CHAPTER ONE
After cutting the grass I put everything back in the garage and went inside to get some cold fruit punch and join my dad watching the ball game. We always sat together in the basement in front of the color TV, and he’d flip the station to channel 11 WPIX. I settled back to enjoy the game. The Yankees were shedding the ghost of their cellar dweller days, rebuilding under the new ownership of George Steinbrenner. My dad often remarked on how he completely redesigned the team from manager to batboy. The Yankees were winning again, which fired me up!
I turned to my dad. “I’m going to practice hard, lift weights, run, throw, and make the Staples team this year!”
He smiled. “And keep up in school too.”
“Absolutely—the sky’s the limit!”
We each had a bowl of ice cream balanced on our knee when we watched the game. I usually ate chocolate chip, and he loved chocolate fudge ripple. The basement was like our man cave. There was a pool table down there and one of those tabletop hockey games where you maneuver the players with sliding steel rods. And let’s not forget the dartboard—I could always hold my own against my friends. I used to hang out down there after school with some of them—kids from the neighborhood.
My dad, Frank, wasn’t the type to yell at the game. He sat calmly, eating his ice cream, and making the occasional comment on a good play or an error. My sister, Maryann, ten years my senior, stopped down a moment and grabbed a soda from the fridge.
“Who’s winning?” she asked.
“Nobody,” I answered, glancing at her then back at the screen, “the game just started.”
Maryann looked more like my dad, with her hazel eyes and big grin. I, on the other hand, resembled my mom with the big blue eyes and a quieter disposition. My mom, Anne, was a homemaker, and my dad a stonemason. They met through mutual friends in the late ‘30s and often enjoyed dancing at the Maple Pavilion at Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport. That was a popular entertainment hall back then with bell towers and huge windows overlooking the water. They were such great dancers that people would stop to watch them twirling on the floor to all the big jazz hits of the era.
They came from hard-working families and were each one of seven children. My mom was the oldest and my father the oldest boy. After a whirlwind romance, they got engaged. My father enlisted, and they kept in touch through letters while he fought in the Philippines and the Battle of Guadalcanal. They were later married, my father in uniform, my mother in a simple white dress, at Assumption Church in Westport, November 4th, 1944.
At first they lived in local housing for veterans, but finally, my father bought a lot on Oak Ridge Park in Westport and began to construct a home from his own design. It was a two-story brick colonial with room for a future family, and he laid out stone-lined flower beds for my mother who loved to garden. The finishing touch was a young maple he planted in the front yard.
It wasn’t long before my mother was happily cooking in her new kitchen with her very own window overlooking that beautiful tree. There she spent many years creating her fabulous dishes, many of them Polish. The house was permeated with the smells of simmering stews, casseroles, and buckwheat bread fresh out of the oven, chowders made from my father's efforts digging up clams at the local beach, and hand-rolled pierogies stuffed with cheese, potatoes, or cabbage. My family never had a frozen dinner or ingredients that weren’t fresh. In the summer the majority of our produce came from my parents’ sizable vegetable garden, which they tended together. One of their specialties was pickled beets, which we ate in the winter, along with other canned goods.
Before my father went to work in the morning, I used to watch him tape up his fingers to prevent them from getting shredded by rough stones and bricks. He was around 5’10” and built like a catcher, which is actually the position he played on the local teams in his younger days. He was very fast and a power hitter. Whenever we ran into his old ball playing buddies down at the marina in Veteran’s Park, they would call him by his nickname, “Dynamite.” Sometimes, they’d look up from fixing a boat motor and say, “I bet some of those balls you hit are still traveling!” He’d just laugh and then they would exchange family news, talk about new fishing tackle or how big their last catch was, go on about the Yankees, or gossip about friends. Sometimes they’d discuss recent headlines about Vietnam, or which local boy was in the armed forces. My dad was respected around town, known for his great masonry work and being an overall good friend to everybody. And even though his baseball days were behind him, he’d really made his mark in the local leagues.
In the 1930s, Norwalk was known as a baseball town. The New York teams—the Yankees, Dodgers, and the Giants—would come down on their days off and play in the pickup games. My dad batted many times against major league pitchers, and Dynamite always held his own. He was even scouted as a hitter by one of the New York clubs, but the economic climate of the Great Depression shifted his future. The major league stardom he might have achieved was put on the back burner because he had family responsibilities. Back then, parents and children really had to work together to survive.
My dad had a total of seven siblings and step-siblings, and as the oldest son carried a lot of the financial weight. As a bricklayer, he could not miss a single day of work because nobody was given time off back then for something like a baseball tryout. He could lose his job over it, and that would leave his family stranded. These were precarious times, and everybody was struggling. So my dad never got to find out his true potential, but this did not make him bitter. He focussed his energies on keeping his family afloat, and many of the local buildings display his artistry to this day. I still like to walk into the Norwalk town hall and look up at the ceiling and imagine him balanced on a scaffold up there, working away. I always wave to his memory.
