One Shot at Forever

Part One

Welcome to Macon

The grain elevator in downtown Macon,
the "skyline" of the town

Herb Slodounik, Decatur Herald

Prelude

Bob Fallstrom had to read the sheet twice, and still he didn't believe it. Was this some sort of joke? The work of a smartass kid?

By 1971 Fallstrom had been at the Decatur Herald & Review for twenty-two years and had spent the bulk of that time covering small-town high school sports in central Illinois. Over the years he'd seen plenty. He'd covered future major leaguers like Bill Madlock and farm boys who'd never seen a curveball. He'd dealt with coaches who were autocrats, coaches who were assholes, coaches who didn't know their own players' names, and, once, a married coach who skipped town on the day of a big game with the school nurse. But he'd never seen anything like this.

In his hand, Fallstrom held a rumpled survey returned by L. C. Sweet, the baseball coach at Macon High, a tiny school twenty minutes south of Decatur that had enjoyed surprising success the previous season. For Fallstrom, who was both the sports editor and lead columnist at the Herald & Review, the survey was a way to avoid spending weeks calling the coaches at the fifty-odd schools his paper covered. The form included lines for batting order and schedule, the coach's lifetime record, and then, at the bottom, a few questions about team strengths and weaknesses. It was boilerplate stuff, and by now Fallstrom knew what to expect: coaches talking up their players and, when possible, inflating their own credentials. And who could blame them? Everyone wanted to look good in the Herald & Review, which was the only daily paper for dozens of small towns and held tremendous sway in central Illinois. As the saying went in the newsroom, "If it's in the Herald & Review sports section, it must be true."

This was different though. Fallstrom called over Joe Cook, his right-hand man in the sports department.

"What do you make of this?" Fallstrom said, handing over the sheet. "Make sure to read the whole thing, down to the bottom."

Cook scanned the answers, then broke out laughing. There, at the end of the survey, under the heading of "Team Weaknesses," Sweet had written the following word: "Coaching."

1

Beginnings

Lynn Sweet never set out to be a baseball coach, and he certainly never dreamed he'd live in a place like Macon. In fact, when he got the call from Macon principal Roger Britton in the fall of 1965 inviting him to interview for a job teaching English, the first thing Sweet did was ask where, exactly, the town was.

A week later, Sweet threw on a coat and tie, hopped into his brown '58, six-cylinder Ford Customline and hit the road, heading south from Chicago. As he drove, the city faded away, replaced by endless miles of denuded cornfields, the splintered stalks poking out of the hard earth like blond stubble. Every once in a while, Sweet breezed through a town, but mostly it was just him and that big blue sky. To pass the time he rolled down the windows, letting the cool air fly through his hair, and hummed a song about a Tambourine Man. He wasn't quite sure where he was going, but that was fine. He rarely was.

At twenty-four, Sweet was a dreamer and something of an idealist. The son of a hard-driving Army sergeant, he had, as he put it, "broken the other way." Sweet was against the war, fond of bucking convention, and convinced the world was full of good people who occasionally had bad ideas. From his mother, he'd inherited a love of the arts, books, and ideas, while his father had given him not only his name—Lynn Junior often went by his initials "L. C." to differentiate himself from his father—but also the ability to relate to most any man. Later, he would come to look, as one opposing player put it, "like Frank Zappa had decided to coach baseball," but for now he was still clean-cut, with short dark hair that framed a wide face, hazel eyes, thick eyebrows, and long eyelashes. Darkly handsome, he was both funny and a good listener, a combination women tended to find irresistible.

By the time he drove south to meet Britton, Sweet had come to a crossroads of sorts, forced to confront his future after years of giving it the slip. He'd dropped out of college twice and worked as a roofer, a painter, and, briefly, on the Kraft Foods factory line, a soul-deadening experience he hoped to never repeat. As far back as he could remember, he'd disliked school but loved reading. His mother read to him frequently when he was young and pushed him to make his own discoveries. He tackled Orwell in the fourth grade, later fell for Aldous Huxley, and wrestled with Joyce.

Though an indifferent student, Sweet was beloved by his teachers. On his seventh grade report card, one Cora Johnson of Hopewell Elementary School, in Hopewell, Virginia, had deemed the boy a "dreamer" and a "time-waster" who could "just about exasperate one at times." Yet she went on to write that she "just loved the boy and thoroughly enjoyed having him in [her] class," calling him "cooperative, helpful (in his own way)" and possessed of "a good mind."

