Venable Park. Tom Flynn

>

      

      “The author expertly balances Henry’s unique account against a universal story through the voice of a memorable character. At the same time, he brings alive an era and place rarely combined in fiction.”

      — Kirkus Reviews

      “Flynn has created an unforgettable character, whose sly humor and wry, Everyman observations transport us back to a time when America still made things..”

      — Post Road Magazine (produced in partnership with the Boston College Department of English)

      “An excellent book...heartbreaking, but ultimately satisfying.”

      — WYPR - Baltimore’s NPR Station

      “This is a strong piece of work...a Ring Lardner quality to the writing.”

      — Seven Stories Press, New York

      “One of the best things about reviewing books is discovering authors like Tom Flynn. Flynn lets his character tell his story without getting in the way...which is what makes Venable Park so captivating.”

      — Celeste Sollod, Baltimore Books

      “Venable Park...creates a unique vision of Baltimore in the age of Gatsby.”

      — Urbanite Magazine

      “A quiet masterpiece.”

      — Zackary Sholem Berger, author, One Nation Taken Out of Another

      Venable Park

      Venable Park

      Tom Flynn

      Apprentice House

      Loyola University Maryland

      Baltimore, Maryland

      Copyright © 2015 by Tom Flynn

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).

      Excerpt from Five Days in Octover: The Lost Battalion of World War I, by Robert Ferrell, Copyright 2005, printed with permission by The Curators of the University of Missouri, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201.

      Designed by: Jenna Perrino

      Cover image c. 1924 Baltimore Municipal Journal

      Map image courtesy of Albin O. Kuhn Library, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

      Printed in the United States of America

      Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-041-7

      E-book ISBN: 978-1-62720-042-4

      Published by Apprentice House

      Apprentice House

      Loyola University Maryland

      4501 N. Charles Street

      Baltimore, MD 21210

      410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)

      www.apprenticehouse.com [email protected]

      To Michael Augustus Flynn & Charles F. Zimmer

      Soldiers of the Great War

      “The day before it entered into the present battle, there were transferred to it approximately 2,000 untrained soldiers from the Depot, the majority of whom had never fired a rifle, thrown a hand grenade, and were entirely ignorant of the elements of military training...”

      —Five Days in October, The Lost Battalion of World War I

      by Robert H. Ferrell

      Prologue

      On December 3, 1921, a football game was played on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore pitting two unusual opponents against each other. The referees represented four different Ivy League schools, yet it wasn’t a college game. It was instead a match between two military teams: the Army’s Third Corps Area squad against a group of Quantico Marines.

      The crowd overwhelmed tiny Homewood Field as civic hot air filled the skies above it. Anyone willing to listen was told that this game, in just its second year, stood only behind the venerated Army/Navy tilt as the most important military game of the season.

      Quantico prevailed 22-0, dealing a setback to young Army assistant coach Dwight D. Eisenhower in the process. As Baltimore Mayor Joseph Broening looked on from his seat at midfield, he reveled in the crowd’s enthusiasm for the game, and envisioned in the contest an opportunity to elevate his city’s national stature.

      In the weeks following the game, the mayor seized upon a civic notion adrift for a decade to build a major stadium in Baltimore and worked rapidly to make it a reality. It was proposed that the city’s Mt. Royal Reservoir, no longer used for drinking water and now sitting empty, have a football stadium with baseball potential fitted within its sunken confines.

      The revered former Baltimore Oriole manager Ned Hanlon lived in Mt. Royal, however, and sat on the Parks Board. He opposed the notion of 40,000 football fans in his neighborhood each fall weekend and proposed that the city’s larger Lake Clifton be drained and fitted with a bowl.

      En route to viewing Hanlon’s suggestion, members of the Board spied nearby Venable Park, a park in name only. It was in truth an old brick quarry turned trash dump, rapidly filling with the ash cinders that 1921 Baltimore spewed out at a prolific rate. Why not put the stadium there? The cinders weren’t yet fully settled, and excavation could be done much more easily and quickly than at other locations.

      With the president of the Parks Board, J. Cookman Boyd, now backing Venable, it was chosen, passing both Mt. Royal and Lake Clifton. Ground was broken in early May and a stadium of Olympian stature was promised.

      What resulted instead was Venable Stadium, built cheaply and speedily in just seven months in 1922. A 40,000 seat horseshoe shaped bowl, it was erected substantially from dirt and wood with a modest concrete wall at its interior base (a classically-inspired façade would be added in 1923). The required upkeep of the stadium in future years would become legendary.

      On December 3, 1922, Venable Stadium opened to fanfare seldom seen in twentieth century Baltimore. Two members of the Cabinet and three governors were on hand, and a Marine sergeant called the play-by-play into a radio telephone linked directly to the White House, where President Harding listened intently. The Marines once again edged the Army, this time by a score of 13-12, and Baltimore was on its way to a future forged by toil, war, and ultimately, Venable.

      1

      I live down at the Point in a boarding house. It’s not the best place to live when the wind is up from the south and brings along the smoke from the stacks. If you look at it from the outside, the house is not much to see, with the soot so heavy on the white sills that you’d think they are gray. But when it’s a land breeze and it takes the smoke back towards the water, then you have something.

      The reason I live here, which is easy enough to figure, is I work at the mill. I don’t work in the coke ovens or near the blast furnaces, so in that way my job is a little easier than some. On the other hand, when I am taking the trolley car north into the city and I watch the conductor sit and say, “Next stop, Dundalk,” I think that trolley conductors might have a leg up on me and a few others at the mill.

      This year I will take to writing some of my