Bob Smith

            I was doing some maintenance work on one of the Encyclopedias I use for my research, and in doing this I had to assign separate identities to a couple of players, or several different players, all named Bob Smith, which was complicated by the fact that one of the Bob Smiths started out as a shortstop and then  had a longer career as a pitcher.  As I was doing this I suddenly remembered something that I had not thought of for more than 50 years, and a tumbler clicked in the back of my head. 

            In the small town in which I grew up there was a guy named Bob Smith who moved to Mayetta when I was about 10 years old.  They lived on a farm just at the edge of town, nice farm with a wonderful big barn of a type that we took for granted in the 1950s because there were a lot of them, but which would now be regarded as something you would nominate for historical preservation, if it is still around.  I used to go out there and play with the kids in the family sometimes; I remember in the barn there was a hayloft that was about 12 feet high, and the ground below it was covered with hay, and we used to climb up into the hayloft and jump off again and again.  I’m sure most of you who are my age remember doing stuff like that.  I think they had five kids in the family, including three in my age range.   They had horses, and we would ride the horses, and a couple of small carriages; we’d hook up the horses and drive around the dirt roads, and they had a pretty large herd of Black Angus cattle.  Only Black Angus in the area at that time.   I can’t remember the kids names any more, except that they all started with "J"; there was a Jim and a Jane, and an older girl named Juanita, which is just Spanish "Jane", so they had two Janes, which I was aware even when I was ten years old.

            Anyway, one day the town woke up and the family was gone, lock, stock and carriages.  Bob was kind of a flashy guy, with a big Stetson hat and big cowboy boots and a big red truck.  It turned out he had been living on credit and running up debts all over town, and when it was clear he wasn’t going to get ahead he just split.   Everybody did business on credit at that time; we all knew each other, and people didn’t have cash, unless it was payday; mostly they just lived on credit and paid off when they could.   One Friday Bob went around town paying everybody off with checks; on Monday morning he was gone and the checks all bounced.  Bob Smith was the only guy I ever heard of who ran out on his debts.   It was the talk of the town for a while.   I never realized that you could do that.  He came back one afternoon a couple of years later, walked around with a smile on his face and said hello to everybody, then he was gone again.

            Anyway, I was sorting out the Bob Smiths in baseball history, and I suddenly realized, 50-some years after the fact:  I’ll bet his name wasn’t Bob Smith.   It’s the near-ultimate anonymous name.  You’d have a hard time doing skip-tracing on Bob Smith, because there are Bob Smiths everywhere.  I’ll bet his name was. ..you know, Ernest Culpepper or something, and he had probably skipped out on his debts at least once before, if not a dozen times.  And the kids named Jim and Jerry and Jane and Juanita. . . I’d half-bet those weren’t their names, at all; their names were probably Sally and Timmy and Ernest Jr. or something.  They were probably running from their last set of debts and, in the middle of the night, their Mom (whose name was something like Jacqueline when I knew her) had probably assigned them all names.   They moved on and became Marilyn and Margaret and Maryann and Marty and Mike.  I never realized that until right now. 

            A young person wouldn’t understand that.  In those days your name was just whatever you said your name was.   That was the legal standard.  You didn’t have to show a birth certificate to enroll in school or check into a hospital or play on a kid’s baseball team or anything, or even to get a driver’s license.  When I was working as a security guard, probably 1976, I fell and broke an arm.  I was working for Pinkerton’s, but on the property of Stokely-Van Camp, and both Pinkerton’s and Stokely’s offered to pay my medical bills, which would be quite a bit different than the way it works now.  They sent me to a doctor named Doctor Bray; all I remember is the name and the fact that he had bright red hair, but anyway a year later Dr. Bray also left town in the middle of the night, owing people money all over town.   Hard to believe now, isn’t it, that a doctor would just pull up and jump ship in the middle of the night?   Wasn’t like it is now; no internet and no computers, it wasn’t easy to track people down.  

            Anyway, a year or two later, I was married, and my wife worked as a legal secretary for the law firm which was hired to try to chase him down and recover some of the money that he owed people.   They invested hundreds of man hours looking through records, filed all kinds of legal papers, hired a private detective agency, never did find him.   And then one day a young lawyer with the firm was looking through a stack of affidavits in an unrelated case, and—BOOM—there he was; Dr. Whatever-his-name-was Bray; I think I remember his first name but I’d better not say.  He was in Seattle, working as a doctor, and had filed an affidavit about having treated someone for injuries, never guessing that the affidavit would find its way halfway across the continent to the people who were looking for him.   Hard to believe now, isn’t it?