In other words, Sweet had many of the makings of a good teacher. So, when faced with a choice between following his father into the military and entering a profession that would provide a draft exemption, Sweet told his father, "Sorry, this cat's not going," and majored in English at Southern Illinois University, with the intention of becoming a teacher. He was two months into a student teaching assignment in Chicago when Britton happened upon his name on a list of prospective teachers.

Sweet immediately intrigued Britton, who was a conservative principal in every respect but one: the hiring of teachers. Believing students should be exposed to a variety of influences and approaches, he'd set out to surround himself with the most interesting people possible after rejoining the Macon School District in 1965. During his first few years Britton hired, among others: a hard-ass former Marine to teach industrial arts; a foul-mouthed six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-forty-pound Southern good ol' boy to coach football and teach chemistry; and a statistical whiz from the nearby Caterpillar factory's quality control division to teach math. Once, upon being impressed with a barmaid at the Lone Oak Tavern in Decatur named LaVonne Jones, Britton brought the entire school board to the bar to meet her, then hired her on the spot.

In Sweet, however, Britton recognized a rare commodity: an English teacher who was young and male. From the look of his file, Sweet was also well educated (that SIU degree) and worldly (that Army brat background), at least by Macon's standards. That he had only a couple months of experience didn't bother Britton. He was more worried about how to convince the young man to move to a place like Macon.

Macon was indeed an unlikely destination for Sweet, who had grown up in a series of midsize cities in Virginia and Arizona before his father got a job teaching ROTC at the University of Illinois, allowing the Sweets to settle in Champaign. Now Sweet was living at the Ravenswood YMCA in Chicago and embracing the burgeoning counterculture of the '60s. He listened to the Rolling Stones, hung out at poetry readings with kids in berets, smoked his share of grass, and stayed up late debating politics and religion.

Now here he was, driving through a sea of cornfields and mulling a job offer in a town so small he was unaware of its existence only a week earlier. Just when Sweet began to wonder if he'd overshot Macon, or taken the wrong road, he saw a grain elevator rising like an iron redwood over the flat plains. It was easily the tallest building for miles. He had arrived.

As Sweet rolled into Macon, past the barber shop, the feed store, and Cole's Arrowhead Tavern, he felt like he was going back in time, and in some respects he was. Though only two hundred miles from Chicago, Macon was, in 1965, still stuck in the Eisenhower era. Men had short hair; women wore long skirts; and the ideological shifts sweeping other parts of the country had yet to make their way this far into the heartland. Here, the greatest generation still held sway. Even though tens of thousands of war protesters had picketed the White House and marched on the Washington Monument only a month earlier, in Macon the United States was still viewed as infallible. The idea that anyone would want to stand up and shout about going to war was absurd. If Sweet was representative of where the country was headed, then Macon symbolized where it had been.

It was also, in the truest sense of the word, a community, the kind of town where kids were sent to the post office each morning to bring back the mail and the local paper, the weekly Macon News, ran the grade school menus on the front page of every issue (goulash and meat loaf were big). The paper's slogan was "We print everything but dollar bills," and that wasn't far off the mark. The News contained a regular feature called "Two Minutes with the Bible," and breaking news stories included headlines such as "Local Cemetery Board Hires Custodian"; "Win Places [Boy] on State Vegetable Judging Team"; and "Evening Woman's Club Meets in Kyle Home," a story that included the following dispatch: "Howard Brown, County Supt. of Schools, gave a very interesting report on 'Squares.' He says we should all start being square and stand up for what we think is right."

If the town felt frozen in time, it was due in part to its location. When the Illinois Central Railroad crews set up a freight and depot stop south of Decatur in 1845, creating the settlement that would later become Macon, they just as easily could have chosen any other patch of flat grass in the surrounding prairie lands, which stretched for miles in every direction. With no reason for the town's existence—no river, hilltop, or swath of ideal topography—there was no compelling reason for people to settle there. As a result, Macon remained an out-post, an hour from the nearest midsize city, be it Champaign or Springfield, and twenty minutes from the closest small one, Decatur. By the time Sweet arrived in 1965, Macon was a largely self-sufficient town of twelve hundred, boasting one bank, two grocery stores, two barber shops, a post office, and enough jobs and farmland that residents didn't have to look elsewhere for their needs. It was possible to go months, if not years, without ever leaving the town, and many people did.

