Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 74, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 March 1912 — MANAGER OF PIRATES SAYS BUT LITTLE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

MANAGER OF PIRATES SAYS BUT LITTLE

By HOMER CROY.

If you will look it up in the die- \ tionary you will find it this way: |gj Fradclarke: (noun) see Old Gibraltar. And then if you will turn to the o’s you’ll read: 1 §|TO7 Old Gibraltar: (noun) see fredclarke. That’s what he is—Old Faithful. You can depend on him 364 days out of the year and if he turns up miss- ... In* on the three hundred and sixty-] fifth you may know some doctor has | a thermometer under his tongue and hia thumb on his pulse. .] i He |vas born on a iarm in Madison Count/, lowa, thirty-nine years ago, and did not talk until he was old r enough to harness a horse alone, and v. .sever since has he said more than three sentences and four goldarnits la succession. Before he utters a complete sentence outside the ball park; he gets out the screw-driver, t£e die cutter and the alligator wrench, goes all over his vocal apparatus, chokes once, strains for-a start and then puts a period at the end of the fifth word. The only time he can use two sentences in succession without getting rosy behind his ears is when he describes his thoroughbred heifers. One Saturday when he was seventeen years old, after he had got the jimßon weeds all cut, lime sprinkled ' on the cucumber vines and the rock | ealt laid out for the cattle in the •back forty, he went to Omaha where be saw his first professional game . of baseball. It excited him so that he didn’t sleep for three nights, and when he went baqk home and told ■the rest of the fellows that the players all had a full suit apiece they hurt themselves laughing and said Fred was trying to put on airs v Just because he had been to the city. t His first game was played with the

Hastings, Nebraska, team and he has been in the big league business eighteen years. His first games were on the prairie, so naturally his games now are on the level. (It’s rotten, but we’ll let it pass). He is one of the wealthiest men in the business, having such a big stock farm at his home near Winfield, Kansas, that he has to get down a plat map of Cowley County to remember how much land he has. It’s so large that it takes two automobiles * and five hired men to run it' He has two daughters and a phonograph. His was the first phonograph ever seen in that part of Kansas, the natives coming for miles and miles on Sunday afternoons to look at it, and then going away believing that Fred was playing a joke on them. They wouldn’t believe it could talk until they locked Fred up in the kitchen and put the thing out in the front yard on a culvert tile of trailing arbutus. He is a farmercist from the word go and would rather talk about Durocs in the back lot than about the best Bougereaus ever hung in the Metropolitan museum. The only habit, hobby or whoopla of the man who for ten years batted over .300, who won four N. L. pennants and one world championship, is chewing a toothpick. He is rough on toothpicks, beginning on them in the morning as soon as he gets one foot through and keeping it up all day until the Pullman porter beglnß hunting for the boys’ shoes. When Fred Clarke wants to have a ripsnorting time he drives a friend out to the hog yard in his auto, hangs one knee over the steering wheel, ruts in a fresh toothpick and throws out a handful of shelled com for hir Durocs. (Copyright, SMJ, by W. O. Chapman.)

Artist Cesare Depicts Fred Clarke.