun city. A variety of song and dance show, talk show, magic shows, concerts, circus performances in the major casino competition staged at the Theatre, is Mubuxiajie; nightclubs, bars, dance halls is Renshengdingfei. In general, here s more at night than during the day. ...

I told Dongdong married, is the kind of mysterious. We go to LAS VEGAS, not for gambling purposes. Honeymoon trip, in fact, to us, it just a few days. Several friends to accompany us. Las Vegas is famous for quick passage of marriage, sitting in the car is basically complete the wedding. We go to the City Hall marriage took office a marriage license. And then go to a church, drove channel. Father wedding on the people we asked some of the window ...