Mud Hens and Rainbows

It’s on the record that on June 25, 2017, the Class AAA Toledo Mud Hens lost 4-1 to the Class AAA Columbus Clippers, a fact little noted around these parts unless you happen to be an avid fan of their Major League Baseball parent clubs, the Detroit Tigers or Cleveland Indians.

But while the Mud Hens were playing 430 miles away in Ohio, about 60 descendants of a Toledo player were gathering in Crestwood’s Whitecliff Park, south of St. Louis, for a reunion. Funny, crazy Irish people — my people — gathered at Pavilion No. 3, and it was glorious.

That the pavilion lies across the parking lot from a pristine baseball field was no accident because of this: A record on www.baseballreference.com for one Tom Clifford, who played professionally for five seasons from 1895-1900 in places such as Shreveport, La., Paducah, Ken., Peoria, Ill., and Toledo, Ohio.

In between attempting a professional baseball career, the son of Irish immigrants learned how to be a grain inspector and met and married in 1899 a woman named Mary Kennedy. After that, children — eight of them from 1900-1915, seven boys, Thomas, John, Edward, William, Richard, Hugh and Joseph, and one girl, who died in early childhood.

The official baseball record stops in 1900 after the birth of the first child, a boy also named Thomas. Apparently, family won out. Either that, or the reality of a .225 career batting average, probably due to the fact he couldn’t hit a curveball. (It’s always the curveball’s fault.) But at least Tom Clifford gave it a shot, leaving baseball behind in his DNA for what is now five generations.

Six of Tom and Mary’s eight children survived into adulthood. The boy Thomas, family legend has it, drowned in the Mississippi River on the day of his First Communion. Of the six remaining boys, four would produce among them 15 children, 14 of whom are still with us. It was the children and grandchildren of those 15 who gathered wearing t-shirts in colors distinguishing the four families. The “Eds” wore red, the “Bills” wore green, the “Riches” wore yellow and the “Joes” wore red, a regular rainbow coalition.

Isn’t that what family is? A mixture of young and old, near and far, colorful and quirky. The oldest, Patty Reckamp, is in her 80s; the youngest were in their 1s. Relatives came from Atlanta, Ga., Chesapeake Va., and from just down the road. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect, nor could the company.

It’s a roll of the dice whenever extended family gets together. But nobody got into any fights nor offered a cold shoulder. People were genuinely happy to be in each other’s company, if only for a short while. Why? Family is what grounds you. It’s good to be reminded of who you are and where you come from before you can figure out where to go next.

If Tom Clifford could have hit the curveball, imagine how different the family might have been. But he couldn’t, and here we were five generations later, still together in the shadow of our own Field of Dreams.

A version of this was published in the South County Times July 7, 2017.

More on Tom Clifford’s baseball career

Tom Clifford was an original Mud Hen, quite possibly a reason the picture above exists. For it was in 1896, according to the Toledo club website, that the professional “base ball” team adopted the moniker that would become one of the most unique minor league nicknames in baseball history. Among the club’s most noted alumni are Jim Thorpe, Kirby Puckett, Curtis Granderson and Brandon Inge (Cardinal fans will remember him as the final strikeout at the hands of Adam Wainwright in the 2006 World Series.)

The record referenced above has Tom Clifford playing five seasons throughout the Midwest. Yet there may have been more. His Dec. 20, 1940, obituary in the St. Louis Star Times, written because at the time of his death he was an elected official — constable of the Seventh District — adds more: a managerial stint in New Orleans and a final attempt with the St. Louis Browns in 1904. I’m still working on verifying those details. But that doesn’t take away the thrill of seeing a name in a box score or in the text of a story pictured from an 1896 clipping in the Fort Wayne Gazette titled, “Wonderful.” It’s an account of a game between the Mud Hens and the Fort Wayne Farmers and is must-read not only for the prose, but for the details of the umpiring. You think journalism is biased today? Read it.

And then there’s this: A single line on the bottom row of a 1900 census book, the Twelfth Census of the United States. Amid information about Thomas E. Clifford’s birth (May 1875); birthplace of his parents (Ireland, in both cases); and his status in the household (head) on O’Fallon Street in the 16th Ward in north St. Louis is a column marked “occupation.” There, it says simply, “ball-player.”

Baseball is clearly in the DNA. Here’s a picture of a baseball team, circa 1920s, with two of Tom’s sons, my maternal grandfather Bill Clifford (kneeling third from left) and his younger brother Rich Clifford (third from right):