Of course, Sweet didn't know any of this as he pulled into the Macon High parking lot. He just knew he was a long way from the schools of Chicago. Certainly, Macon High wasn't much to look at: a one-story brick building that, on its north end, became the junior high. Out back, a rutty baseball diamond shared real estate with the football field. A sign out front read WELCOME TO THE HOME OF THE IRONMEN.

Strolling into the front office, Sweet was greeted by a skinny, neat woman with a brown bob haircut. It was Roger Britton's wife, Vera. Presently, Roger himself appeared. Tall and still possessed of the athletic build that made him an elite high-jumper and hurdler as a teenager, he had neatly parted, gray-flecked hair and a long, sharp nose. He struck Sweet as an easy man to get along with, and most of the time he was. What Sweet didn't know was that Britton was both a powerful, persuasive speaker and a savvy salesman, naturally attuned to the ever-changing angles of leverage in any situation. He was the kind of man who, during contract negotiations with the Macon School Board, once brought a phone into the meeting. While discussing a pay raise, the phone rang. Britton picked it up, spoke for a moment, and then placed the receiver off to the side. "Well, this is the other school," he announced, looking around the room. "They want an answer right now." Scared of losing a young, talented principal, the board OK'd his pay raise on the spot. It's a shame none of the men thought to pick up the call. If they had they'd have discovered Vera Britton on the other end.

At the moment, however, Britton was focusing his considerable talents of persuasion on luring Sweet to Macon, and he thought he knew how to do it. Walking down the white-tiled linoleum halls, past the tiny cafeteria and the chemistry and typing classrooms, Britton emphasized how, with 250 students and nineteen teachers, Macon High offered the kind of intimate, personal environment where a young teacher could have an impact. He mentioned that he was a former English professor and, upon learning that Sweet was a Cubs fans, casually mentioned that not only was he a Cardinals man himself, but if an employee were to, say, sneak off for an afternoon ball game, it wouldn't be viewed as the worst offense in the world. Finally, Britton came to a stop in a small, white-walled classroom at the southwest corner of the building. A row of large windows looked out upon empty cornfields and two dozen individual desks were arranged in rows. Blackboards covered two of the walls.

"Here's your desk, your textbooks, and your grade books," Britton said, pointing to a stack of materials on an old wooden desk. "We play poker on Wednesday nights."

Sweet stared at him. "That's it? I got the job?"

Britton nodded. He hadn't said a word about what he expected of Sweet or his curriculum, and this was by design. Britton had taught in three schools, had a master's in education from Millikin University in nearby Decatur, and was pursuing an advanced degree from Eastern Illinois University. He'd been around a lot of teachers of all inclinations and Sweet struck him as a man who valued autonomy, who perhaps harbored grand ideas about teaching. He was a man to be encouraged, not reined in.

"But I haven't accepted it yet," Sweet said.

"True, but we'd like you to," said Britton.

Sweet stood there considering the offer, and the friendly but assertive man in front of him, and he began to warm to both. It's not like I have to live in Macon the rest of my days, he thought. Life was full of opportunities; if he didn't like this one, he'd move on to the next. Besides, he was only an hour from friends and family in Champaign and, best he could tell, Britton was offering him carte blanche as a teacher. Plus, he did like poker.

Ah hell, Sweet thought, why not? He extended his hand and smiled.

Britton smiled back. "Welcome to Macon," he said. He turned to leave, took one step, and then paused. "One more thing," Britton said. "There are three taverns in the town and as teachers we don't drink at them. To set a good example, you understand."

Sweet nodded and gave Britton a look that said, Of course I understand.

A few minutes later, when the paperwork was in place, Sweet walked out to his Ford. He turned on the ignition, pulled out of the parking lot, and promptly drove down to Cole's Tavern, where he drank a beer with the locals and talked about the Chicago Bears. He then proceeded across the street to Claire's Place for another beer before dropping in at the Nite Owl on Wall Street, where he shared a Pabst with the afternoon crew, at which point Sweet felt safe in his determination that all three were fine establishments.

It wasn't Champaign or Chicago, but Macon would do.

2

Shark

Three years later and five miles up the road, a fourteen-year-old boy who would become very important to both Lynn Sweet and the town of Macon found himself in a bit of a jam. From his hiding place, he could hear sirens, could hear police yelling at him to "COME DOWN RIGHT NOW STEVE SHARTZER." He appraised his options and thought about making a run for it.

