Field of Dreams: Truth better than Fiction

[Infobahn]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/509/5481156.html

Chisholm's Doc Graham: One-game flop, but lifetime hero

CHISHOLM, MINN. -- In the movie "Field of Dreams," the elderly Doc Graham asks a visitor to Chisholm named Ray if there could possibly be enough magic in the moonlight to make long-buried wishes come true.

In real life, that question has no verifiable answer. But this much is true, verifiable and pretty remarkable:

There is indeed enough magic to transform a small town's long-buried doctor into a famous literary and cinematic figure. There is enough magic to resurrect him simply for his poetic nickname and obscure moment in baseball, and then immortalize him for a lifetime of kindness that almost no one knew outside the little mining town he loved.

Today, busloads of Chisholm residents are descending from their home on the Iron Range to the Metrodome, to help the Minnesota Twins honor Archibald (Moonlight) Graham on the 100th anniversary of his single brief appearance in the major leagues.

The travelers will include Veda Ponikvar, the retired Chisholm newspaper editor who barely mentioned Graham's baseball career when she wrote his obituary in 1965 and a separate editorial titled: "His was a Life of Greatness."

"Long before the movie, I recognized that he was someone very special," said Ponikvar, 85, the inspiration for the newspaper editor-character in the movie.

In the past few weeks Ponikvar has fielded questions from television networks and other national media outlets calling about the centennial. She never gets tired of talking about Doc.

She may have said it best in her much-photocopied editorial: "There were times when children could not afford eyeglasses or milk or clothing because of the economic upheavals, strikes and depressions.

"Yet no child was ever denied these essentials because in the background there was a benevolent, understanding Doctor Graham. Without a word, without any fanfare or publicity, the glasses or the milk or the ticket to the ball game found their way into the child's pocket."

Ponikvar is scheduled to participate in the first-pitch ceremonies before today's game between the Twins and Kansas City on Moonlight Graham Day at the Metrodome.

"It's an honor, but I'm nervous about whether I can throw it that far," she said. "My nephew is helping me practice."

Road to Chisholm

On June 29, 1905, Moonlight Graham -- so nicknamed, some say, because of his insomnia -- made his single major-league appearance.

The North Carolina native played right field for the New York Giants for one or two innings and never got a chance to bat. Seeing his baseball career going nowhere, he quit to become a physician. In 1909 he took a train to Chisholm to answer an ad placed by Rood Hospital.

Hundreds of baseball rookies played in only one game and never got immortalized on film. The magic in Moonlight's case happened when his nickname intrigued W.P. Kinsella in the 1970s, as he thumbed through the Baseball Encyclopedia.

He was researching his book "Shoeless Joe," which became the movie "Field of Dreams." He later said he wondered what becomes of a man who finally grasps his dream, only to watch it slip away.

On a hot Friday afternoon in the mid-1970s, several years before the book came out, a 1930s-era rumble-seat Ford pulled up in front of the Chisholm Free Press.

The men who got out introduced themselves to Ponikvar as W.P. Kinsella and J.D. Salinger, whom she immediately recognized as the reclusive author of "Catcher in the Rye." They wanted help finding Doc Graham.

They seemed stunned to learn that he'd been dead for a decade.

They hung around for three days, Ponikvar recalled, filling notebooks with anecdotes, discovering that far from fading into embittered nothingness in Chisholm, Graham blossomed into greatness.

Kinsella later said there was no need to fictionalize Doc Graham's life; it was better than anything he could make up. As Burt Lancaster said, while portraying him in the movie: "Son, if I'd only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy."

All his children

While still new in Chisholm, he grew sweet on Alicia Madden, a schoolteacher. She was a farmer's daughter from Rochester, and they married in 1915.

They never had children. Instead, they showered their affection on every child in town -- he as the full-time doctor for the public schools for more than 40 years, she as the director of countless community plays.

They built a house that still stands in southeast Chisholm, on the fringe of a neighborhood known as Pig Town, for the livestock kept by the hardscrabble immigrant miners' families.

"That was Doc," said Bob McDonald, who grew up in Chisholm and has coached high school basketball there for 44 years. "He and Alicia could have lived up with the high and mighty on Windy Hill, but they chose to be among the common people."

McDonald remembers a wiry, athletic man, dapper in an ever-present black hat and black trench coat, walking everywhere and always swinging an umbrella. Yes, he said, Alicia did always wear blue.

On the opening night of all of her plays, Graham would sit in the same seat in the back of the high school auditorium, a dozen roses in his lap, Ponikvar said.

People were poor, but schools used mining company taxes to meet needs. Under Doc's care, kids got free eyeglasses, toothbrushes and medical care. He lectured them on nutrition, inoculated them, rode their team buses, made 20-year charts of their blood pressure, swabbed their sore throats, made house calls if they stayed home sick.

He bought apartment houses but charged rock-bottom rents, and no rent to a single mother and her eight children, Ponikvar remembers.

"Doc became a legend," she wrote when he died. "He was the champion of the oppressed. Never did he ask for money or fees."

Pilgrims to Chisholm are sometimes disappointed to find that Doc Graham isn't in a cemetery there. Alicia buried him in the Madden family plot at Calvary Cemetery in Rochester, according to her grandniece, Lynn Didier.

Didier inherited her grandaunt's possessions, including a love letter from young Archie and his picture in a baseball uniform, a man who never could have envisioned his strange, wonderful path to immortality.

"Now and then," she said, "younger family members will call me up and ask, 'Are we really related to Moonlight Graham?' "

[eo000]

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[ReBurn]

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[Jessie]

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Need a tissue?

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[eo000]

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[ReBurn]

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[eo000]

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Need a tissue?

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[Infobahn]

Well, there goes that moment.

[ReBurn]

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