To the wonderment of all

The great Willie Mays was already gone to the Mets
by the time I saw this illustration.

Behold, a serendipitous dip from my fountain of youth:

I give you — the works of Dave Beronio.

This is the stuff I promised to show way back when I wrote about my first baseball game 41 years ago.

The Giants split a doubleheader with the Cubs, and Dad, after a quiet sigh of "fer cryin' out loud," I bet, had split open his wallet for the dollar for the program.

Or yearbook, as the Giants were calling it. The Giants had won the National League West pennant the season before, and the yearbook basked in the glow, with a special logo befitting the design zeitgeist, and an out-of-focus photo of the great Willie Mays sliding into second base against what looks like the St. Louis Cardinals.

Half the fuzzy photo comprises the blue-green artificial turf that covered the field at Candlestick Park, and the year 1972 is printed in black over the green field.

The cover photo may have been prophetic, because Willie Mays was soon out of the picture, traded to the Mets in May, a month before my first ballgame. By June, the Giants had all but guaranteed they wouldn't defend their pennant.

Willie Mays was still the franchise at press time, though, and as I thumbed through the program, past the color photo essays and beer ads, I came upon Dave Beronio's drawing of Mays.

Candlestick Park and the rest of the world suddenly melted away. I sat bewitched. Somehow, with careful and yet carefree application of pencil — the same kind I pushed around a paper in maddening struggle — emerged Willie Mays, all life and light and likeness, exactly the man I had seen on TV and in photos.

Only moreso, somehow.

How did Dave Beronio mold the face just so, the shade here and light there, to make it dazzle? It was the best kind of magic. In the moment, and ever since, I have desperately wanted to draw like this.

"Sudden" Sam McDowell

The yearbook showcased Beronio's treatment of the Giants stars, including the starter acquired from the Cleveland Indians the year before, "Sudden" Sam McDowell:

Beronio was wise not to compose the lefty in a Giants hat, but to let the rockabilly hair and sideburns unfurl.

Beronio used black pencil on coquille board, a heavy paper with a pebbled surface. The pencil catches on the pebble shapes and creates a kind of dot pattern that made print reproduction easier.

Coquille board is somewhat old-school, popular in the mid 20th century among editorial cartoonists and newspaper illustrators.

Old-school would describe Dave Beronio, coming out of that fine time, before my time, when illustration daily graced the sports pages.

A closeup of the coquille board texture.

Noting Beronio's 75th birthday in 1996 from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. George Miller said the athletic reporter and editor would spar with the boxing greats of the time, interview them for stories — then have them sit for portraits.

As an editor for his hometown Vallejo Times Herald and the Vacaville Reporter, Beronio did so frequently, which is how the Giants called on him to draw for the 1972 program.

Beronio was a gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress during World War II, flying 35 missions and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.

He was distinguished for a special commemoration on the walls of Candlestick Park, the lone writer among pro athletes. And he introduced his friend Bob St. Clair when the San Francisco 49er was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1990.

Juan Marichal

And he drew me these wonderful pictures for me for a dollar.

Thumbing through the program again, I am still enthralled by Beronio's drawings. Occasionally I'll find gestural cross hatching, just a hint of looseness. For the most part Beronio showed great patience and economy of style.

He drew just enough, until the work was just right. His subjects shone as a result.

Should you stumble upon this blog and know about Dave Beronio and his work, I'd love to learn more, the man and his process. His body of work seems so far to have eluded the magnet of the Internet.

Until then, I'm grateful for the magic.

"Keystone Kids" Chris Speier at shorstop (my favorite) and Tito Fuentes at second base. Speier, in his
second season in the pros, was that day's Brandon Crawford. Speier's only sin is that he's now
the bench coach for the Cincinnati Reds.

My first ballgame

Technicolor could not even do justice to how green
Candlestick Park's carpet was that day. Willie McCovey
launched the world's highest popup that day.

By miracle of the Internets, I know nearly every detail of my first professional baseball game, 40 years ago this summer.

The only factors not recorded for posterity (at least not online) are how vividly green the grass glowed at first sight (I've heard this many times from others recalling their first Major League game, even when the grass is fake, as it was in 1972 at Candlestick Park); and how bored I was by the third inning of the doubleheader. That's the inalienable truth we ignore about baseball; it can drag on, until our own lives slow to its pace around adulthood, when we can finally withstand weaving it into our daily lives over the radio.

Without the computer as crutch, I can remember:

• I went with my dad (and we went with some other people, but I can't remember who; since my aunt was the only reason we'd visit the Bay Area, maybe it was some of my cousins and her second husband)

(We took our kids to their first game, also at Candlestick, a story that merits its own post; our son's birthday is today.)

