By Dan Mackie

For the Valley News

 Baseball is back, tra la, like sunshine, songbirds, and the evergreen dreams of youth.

 Baseball is a conquering hero. Winter is vanquished, and, if my annual prediction is correct, the New York so-called Yankees will meet a similar fate — their season will end in an autumnal flood of tears. Come World Series time inglorious pigeons will rattle around a silent Yankee Stadium, pecking at the greasy leavings of a wasted season.

 The Red Sox will win with power pitching, stout defense, and enough timely hits to make opposing teams limp away from Fenway series satisfied if they have taken 1 out of 4, or — miracle! — 1 of 3.

 Grizzled managers who thought they had seen it all will say, “There goes the best team I ever saw.’’ Visiting players will agree. “The better team won today. I just may hang them up (retire) and call it a day.”

 This is the year that the Sox hitters will rediscover that Boston baked beans build muscles better than chemicals. Despite some press box grumbling about side effects, the Beantown mashers will send home runs soaring. Sports writers will adopt the slogan, “A Mighty Wind.’’

 Excellence won’t stop there. Oft-injured J.D. Dew, the Red Sox right-fielder, will unveil his own plan for reforming healthcare. Republicans and Democrats alike will see that this was the solution they were hoping for, and will adopt it by acclamation. “Being on the bench gave me time to think about this,’’ the modest Drew will explain. Follicularly challenged second baseman Dustin Pedroia will discover a cure for baldness by mixing tobacco juice, coffee grinds, and mud collected from the depths of Boston Harbor. “I get restless, so I invent stuff,’’ the ever-peppy Pedroia will say. General Manager Theo Epstein will volunteer his services to the nation and solve the economic crisis. He will sum up his efforts: “I traded some hedge fund managers for GM executives, moved Warren Buffet from Omaha to Washington, and put Apple’s Steve Jobs in charge of California.’’ President Obama will say, “God Bless America, and God bless the Red Sox.’’

  Or, I may be getting carried away. It happens every spring.

 I have been following baseball, sometimes closely, sometimes less closely, for decades. I’m fairly certain that I saw Ted Williams play in a night game, but we were exiled in right-field grandstand seats that my family purchased through a First National Store promotion. I wouldn’t have known Ted Williams from Fred Williams at that distance, but my father told me he was over there in left, that he never tipped his cap to the fans, and that he (my father, not Ted) wasn’t going to buy us hot dogs since we had brought perfectly good bologna sandwiches that were just as tasty as Fenway Franks.

 The Red Sox of my youth were dreadful, but they seemed star-crossed unlucky to me. I saw few games on television, and got most of my information from the radio broadcasts, where they followed the song’s advice to “accent-u-ate the positive, e-lim-inate the negative.” It was the gospel according to Gowdy, as in broadcaster Curt Gowdy.

 I checked the box scores in the newspaper nearly every day. Amid a lineup of mediocrities, the Sox had Pete Runnels, a singles-hitter who contended for the batting title. It gave me pleasure as I gobbled my Cheerios to see that Runnels had gone 2-for-3, or 3-for-4, and that his average had nudged higher.

  I was baffled why the Sox were so bad and the Yankees so good, and noted that the New Yorkers had awfully good nicknames, such as Yogi, Whitey and Casey. Mickey, too.

 I was a loyalist. When we bought baseball cards I traded away Yankees stars Mantle and Maris — yuck — for our own Don Buddin (the pride of Turbeville, S.C.) and Chuck Shilling. This was like trading a Cadillac for an old Rambler rusting in a Vermont farmyard. Some of the Sox infielders of the era, in fact, had the mobility of cars on blocks.

 Despite the ignoble start, I stuck with the Red Sox, and had to wait only 40 years or so for a World Championship, to see the taming of the monster. With one fell swoop, and then another, the sting of historic failures was soothed, the weight of Babe Ruth was off our shoulders. Fenway fans no longer gather like a support group with vendors crying, “Hey, get your Prozac here!’’

  I still dislike the Yankees, but it’s out of duty and tradition, not passion. As for baseball itself, I have come to appreciate its drowsy pace. Many games have no drama at all, and the radio announcers turn to storytelling, which suits me. But that sleepiness can end in a flash, like waking from a snooze to find the house on fire, or the bases loaded. The season comes along slowly like a garden patch, and it’s a long wait for the payoff, or playoff.

