[Eugene Church]

MY LIFE IN 2023
Yep, EC's Life Is Still Filled With Glee in '23

EC's having fun but I'm still on the run... playing music at Nursing Homes and doing a 2-hour weekly Southern Gospel music radio show... to slow things down and make my life a little less hectic, I decided to cut back to just 2 nursing homes and play them each 2 times a month... that means once a week I will play music... that cut my schedule in half... hate to admit it, age may be catching up with me... at 83 it is getting physically harder to load and unload my sound system... EC is no longer as young as he thinks he is... I have noticed the change in the last few months... keep in mind I have to load up my car, go to the nursing home, unload my car and carry it into the nursing home, set the equipment up... play music for 2 hours, while also dancing with the residents... then load the equipment back up and take it to my car and load it... go home and unload it again... that loading and unloading 6 times... yeah, buddy, EC is pretty tired at the end of the day.

I have finished Bill Veeck's very enjoyable book about his life in baseball "Veeck As In Wreck"... Bill was a club owner with a heart... he was easy to deal with at contract time... players loved Bill Veeck and rightly so... he was a good and decent human being... Bill served in World War II... was wounded badly in the leg... he suffered from pain the rest of his life, but persevered and never let it get him down... Bill lived his life on one leg with a big smile on his face and a lot of love of life in his heart... life gave him plenty of lemons, but Bill just used them to make a lot of lemonade ... Bill Veeck was a great owner, a good guy and a baseball visionary... also a darn good writer... yeah buddy, he is greatly missed.

"Wit, