Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 March 1912 — MANAGER OF PIRATES SAYS BUT LTTLE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

MANAGER OF PIRATES SAYS BUT LTTLE

By HOMER CROY.

If you will look it up In the dictionary you will find it this way: Fredclarke: (noun) see Old Gibraltar. And then if you will turn to ■the o’s you’ll read:* Old Gibraltar: (noun) see fredclarke. That’s what he Is —Old Faithful. You <»ati depend on him 364 days out of the year and if he turns up missing on the three hundred and sixtyfifth you may know some doctor has a thermometer under his tongue and his thumb on'tas pulse. He was bom on a farm in Madison County, lowa, thirty-nine years ago, and did not talk until he was old ;■ enough to harness a horse alone, and never since has he said more than three sentenoes and four goldamits In succession. Before he utters a complete sentence outside the ball ; park he gets out the screw-driver, the 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 la when he describes his thoroughbred heifers. One Saturday when he was seventeen years old, after he had got the Jimson weeds all cut, lime sprinkled on the cucumber vines and the rock laid out for the cattle in the jback forty, he went to Omaha where he saw his first professional game ■of baseball. It excited him so that he didn’t sleep for three nights, and when he went back home and told the rest of the fellows that the players all had a full suit apieoe they nearly hurt themselves laughing- and said Fred was trying to put on airs just because he had been to the city. ms 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 farmerclst from the word go and would rather talk about Du rocs 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 begins hunting for the boys’ shoes. When Fred Clarke wants to have a ripsnortlng time he drives a friend out to the hog yard in his auto, hangs one knee over the Bteering wheel, -puts in & fresh toothpick and throws, out a handful of shelled corn for hir Durocs. (Copyright, I$U. by W. G. Chapman.)

Artist Cesare Depicts Fred Clarke.