Irish Flats

IT WOULD BE historically interesting in sportsdom could a census be taken of all the former star amateur baseball players who have been attending games at Lawrence stadium. Among them would be Jim McClure, livestock dealer in Wichita. Jim used to be a champ pitcher for Calista and later the “Irish Flats” star twirled many winning games for Kingman and Norwich.

I only have a photocopy of the clipping. There’s no date or headline, no idea even what newspaper it’s from (though probably one of the Wichita papers, as Lawrence Stadium was in Wichita, and probably from the 1900s or 1910s). Jim McClure, the “Irish Flats,” was my grandfather, my father’s father. But I never knew him. He died (“with his boots on,” as he had wished and as was noted in his funeral notice) when I was nine. I only have two specific memories of him: The first was my father taking me to the Wichita Stock Yards to see him at work, herding cattle on the wooden walkways above the pens, in his red flannel shirt, overalls, and muddied work boots. The second was fishing at a farm pond, my catching a large (at least to me) snapping turtle, his landing it once we saw it wasn’t the enormous fish I thought it to be, and his eviscerating it and making it into turtle soup that night.

But I really never knew him. I certainly never knew he was “Irish Flats,” a star “twirler” in amateur Kansas baseball. And it makes me wonder what my granddaughter Ellie will know of me in 50 years or so, long after I’m gone. Will she know that I played in several obscure rock and folk groups in the 1960s? That I had several poems and short stories published in small literary journals in the 1970s? That I had a couple of plays produced, and directed a few myself, in the 1980s? Will she find a vague newspaper clipping about when I was in my 20s or 30s and think, “Whoa, that’s my Grandpa?” I hope so. But I hope also that she has more than just two scant memories of her and me together, that she can remember a series of good times over years of our being together, times where I can become a living memory for her and not just the enigmatic star twirler “Irish Flats.”