GERALD WAS the first of two children born to Natalie and Jake Foos. Gerald was five years older than his brother, Jack, and while they were similarly reared, attended the same schools, and bore a physical resemblance—dark hair, dark eyes, pale coloring, big-boned, and tall—their difference in age and personality contributed to their not knowing one another very well. They had neither a rivalry nor a fraternal bond. In school they were never classmates, teammates, or confidants. Quietly, they went their own way. It was as if each were an only child.
Gerald was by nature a “loner,” as he acknowledged in his writing. When he was not busy with farm chores, or spying on his aunt, or collecting cards, or riding his horse to grade school each morning, he would often “look up at the sky and know there was something out there for me.” He sometimes carried a juvenile novel about the Wild West, or Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he had borrowed from the town library. His mother had encouraged him to join the library, and while he sat at one of the tables he would glance up at the cases and see hundreds of books with brightly colored spines.
This was an astonishing sight to a boy who lived in a farm house where books are almost unknown . . . in a rural community lacking a common culture or aesthetic tradition, in the aftermath of the Great Depression in which people like my family and relatives worked, and worked, and had little time for reading more than newspapers . . . I was mesmerized by books, and what might be called “the life of the mind,” and the life that was not manual labor, or farming, or housework, but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities.
The fact that Gerald had a younger brother was rarely referred to in his writing—except for one occasion when his parents asked that he share his bicycle with Jack, which he did willingly, and on another occasion when Gerald described the two of them standing in proximity to one another outside the house while their father, a onetime semipro baseball player, was trying to teach Gerald how to bunt.
My father’s arms are around me. His hands are covering my hands, gently pushing them upward on my sturdy Louisville Slugger baseball bat. “You’ve got to choke up,” dad tells me. “The bunt is all about control.” My brother is mowing the front lawn, and he doesn’t pay any attention to dad and me. “A bunt,” dad says, “is a thing of beauty, an opportunity of something good to occur in the future.”
Maybe he focused exclusively on bunting because we couldn’t hit away in the small backyard of that little house. I think it was more than that, though. The bunt isn’t a game changer, like a home run or a triple. Instead it nudges things along, and keeps the ball as far as possible from where the opponents want it to be, a strategy, brains over brawn, and something my smart dad understood.
My brother and I haven’t grown up to be Major League long ball hitters. Neither of us has changed the world. In the past few years, we’ve lost jobs, lost our swings, lost our confidence, lost our faith, lost dad. But thanks to him, we are masters of making do, stretching things out, getting the most from what opportunity offers. At keeping it going with nothing more than grit in our hearts, and our grip on the bat, ready for the bunt, that dad taught us.
Gerald and his brother Jack were both excellent all-around high school athletes, with Gerald being better in baseball, football, and track, and Jack (two inches taller than his six-foot older brother) superior at basketball and he was also one of the best discus throwers in the state.