The Little League Star Who Left Fayetteville

Every so often the topic of playing Little League baseball during the good old days (the last half of the ‘50’s) pops up on Facebook, stimulated by the post of a team picture or the mention of a name. It is of interest, of course, only to folks who were on one of the Fayetteville teams in those years or who know someone who was.

In talking about the good old Little League days, the conversation usually turns to recollections of some of the memorable boys we played against. There was Justin Daniel, the man among children, who hit home runs not only over the fence, but also over the road behind the fence, endangering the windows of a distance apartment building. His fastball, thrown from a mound only 46 feet from the plate, lived in the nightmares of more than a few of us who had to bat against him and feared for our lives. Then there was Lloyd Wolf, a short, freckled, thick left-hand hitter famous for regularly hitting balls into the City Park swimming pool behind the right-field fence. Like him, Charlie Jordan, a raw country southpaw with a mighty swing, also deposited quite a few balls into the water. (These boys must have made the adults who ran the league cringe; two new baseballs were allotted to each game, and they were no good when soaked.)

Among the pantheon of remarkable players from 1956 to 1959 was a boy named Richard Quackenbush, who impressed with both his strong arm and his hitting power. When his name arises and his athletic ability is discussed, there inevitably follows a statement like, “I wondered what happened with him.” We don’t know because he moved away from Fayetteville with him family before the 1959 season, when he would have been twelve years old (at the time, Little League players were between the ages or 8 and 12.) When he left, most of us lost touch with him, given our youth and the comparatively primitive avenues of communications at the time. 

Picture in the 1967 Oregon State University Yearbook

Curious about where Richard and his family moved and what he did after he got there, I decided to try to see what information I could track down about him. The two pieces of information that I had were his age (born, likely, in 1947) and the someone’s memory that the Quackenbushes had moved to the Pacific Northwest. 

With a little research on Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com, I located Richard (born August 12, 1947) in Salem, Oregon. Fortunately, the Salem newspaper, the Capital Journal, is available on Newspapers.com; most of the information about him comes from that newspaper.

Richard and his family moved from Fayetteville to Salem because his father, a career army officer, was from there and wanted to live there after his retirement. Lt. Col. Roger W. Quackenbush served in the army for 27 years, beginning during World War II, and earned two silver stars and two bronze stars for valor.

Richard played for the North Salem High School Vikings basketball, football, and baseball teams. His name was regularly in the paper for exploits in those sports, especially baseball. For the football team, he played end, and in a 1964 action shot published in the local paper, he shows up as number 80. In another newspaper picture published in 1984, he is playing on the Viking’s basketball team.

 

Picture caption: North Salem's senior fullback Dave Young (30) crashes over from the one yard line for the final Viking touchdown in the closing minutes of Friday night's North Salem - Grants Pass game at Bennett Field. North's Rich Quackenbush (80) is in the background 

Picture caption: Study in finger exercises is executed by Dave Olson (46) of the South Salem Saxons and Bud Allen (33) of North Salem during last night;s District 8 A-1 finale at South Saxon. North's Rich Quackenbush pokes a paw over Olsen's ? as the combatants battle for a rebound. (I think Quackenbush is the middle person in the picture)

He, of course, excelled in high school baseball and in the summer baseball leagues. He played third base and occasionally pitched. His heroics over the years are described in many different newspaper articles. For example, one article describes a grand slam home run he hit to win a high school game. Another tells of a no hitter he pitched, his team winning 20 – 0. 

After graduating from high school in 1965, Richard attended Oregon State University and played baseball on its team as a third basemen The newspaper article in the Corvallis Gazette, dated August 2, 1965, that announced he would play OSU baseball noted, “Quackenbush has a cannon for an arm drawing ohs from the crowd every time he cuts loose” (it is not stated if he received a baseball scholarship).

At OSU, Richard majored in business and technology. Having taken ROTC, he was commissioned as a armory officer in December, 1969 after his graduation, then returned to OSU in 1973 to study for an advanced degree in criminology. In 1975, he was married at a wedding in Briarcliff Manor, New York. An article describing the wedding said the couple was settling in Ossining, N.Y. 

At some point after that, he returned to Salem and, it seems, taught special education there for many years. A 1996 picture shows him as a special education teacher in the Development Learning Center of Whiteacre Middle School in Keizer, Oregon, a small town just north of Salem.

In 2003, the local newspaper reported he had made a hole in one at a nearby golf course.

  

This glimpse into the life of the former Fayetteville Little Leaguer, though incomplete, is enough to make us regret that he and his family did not stay around so that we could have played with him on different junior high and high school teams. Also the information reassures us that Richard has had a good life after leaving the city, full of accomplishments and successes. Of course to most of us in Fayetteville who knew him -- or knew of him -- Richard Quackenbush will always in our memories be a young boy in a Goff-McNair uniform throwing hard strikes and hitting long homers.  

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For more on the Fayetteville Little League in the late 1950s, go to this link:  http://www.eclecticatbest.com/2016/01/playing-in-little-leagues-mcilroy-bank.html 

Viva Vigo's Public Art!

Public art is often like Muzak: it exists but you hardly notice. It’s bland, easy to ignore, and forgettable. Personally, I prefer public art that demands attention because it is startling, provocative, or even shocking. It also helps if such art exhibits some beauty even if it is an enigmatic sort.

Gobsmacking public art in the United States is found mostly in larger coastal and university cities where a good portion on the citizenry is open minded and not offended by things that are “different.”  Medium and smaller cities are less likely to spend money on, or give their imprimatur to, unusual art that would challenge, maybe even offend, local citizens who would decry spending THEIR TAX DOLLARS! on any art that did not include a cross; depict Jesus, a saint, or a hero; or contain an accurate representation of a pleasant aspect of reality. While, most public art is bought with private funds, its location in public areas nonetheless gives each citizen the right to complain.  

