The Roanoker - March 2014 - 6

R the 360
Dudes:
A Short History of the Heroes
A guy has no chance at dudedom if he doesn't have
good (or not-so-good) role models along the way.
the first one was pretty traditional. Boyhood hero, that is - when I was five or six.
Fred Hurt, my maternal grandfather, lived in
Radford, and when we visited in the summer,
he would show me how to do things like ride
a bicycle, row a boat, throw a baseball and
build stilts. And then take my sister, brother
and me to the Clover Creamery for the best
ice cream cone there was.
Lesson absorbed and its fate this impossible
number of years later: Go outside and play!
There remains nothing I'd rather do.
When I was eight, the baseball team came
to my hometown of Baltimore, and pretty
soon after that, Willy Miranda came to play
shortstop for them; flashy though error-prone
at short, he couldn't hit a lick, as if in portend
of his admirer's baseball undertakings.
Lesson absorbed and its fate: Try not to
flinch on the curveball. Nope, I never got that.
Nor did I end up liking the infield much,
which led to the biggest hero I ever had. From
age 13 to 16 (yes, boys grew up more slowly
then, or at least I did), I cut every single mention of flaky, fine-fielding Orioles' centerfielder Jackie Brandt out of all three Baltimore
newspapers, Sport magazine, Baseball Digest,
you name it; and kept them in manila folders.
Dude was born the same day I was - just a
few years earlier.
Lesson absorbed and its fate: I became an
outfield late-inning defensive specialist for the
high-school baseball team; then an outfielder
for slow-pitch softball teams for as along as
the legs held out and I was banished to third.
I delivered the set of clippings to Jackie Brandt
about 10 years ago, tracking him down on a
golf course in Omaha, thinking they might
mean more to him or his family than to me
at that point. His first reaction? "I don't know
about these . . . my roommate might use them
for toilet paper."

6 MARCH/APRIL 2014

The radio changed completely in 1961
when I was 15, and out of the sea of Bobby
Rydell and Connie Francis came . . . Bob
Dylan, singing about Fixin to Die and Baby,
Let Me Follow You Down. The world changed,
and I got me a guitar, the first song on which
I learned was "Don't Think Twice."
Lesson absorbed and its fate: There is a
whole world of wonderful music that isn't on
the radio. I still pick up the guitar every day
and sing great songs from obscure folkies to
my daily audience of . . . me.
In high school I ran - just to, you know,
stay in shape for baseball - cross country. And
our coach, Baxter Berryhill, became a hero
not just because he would lead us on 16-mile
runs all the way downtown and back, but also
because he coached up two of his charges to
the point that Dave Patrick and Charlie Messenger went on to Villanova and near-misses
with the 1968 Olympics.
Lesson and its fate: I got back to distance
running about 15 years out of high school
when I started to get fat and had to, you know,
stay in shape for softball.
If you're an English-major-type person,
at some point you're prone to end up with a
literary hero. My male one (though Flannery
O'Connor certainly had some dudeness), was
John Updike, and the wonderful short stories
he got out of his boyhood town of Shillington, Pa.
Lesson and its fate: I knew my boyhood
hometown was cooler than Updike's, and over
the decades have gotten many stories out of it.
And yes, as Updike said late in his life, the stories that came almost involuntarily as a young
man become harder to ferret out with age.
Continued fate of the running: These many
decades later I hold a vow-to-self to stay with
it as long as the legs allow. In that context,
I have two new heroes: Bobby Spencer of

What boy's early hero is not a baseball player?
Well, lots, likely, but if you are of a certain age
and grew up in Baltimore . . .

Daleville and Harold Ingram of Henry recently graduated out of my age group in the
area 5K races, now that they are 70! - meaning
that for at least a few years, I won't be losing
by like two minutes to some really old guys.
Then again, if we're all still out there competing two or three years hence, I'll be glad
to take the pounding. After all, we'll still be
outside playing.
And one last hero at last. My father, Walter
Rheinheimer, is 97 years old and as relentlessly opinionated as ever. Lesson absorbed? Well,
longevity is a good thing, but only healthy
longevity. Fate thereof? I can only hope I'm as
fortunate as he is. -Kurt Rheinheimer
The

R oanoker.com

http://www.THEROANOKER.COM

The Roanoker - March 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Roanoker - March 2014