• The San Francisco Giants hosted the Chicago Cubs for a doubleheader (which seemed like a good idea at the time; if one game is good, how much better should two games be? Ask any 10-year old.)

• Juan Marichal started for the Giants against Bill Hands in the first game. I had heard of Marichal before I got to the park, either because my dad told me or he was one of those players whose names transcended baseball, like Willie Mays.

• Game 2 was a blur of nothing.

• Ron Santo played third for the Cubs. I had his baseball card. I also had cards for Bobby Bonds, the Giants' rightfielder (and Barry Bonds' dad) and catcher Dave Rader.

• Willie Mays was gone by 1972, traded to the New York Mets by Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who supposedly traded Mays for cash and then gave the money to Mays, because Stoneham couldn't afford to give the great Mays the money he deserved. I had come in hopes of seeing Mays, and didn't realize until that he reached the ballpark that he was no longer a Giant. Though I liked baseball, I wasn't paying careful attention.

• Willie McCovey, the first baseman and eventual Hall of Famer whom people called Stretch, hit a ball so high into the air, twice as high as the lip of the stadium, I felt the adrenaline rollercoaster ride of being one of the few fans who would see this man hit a ball clear out of vast Candlestick Park. The headlines the next day of this amazing feat: Imagine! It became a routine popup instead (to the shortstop in the bottom of the seventh in the first game, exacting detail courtesy of www.baseball-reference.com). Nothing new under the sun.

• Giants Manager Charlie Fox got mad at an umpire's call (not sure which call; the exhaustive statistics fail my curiosity here) and told the umpire so, body shaking, arms wheeling, prompting his rejection from the game. In revenge Fox took advantage of the artificial turf, smooth as a billiard table, and threw several buckets of baseballs onto the field, where they rolled wherever the field was green, and then a couple of armfuls of bats, which arced this way and that as if free of gravity. I cheered with the crowd: A grown man having a child's tantrum! Who'da thought?

• The $1 program held me transfixed, especially the pencil drawings of selected players. They helped inspire me to draw, in the same way that Bernie Fuchs and Leroy Neiman and Mort Drucker did. It kills me I can't find the program, which I know I kept. It's somewhere in my series of godawful messes or (better) I gave it to my son. I'll post some of the work if I find it soon.

• One of the drawings was of the Giants' young infielder, Chris Speier, a wiry spider of a player who with second baseman Tito Fuentes were known as the Keystone Kids, turning double plays. I became an instant fan of Speier.

Here's what the comprehensive stats tell me:

• It was Sunday, June 11, 1972 (I missed the 40th anniversary by almost a month); the first game started at 1 p.m. under sunny skies, 70 degrees at Candlestick Point. In addition to me, 21,728 other people also paid to sit in the stands. The summary doesn't indicate whether the stiff wind was blowing, but it probably was. Almost always did.

• A legend, Leo "The Lip" Durocher, was the Cubs' manager.

• The Giants were not good, not like the year before, when they had won the National League West division. Two months into the season and they were already 16 1/2 games behind first place, with 18 wins and 38 losses. They weren't contenders like today, when they're leading the division. They had lost seven straight and would lose that game too, getting shut out 4-0. They rallied to win the second game 3-1. I didn't really care about any of this.

• It was not the great Juan Marichal's day. The Hall of Famer would lose, and would also commit two throwing errors in the same inning trying to pick off runners at first.

• Catcher Fran Healy and a sometime shortstop named Damaso Blanco drove in the go-ahead runs for the Giants in the second game. Ron Bryant got the win for the Giants. Burt Hooton started for the Cubs; Hooton threw a no-hitter his first year in baseball, but was really more known later as a solid Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher.

Forty years later, Hooton is still in baseball, a pitching coach for the Houston Astros' Triple-A ballclub. Chris Speier is bench coach for the Cincinnati Reds; he and his team were just in San Francisco to split a four-game series with the Giants, and I got to hear a lengthy radio interview with him over the weekend. Tito Fuentes is a Spanish-language radio broadcaster for the Giants. Willie McCovey is an almost daily presence at AT&T Park, where he sponsors Junior Giants youth baseball. Willie Mays is also a constant, long since returned to baseball's good graces after he and Mickey Mantle were shunned for being greeters at Las Vegas casinos. Marichal is still revered in these parts.

And each and every day this time of year, kids' hearts thump extra hard when they first catch sight of the glowing green grass of a Major League ballpark.