 

Henry Moore's statute in downtown Little Rock, 1978

When I was living in Little Rock in the 1970s, a controversy arose over a sculpture bought by a quasi-public organization and placed in a very public location. It was 1978, and the Metrocenter Development District was trying to revitalize the downtown. It got authorization to create a pedestrian zone and to place an important piece of art at its center, Main and Capitol Streets. Following the advice of advising experts, it bought (with funds coming from a property tax on businesses in the district) a large abstract sculpture by the renown Henry Moore. It was titled, “Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge.” The cost was $185,000. For more on the installation of the Henry Moore sculpture in Little Rock see these links: http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?search=1&entryID=2131 and https://littlerocklove.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/a-silent-sentinal/

A hullabaloo followed, with a flow of complaints about the sculpture; some people complained that it did not look like anything. “What is it?” they would ask. Also some folks complained about its cost, ridiculing the idiots who made the decision to spend a vast amount of money on such trash, even though general taxpayers did not pitch in a penny. Others suggested the art was, at best, a symbol of the folly of over-educated liberals and, and worst, of the decline and fall of civilization. 

When the pedestrian zone was abolished in 1999, the sculpture was moved a couple of blocks to an empty patch in front of a bank. In April of this year, the city of Little Rock acquired it in return for a piece of downtown land. The city will move it to the renovated Arkansas Art Center. The assessed value of the sculpture is about $5 million.   

 

"Iron Horse," in exile on a farm near Watkinsville, GA

I encountered another example of scorned public art when I was living in Athens, Georgia. One day I was driving on a rural road south of Watkinsville, which is a short drive from Athens, when a colleague in the car yelled at me to look to the left. There in a corn field, about 150 yards from the road, was a large stylized statue of a horse (named Iron Horse, or Pegasus without Wings). My colleague then told me the story of how in 1954 the sculpture had been installed on the University of Georgia campus, but many students hated it. After it had been vandalized a few times, the head of the art school had it secretly loaded on a truck one night and taken it to the farm of a man who was happy to host it on his land. The statue, owned by UGA, is still there, but now the university also owns the land that it uses as an experimental farm.  

 

A view of Vigo from the waterfront

Fortunately, despite resistance to it, Gobsmacking public art can be found diverse places throughout the world, including some medium and smaller cities scattered throughout Europe. I was reminded of that when I traveled to Vigo, a city of about 300,000 people located on the Atlantic coast of Spain. I knew also nothing about the city before I arrived there in May, and chose it mainly because it was a convenient stop after a long train trip through the mountains from Burgos.

I quickly started enjoying my visit to the city, in large part due to views of its mountainous residential areas sliding down to the beautiful waterfront, but also because of its public art. Much of the waterfront is a working port with cranes and warehouses, but after walking down the hill from my hotel, I saw the beginning of a long park and walked toward it. As I got closer, I spotted something that caused me to blurt, “What the ….” It was a sculpture of a swimmer taking laps in the concrete. It definitely came from the School of Gobsmacking Art.  

 

First glimpse of "The Swimmer'"

"The Swimmer" by Franciso Leiro

Walking down further the promenade along the waterfront, it did not take me long to get to another strange site. It was a statue of a man, Jules Verne, that seemed quite conventional until you noticed that he was sitting on a huge squid. Unconventional and surprising, I was delighted to see it. The statue subject is Jules Verne, whose book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, was set in Vigo Bay. If you want to know about the squid, view this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhyuey4xU3Q

 

Statue of Jules Verne stilling on a squid by Vigo Bay

Walking a few more minutes on the promenade, I came to a plaza in front of a waterfront shopping center that is adjacent to the city’s port, where a gigantic cruise ship was moored. As passengers departed from the ship and walked onto the plaza, they had a surprise in front of them: a large sculpture of the head of a woman (or maybe its a man) whose face has smacked the ground. I thought its name should be “faceplant,” but it turns out to be “Leap.” It was created by Francisco Leiro, a Galician born in 1945. He is the artist who sculpted the Swimmer that I saw earlier. The faceplant piece certainly attracted the attention of the disembarking passengers. After first examining the sculpture myself, I found a nearby place to sit to watch the reactions of people when they first walked by it.

 

"The Leap" by Francisco Leiro

View of "The Leap" from the back

Going up the hill from the port area, through a nicely maintained Old City that gives a taste of Vigo as it looked a century ago, I came to the most bizarre of the city’s public art. It located in a small square next to one of the city’s busiest streets. It is also the creation of Leiro, his most audacious. This sculpture is mounted on high double columns. Its name is “Merman.” The name explains the scales on the man’s chest, the conventional face, and the strange body. For an interesting discussion of the statute, go to this link: https://littlerocklove.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/a-silent-sentinal/ The "merman" sculpture is another piece of Vigo’s art that will be hard to forget. It definitely would not be a hit in Little Rock or Athens, Ga.

 

"Merman" by Francisco Leiro

I have to say that Vigo’s public art certainly enlivened my strolls around the city. While I was most attracted to the Gobsmacking public art, I also enjoyed some of the more conventional art, such as a pair of statues near the shoreline facing each other. One depicted a fisherman returning from the sea carrying some fish, the other his family awaiting his return. These sculptures are touching in a familiar way.

 

Fisherman

Fisherman's family looks for him

With its numerous and diverse pieces of art scattered throughout the city, thanks is owed to Vigo for creating a stimulating experience for strollers. Viva Vigo and its taste in public art!