“Enjoy the game,” Maryann smiled, “I’m going upstairs to study.”
Maryann was a commuter student at Central Connecticut State seeking a degree in accounting and computer science. Being very driven, she also took business courses at the University of Bridgeport and taught on the side at Norwalk High School.
My dad turned to her, “What’s your mom doing?”
“Reading the paper and listening to Dr. Meltzer on the radio.”
“Your mom always says he really helps people out.” Then he turned back to the game. I heard Maryann’s quick footsteps retreating up the stairs. I knew she’d be up in her room the rest of the night with a cup of tea, engrossed in her book. It was a typical evening in the Krysiuk household, everyone peacefully going about their own business.
Weekends also had their own kind of order to them. Saturdays were for running errands and visiting family. Sundays we all went to mass, Dad and I to the 8:15 a.m. service, my sister and mother at high noon. It was the same church where my parents were married. Like other members of the Greatest Generation, he never thought twice about serving his country. I don’t know much about that time in his life, and the details are fuzzy, but I’m very proud of his service. My father was actually awarded the Silver Star, but he never talked about it. I wish I’d asked him more questions when I was younger, but I didn’t know the importance of the honor or what to ask. He put the medal in a box and kept it in his desk drawer for years. I didn’t even know it was there, or that he had many others, until years later when my sister told me about it.
She didn’t know that much either, except that he was proud of his time in the Army and served as some kind of rescuer. Whenever there was a difficult mission, they’d always send my father in to get people out. He was quick on his feet, intuitive by nature, and both calm and effective under pressure. He was a scout and a gunner and could procure supplies that no one else could find. As a result, the Army had him constantly on the move. He didn’t share too many stories, but he saved many men and women, even when the odds were heavily stacked against him.
Upon his return to the States, the Army sent him to Northampton, Massachusetts, to aid in the psych ward of the Northampton Veterans Administration Hospital. Though he never experienced what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, he found himself helping those who suffered from combat stress. On weekends he would travel home to his mom’s house in Norwalk to get a breather. He told her the job really beat him up, all those patients reliving the war. He felt for every single one of them. During his time in Massachusetts, he discovered he possessed a strong gift for helping soldiers recover from their psychological wounds, and this type of work became part of the fabric of his life. Over the years he helped many veterans recover, as well as his two brothers, a niece’s husband, and a cousin who suffered from PTSD after serving in Vietnam.
But when it came to talking about his own experiences in the Pacific Theatre, he said very little. My father was, by nature, a quiet guy. Just don’t get him mad. He had a long fuse, but you could tell it was burning by the tone of his voice, which got louder and louder until he blew the wax right out of your ears. But it took a lot for that to happen. He was the balance in other peoples’ lives, and all the skills he acquired from the war, and afterward helping veterans, prepared him well to help save and guide me when I needed him most during the darkest period of my life. Without his leadership and faith, as well as the support of my family, I don’t believe I would be here.
But on a sunny day after mass, heading with my dad out to the local baseball field to throw and catch, bad times were the furthest thing from our minds. He was my personal coach and believed in my pitching potential. He always brought a bag of balls, and I carried the gloves and my favorite bat. It was a Louisville Slugger—Al Kaline model. He was an outfielder and a great hitter for the Detroit Tigers. My bat was thirty-two inches long, a perfect weight, and the ball just popped right off it. We’d spend a few hours out there most Sundays, pitching and hitting. Time just flew by.
Since I was eight, my dad taught me the fundamentals of baseball, with a focus on pitching. As I got older, his confidence in me grew. By the time I hit high school his teaching had really paid off. I was known for my sinker, which would drive the batters crazy and frustrate the umpires who couldn’t always tell if it was a strike from the way it crossed the plate. When the ball came up to the batter it seemed to drop off the table, sinking so fast it caused them to swing and miss or get called on a third strike. That pitch was a "true sinker”—my favorite! And when it came to hitting, my dad gave me so much batting practice and so many special tips I was able to contact most pitches and develop my own power swing. But when I got into high school, I concentrated mostly on pitching because that’s where my father and I felt I had the most potential for making the team.
At seventeen life was pretty grand. I loved spending time with my dad, especially watching the games and studying the different pitchers so I could apply their techniques to my own and discover new ways to outsmart each hitter. Baseball was my life, and I also wanted to use it as a way to become popular and attract the girls. Doesn’t everybody?
As we shut off the TV and headed up to bed, all I could think about was tryouts. I lay in the dark, imagining standing on the mound, body relaxed, mind focussed, my left cleat kicking up for momentum, then leaning in a fluid motion toward home plate, releasing the ball in a perfect line toward my target, as my right foot finished forward, leaving me in a ready position to field any ball that flew in my direction. Strike three! Perfect pitch! Let the party begin!
Excerpted from the upcoming novel, The Big One, by Mike Krysiuk with Julia Bobkoff. Based on a true story.