The trouble began a few months earlier, when Steve was biking through his hometown of Elwin one afternoon looking for something to do, an endeavor that usually proved futile. If Macon was a dot on the map, Elwin was a pencil point. Just off County Highway 30, Elwin harbored ninety-odd people, one gas station, one motel, and one runty grain elevator. Really, it was more of a four-way stop sign than a town. Steve's parents had moved to Elwin from Decatur when he was in the second grade to provide their two children with a quiet environment. However, it proved far too quiet for Steve's tastes, and in the intervening seven years he'd gone to great lengths to entertain himself. More often than not, this meant turning even the most mundane activity into a game.

Steve was a pure, obsessive, born competitor. When he was one, his father learned that if he rolled a small rubber ball to his son, Steve would reach up and roll it back. Not once. Not twice, but for five, ten, fifteen minutes at a time. By the time he was three, Steve could swing a bat and catch a baseball. Not allowed to leave the block, he'd sit at its end, where it abutted Fairview Park, and stare down at the expanse of grass below, watching the older boys play pickup games of baseball. Inch by inch, he'd scoot farther down that hill until, finally, he was close to enough to really watch. Always, he hoped they would ask him to play. They never did.

By four, Steve was hitting balls in the family's tiny back lot in Decatur, which was separated by a wooden fence from an alley, which in turn bordered a synagogue. One afternoon, he sent a ball soaring over the alley and crashing through one of the ornate windows of the synagogue, a mammoth blast for a child his size. The rabbis were not impressed. Neither was his father, Bob. At least not that he let on.

From an early age, Steve learned one abiding lesson from his dad: losing hurts. Bob Shartzer was a veteran of World War II and the Korean War who worked for the railroad on the St. Louis to Chicago line. He was a big man who spoke rarely, drank hard, and was not to be messed with. He saw in his son a boy with loads of talent who nonetheless needed to learn early on that life handed you nothing. So whenever he played a game with Steve, whether it was Old Maid or checkers, Bob refused to let the boy win. After each loss, Steve yelled. Then, when that proved fruitless, he began crying, sometimes for minutes on end.

"Can't you let him win, just once?" Georgianna Shartzer said to her husband.

"He'll win some day," Bob replied.

When, as a six-year-old, Steve begged his dad to erect a basketball hoop in their backyard, his father complied. Only, instead of a full set, he installed only an iron pole with a bracket at the top gripping a naked rim. "When you can make it on this I'll get you one with a backboard," Bob Shartzer said. Steve hated his dad for this, but he had no choice. So he practiced incessantly. He had one bald rubber ball and his "court" consisted of a ten-foot patch of dirt, which made dribbling problematic and, when it rained, impossible. Still, Steve made the best of it, looping in one jumper after another from most every spot in the yard. By the time, many years later, that Bob Shartzer deemed his son worthy of a backboard, Steve was accurate from anywhere inside twenty-five feet. On principle, he considered refusing it.

That backyard in Elwin was Steve's world growing up. A good half acre in size, it bordered on a cornfield and, beyond that, groves of wild elm trees. Stuck in a town with only a few boys his age, Steve collected rocks and, when he couldn't find those, stole pieces of gravel from the driveway so he could swat them with a broomstick. He fired football after football through a tire attached to a rope swing. He sat rapt in front of Jim Thorpe—All-American on the family's small color TV, then went outside and tore around the house until he threw up, believing that doing so would make him the best athlete the world had ever seen.

There was no pursuit Steve didn't think he could master. When he saw an older kid throwing the discus, he thought, Hell, I can do that. So he trudged out to the backyard lugging a high school discus and stood there, at the back of the lot, heaving the iron plate out into the cornfield, time and again. After each throw, he marked the landing spot with a cornstalk, then walked back to do it again, just trying to move that stalk. By the time he was at Macon High, where all the kids from Elwin commuted for high school, he could throw the discus more than 160 feet, a distance that would qualify him to compete at the state finals.

Baseball was his first love, though. By the time Steve was six he was playing with the eight-year-olds in Little League. By ten, when everyone had taken to simply calling him "Shark," both because of his name and his demeanor, he was bruising other boys' hands with his throws. When a kid named Stuart Arnold came out for the Elwin team, small for his age and intent on being a catcher, Steve knocked him over the first day with his fastball.

