What could a legendary ballplayer and a professor of English possibly have in common? The lives of the two men run simultaneously through “Growing Up With Clemente,” a lyrical but uneven memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh by Richard Peterson.
Ultimately, one man’s story overshadows the other, but it might not be the one you first imagine. While both biographies have their merits, this particular narrative might have been better served had the author stuck to the more compelling story — his own.
Its framing device is the writer’s abiding and unquestionable love for baseball, specifically for the Pittsburgh Pirates during their halcyon years punctuated by the feats of famous Puerto Rican right fielder Roberto Clemente. The heart of the tale, though, lays in Peterson’s sad-sack upbringing in the city’s grueling South Side during the 1940s and ’50s and his ill-fated attempts to escape his roots.
Curiously, his reminiscences can be as unearthly as they are often mundane; the book’s first chapter recalls Peterson’s observation of men pulling a body from the poisonous waters of the Monongahela River. Where Peterson succeeds best is in drawing, with acute period detail and a keen memory, a portrait of a neighborhood where things were always hard, a family hamstrung by its own eccentricity, and the hard-won successes of a boy whose life was both elevated and scarred by the game he loved.
The author’s hard-luck story isn’t wholly uncommon, but Peterson demonstrates a gift for making the denizens of his hometown live and breathe. The earliest parts of his personal narrative, as the Catholic son of new Lithuanian immigrants, conveys the curious strangeness of a new place more common to postmodern immigration novels as he describes his hard-drinking, gas-pumping father’s foibles and his straight- talking waitress mother’s efforts to raise Peterson and his sister to the best of her abilities.
Conversely, it’s also an American story full of movie houses and boys’ antics and the first stirrings of interest in girls. The trappings are ordinary but Peterson gives them a gloss that only comes with time, tinged with an older man’s wistfulness. Peterson’s memories of his rough- and-tumble neighborhood are particularly vivid, depicting an environment populated by working stiffs, ne’er-do-wells and a heady ethnic mix of Serbian, Lithuanian, Polish and German immigrants all trying to survive in all-too-close proximity.
There’s a love story, but it’s not the one between Peterson and his wife of more than 40 years. No, it’s baseball that holds the author in thrall as he describes accompanying his father to Forbes Field in the late 1940s, the heart-rending state of the team in the early ’50s, and his elevation of the local sports stars to something more than mere adulation.
“They were the closest thing I had to heroes in an otherwise drab, blue-collar world,” Peterson writes. “They played out their follies at a magnificent ballpark, at one time a symbol of civic pride, but now just a Pittsburgh sports memory. They gave me pride and hope, no matter how foolish and misguided, because they were my Pirates and Steelers. No matter how often they disappointed and angered me, they still deserved my loyalty and love because they were all I had.”
Facing the inevitable destiny of toiling away in local industry, young Peterson latches onto every boy’s dream of playing professional baseball, a fantasy he clings to long after a broken arm dashes his hopes of playing at Forbes Field. “As I played ball as if my life depended on it, rooting for Pittsburgh’s sports teams became the way of sustaining some dream or hope of a life beyond steel mills and coal fields, even if the teams were as hopeless as the dream itself,” he mourns.
Peterson makes an admirable attempt to interlace his struggle to overcome poverty and indigenous prejudice with the triumphs of the titular slugger. But since Clemente didn’t even make his major- league debut until the author was 16, the focus on a single ballplayer often feels superfluous to the “growing up” at hand. The plethora of Pirates trivia combined with the minutiae of high school and odd jobs threatens to dilute the substance of Peterson’s story at times.
As so often in life, the book’s best material comes in its small moments — the heartbreak of losing a Little League game, a mother’s support of “a lot of damn foolishness” in sending her son to college, the decision to major in English because the girls were prettier — that, in lingering memory, turn the pedestrian into the sublime.
Clayton Moore is a freelance writer who lives in Superior.
NONFICTION
Growing Up With Clemente
by Richard Peterson
$18
