How Yogi Got To Be My Best Friend

This story has four beginnings. I am going to burden you with all of them because each one is germane to where we are going here….and I have a deep abiding faith in your ability to keep up.

I was recently riding back with a couple of friends after attending an out-of-town funeral. It was an hour plus trip and after properly “remembering” the deceased, somehow the conversation turned to the first girlfriend, or first crush, or the first girl to make an impression on us. I didn’t bring this subject up.

And I didn’t add much to it; my mind had raced six and a half decades and 510 miles away.

I met Bobby Brewer in kindergarten; I think. It was so long ago that I don’t remember life without him. He was one of many friends that listened to Miss Katie talk about the wonders of learning and growing and meeting new people….

We were five years old for goodness sakes! We cared way more about the ice cream she would hand out after lunch than any direction our young lives were taking. Bobby was a lot smarter than me, so I hung around him quite a bit.

The summer we turned eight, we both were chosen to play on the Lions Little League team. It is where Bobby started his catching career. He kind of reminded us of a young Yogi Berra. The name stuck.

If you are keeping score, we are half way through the beginnings.

Prentice Ray Doyle and his brothers, Phillip and Earl, were gathered up on the front porch of the ice house on a steamy hot day in the summer of 1959. Their good friend, Rollin Trull, was with them. I was just kinda hanging out to catch a little tinge of the cold air when the icehouse door was opened.

Prentice Ray and Rollin were dividing the girls in town into good looking, ok, and “move on to the next one” categories. I was 12 that summer. And way more interested in baseball, and keeping cool. But I got to noticing how Phillip and Earl were nodding eagerly in agreement with everything that was being said.

Both Prentice Ray and Rollin were older than me. And wiser. And more worldly. I walked all the way home thinking about girls. Maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention. Prentice Ray said there was a girl out there for everybody, the trick is to know it when you see her.

I’d mostly forgot all about it by the following week as I was cooling off at the swimming pool. Leon was a life guard. And Roe and Belle Alexander let me in free if I would, two or three times a day, make a sweep of the area around the pool picking up discarded candy wrappers and empty Coca-Cola bottles.

I could write a book on how ants would bypass Baby Ruth, Snickers, and Butterfinger wrappers to get to an empty Zag Nut paper. I believe it had to do with the crunchy bits of the Zag Nut that were always left when it was broken or a bite was taken. But I digress.

As I was attempting to pick up a Zag Nut wrapper with out touching it, I looked up and Carol Jean Ellis was standing right in front of me. She was the most beautiful creature that I had ever seen.

And my story begins….

She had on a red bathing suit and the sun glistened off her Baby Oil-ed skin. Her teeth were so white she could have starred in her own Pepsodent commercial. Her smile was friendly, beguiling, and as wide as all outdoors. She dropped Doris Day down to the “move on” category.

I believe the word Prentice Ray used at the ice house was smitten….

Carol Jean was sixteen, way older than me, and, of course, totally out of reach. That didn’t keep me from dreaming of swinging down from a giant tree and pulling her out of the quicksand that suddenly appeared in front of that big house up at the corner of Stonewall Street and Magnolia Avenue.

Listen, she lived almost next door to Yogi. Oh my gosh! I started going over to his house every day. I’d drag him up and down W. Cherry Avenue just hoping Carol Jean would be watering the geraniums beside her front door.

I spent the night with Yogi every Friday for two years. We’d eat the best spaghetti in the world and I’d peer out the window hoping you-know-who would just “happen by.” It was what Prentice Ray called, “Killing two birds with one stone.”

I believe to this day it was fate that brought Carol Jean and me together. Yogi was strategically located, Prentice Ray and Rollin got me to thinking “girls”, working at the swimming pool put me in the right spot at the right moment. It might have even been scriptural!

And then, 65 years later, riding home from a funeral of all things, I am confronted with this indelible memory from my distant past.

The real Yogi would say, “It was déjà vu all over again.”

Respectfully,
Kes