As he got older, Steve began to wonder whether there were other uses for his arm. Which was how, as a cocky, wiry eighth grader with a short brown burr haircut that invariably cow-licked in the front, he came to stop his bike outside the general store, having spied, parked off to the side, an unmanned produce truck. Peering in the back, Shartzer saw a sea of tomatoes—boxes and boxes of fat, round, red tomatoes. Each one, he noticed, was roughly the size of a baseball.

Half an hour later, Steve and a buddy were lugging a crate through town like a couple of scrawny sherpas, looking for a suitable launching spot. There weren't many options; only a few buildings in Elwin were more than one story. The grain elevator at the intersection of 51 and County Road 30, however—now that was forty feet tall. So up they scrambled, higher and higher above the two-lane road known as the Mt. Zion blacktop. There, perched on metal scaffolding, they could see many things. Including, it turned out, cars approaching from a good three miles away.

Steve informed his buddy of his intention: to hit every car not once but at least twice.

"But how are we going to do that from way up here?" his buddy said.

"I'll show you," Steve said. And with that, he took a tomato and, gauging the speed of an oncoming car, lobbed it up into the air. Then, while the tomato arced toward the asphalt, Steve reloaded and pumped two more overhand shots at the hood of the approaching sedan.

The first shot, the lob, missed. The other two did not.

It's worth considering for a moment the physics of the situation. The cars on the highway were going 60 mph, Shartzer was fifty feet away, and the tomatoes were of varying weight and size. In essence, his task was akin to a quarterback trying to properly lead a wide receiver, only the receiver happens to be standing in the open door of a passing train. Yet, again and again, Steve torched those cars. Splat. Splat. Splat. Tomato guts shot into the air; seeds sprayed across windshields.

Some of the drivers kept right on going. Others screeched to a halt, then leapt out and looked around angrily for a culprit. They never thought to look up. Even if they had, Shartzer was hidden from view.

For months, Shartzer wreaked havoc from on high. He loved the sense of danger, the power of the moment, and, most of all, the challenge. Every time he hit one of those cars, it was proof of his talent, testimony to the future that awaited him. Sometimes friends joined him; other times he chose a different launching spot. No one, it seemed, was the wiser. Down in Macon, farmers spent their afternoons muttering about how crates of tomatoes kept mysteriously disappearing from their trucks.

Eventually, however, Steve tired of tomatoes. As he saw it, they had two flaws: They were soft and they didn't always carry well.

You know what carried well? Apples.

And that's how Steve found himself jammed above the axle of a big soybean truck on the night of the Macon High prom, sirens screeching outside.

Earlier in the evening, accompanied by a kid named Waldo Ross, Shartzer had once again ascended the grain elevator. He and Waldo were having a grand time flinging fruit, detonating one shot so artfully that pulp smattered the dress of a prom-bound girl like apple shrapnel. And then they did it: Steve hit an Illinois state trooper. Not once, or twice, but with the elusive triple.

"Oh SHIT!" said Waldo, suddenly very scared.

"GodDAMN!" said Steve, suddenly very proud.

Then the cop car stopped, turned around, and came roaring back—right toward the grain elevator. With the same quickness that served him so well in so many sports, Steve scrambled through a busted-out window in the elevator and climbed atop the wheel well of one of the towering bean trucks, wedged under the motor some ten feet off the ground and prepared to hide for as long as was necessary. Until Waldo, who was neither as quick nor as creative as his friend, tried to wedge in next to him.

"Get out of here. There ain't room for both of us," Steve hissed.

But the boy kept pushing and pushing until he had all but one leg in that crevice. Moments later, the cop yanked on that leg and down came Waldo. Steve was still hidden, though. For what felt like an hour, but couldn't have been more than five minutes, Steve huddled there, scared shitless in a way only fourteen-year-old boys who've suddenly realized they're not indestructible can be. Finally, he heard Waldo's voice.

"Shark, come out. We're caught."

By this time, two more troopers had arrived, though it seemed like ten to Steve when he walked out to see all those twirling lights. What's more, the cops had their hands on their guns. Steve thought about running, but before he could move he was thrown to the ground and handcuffed.

A few hours later, Bob Shartzer showed up at the police station in Decatur to retrieve his son. After a brief lecture from a tired officer about the dangers of throwing fruit, Steve was released into the night.