 I won’t apologize for irrational exuberance. If philosopher Rene Descarte had grown up in New England he might have put it like this: I hope; therefore I am. Or in the original Latin: Sox ergo sum.

 The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.

By Dan Mackie
For the Valley News
I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid, but most of it is as forgotten as the battered Barbies, deflated footballs and cockeyed kitchen chairs that litter the Lebanon landfill.
I can hardly recall what programs I liked. I liked whatever was on, I guess, or made peace with it. We had less than a handful of stations — only two with perfect signals — so you watched Bonanza or you watched Disney, or when all else failed you did your homework.
One highlight, though, came to mind recently with the death of Fess Parker, the actor who played Davy Crockett, one of my boyhood black-and-white TV heroes. In those days kids had to endure lots of programming aimed at their parents — Steve and Eydie singing a medley from Camelot, or newsmen in eyeglasses talking about steel prices—but Davy Crockett was all ours.
Crockett, if you are too young to know, was “king of the wild frontier.’’ According to hit song lyrics, he was “born on a mountaintop in Tennessee’’ and “kilt him a bar (bear) when he was only 3.” Thus are heroes made.
He wore buckskin clothes and a coonskin cap, and cradled a musket rather than a cell phone in his arms. That was no fanny pack at his hip — it was a powder horn.
Davy went on to have a number of TV adventures, some semi-comical, some soft-core violent (in those days you could stab an adversary to death without drawing blood and the deceased merely seemed to faint). It all was utterly entertaining to an 8-year-old boy. When Davy (spoiler alert) died at the Alamo while whacking Mexicans with his musket, I knew I was going to miss the big fella.
A couple of years ago I picked up a VHS copy of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier for less than a buck. It sat unwatched until last week, when Parker’s passing reminded me I had it.
Fortunately, we have a video machine that still works, though its front door is permanently open and you have to put a tape in two or three times before it catches. I unhitched the DVD player and reattached the VHS box, which makes strange clunky noises and lightly hisses. To prepare myself, I had read a little about the real Davy Crockett on the internet. (Wikipedia is the lazy researcher’s friend.) I hit play and hurried back to the couch — we’ve long lost the VHS remote — and returned to Davy and Disney land.
The video was in color, although I’m quite sure I first saw it in black and white, since my family wasn’t an early adopter of the newfangled color sets. But this time I watched Davy on a medium-big LCD TV, not high-def, but with a lot more def than our old Zenith.
Davy Crockett is still Davy Crockett, but 8-year-old Danny Mackie is long gone. Still, I kind of liked it.
Davy Crockett a la Disney was a man of few words, and those few he uttered were often ungrammatical. He “reckoned’’ a lot. “I reckon I gotta learn you how,’’ he said to his sidekick, George Russell, played by a grizzled Buddy Ebsen, who later played Jed Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies. “I ain’t much at speechifying,’’ Davy began when he was thrust into frontier politics.
Davy was my kind of hero. He was good-natured and slow to anger, but whupped those what needed whupping, to express it as he might have. At the beginning he was an Indian fighter, but later became an Indian friend, after he bested a chief in a hatchet fight and gave him a lecture about white man’s law being good for all. Davy was an optimist.
As a boy I wasn’t bothered by the fact that Davy may have had commitment issues. In the Disney story he comes back home to his family only for a couple of days before he gets “restless,’’ and heads off to war, or another frontier, or another miniseries.
In fact, his pretty wife dies from fever when he’s away and Davy shakes it off right quick. “I just need to be alone fer awhile,’’ he says, and briefly broods by a tree. No grief work for Davy. His “young ’uns’’ are never heard from again.
Things were simpler then. Bad people were “varmints.’’ The settlers in Texas were, in Davy’s summation, “Americans in trouble.’’ As I mentioned, death in battle didn’t seem so bad; Indians or Mexicans who were shot just tumbled off their horses onto the ground, as if they’d fallen off a playset.
The real David Crockett lived an interesting life. After his pioneer phase he was elected to the U.S. Congress, but fell out with the Andrew Jackson Democrats and lost a bid for re-election. He told the voters, “you may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.’’ Those are few words, but they are good ones.
The rest is history, or history with lyrics: The Ballad of Davy Crockett. Three versions of the song made the Billboard charts in the 1950s, when the Crockett craze was at full roar. It doesn’t have a great melody, and you can’t really dance to it, but me and ol’ Davy never was much for dancin’ anyway.
The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.