(This column originally ran in the Sunday November 4, 2018 editions of The Times and The News-Star.)
Tough week here in the ol’ Fatality League, and that’s in no way meant to be glib. When the bell tolls for another guy, it tolls for each one of us.
First there was the surprise passing of Tony Joe White, 75, of a heart attack. A blues man who made the late 1970s and early 1980s that much more fun for me, raised in Oak Grove just one parish over from the Mississippi River, the soulful and perfectly named Tony Joe White wrote Polk Salad Annie and Rainy Night in Georgia in the same week. In the same week. Do that and you take the next two weeks off.
Willie And Laura Mae Jones. Swamp Rap. I Get Off On It. Momma Don’t Let Your Cowboys Grow Up To Be Babies. (See what he did there?) Tony Joe White was the original swamp blues man.
Somehow when I was in college I became friends with the president of Germany’s chapter of the Tony Joe White Fan Club. (I know?!) I’d get cards from her, cards with a lot of little doors on them to open, because Germans like that sort of thing. I never met her, but I hope she is alive and I hope she took the news as good as someone who is their country’s president of a person-who-just-died fan club can be expected to take it.
I miss her and those cards. And Tony Joe.
Then Willie “Stretch” McCovey, whose line drive to New York Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson (of Sumpter, S.C., homeboy and all) wins the World Series for San Francisco’s Giants in 1962 if it’s two-feet higher or farther in any direction, died at 80 from a series of health issues. The 1959 National League Rookie of the Year (I wasn’t born until during the World Series that year so I was ineligible) and the 1969 NL MVP, McCovey is 20th on the all-time home run list and first on the grand slam list with 18.
But more than that, everyone just loved him. There is McCovey’s Cove outside right field in the San Francisco ballpark, and if you miss that, there’s a statue and all. The most inspiring player on each year’s Giants team is given an award named after McCovey.
Because Shreveport’s minor league ballclub was the Class AA affiliate of the Giants, McCovey came to Fair Grounds Field one summer, I think in 1986, the year he was voted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Still have a picture of him being interviewed by Dave Nitz, then the Voice of the Captains and still the Voice of Louisiana Tech’s Bulldogs. Stretch had on Sansabelts; it was an ’80’s thing.
Former Shreveport sportswriter Nico Van Thyn reminded me that when McCovey was in the Texas League playing for the Dallas Eagles in 1957, “he was barred from playing in Shreveport because of a Louisiana state law forbidding integrated games. The Dallas team, on each trip to Shreveport, had to leave McCovey and four other players at home…A dozen years later, McCovey did play in Shreveport—for the Giants in their spring exhibition game against the Cleveland Indians. That day, McCovey hit TWO home runs—one a grand slam—out of SPAR Stadium.”
Nice man. Big man. Beloved teammate. Google his liner to Richardson sometime.
So we’ll miss Stretch.
But the unkindest cut of all was the passing of Dorcas Reilly, 92, inventor of the green bean casserole. Yes: I, too, wish I were joking. But 92 is a great run, and green bean casserole—plus a marriage of 59 years—is no small legacy.
We try to remind you at this pre-holiday time of year, that “outlined against a blue-gray November kitchen, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are homemade macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, cornbread stuffing and green bean casserole.”
No question, green bean casserole is on the Mount Rushmore of holiday staples.
Imagine: as a test kitchen supervisor with Campbell’s Soup Company in 1955, Mrs. Reilly invented this holiday classic at age 29. So for 60 years she knew that most of America was enjoying her creation before their Thanksgiving naps. She’d basically, before 30, already signed her ticket to the Inventors’ Hall of Fame.
But this is what makes her the coolest: although it was mentioned elsewhere, (including in the New York Times), in her obit in her home paper’s obit—the Courier-Journal in New Jersey—her being the Mother of the Green Bean Bake was not mentioned. But it did mention this:
“In lieu of flowers the family requests that donations be made to the Haddonfield First Presbyterian Church Music Ministry, or to your favorite charity in her name.”
So she was humble and awesome, and she was to casseroles what McCovey was to baseball and Tony Joe White was to swamp rock. How many green bean casseroles you think she took to socials at Haddonfield FPC through the years?
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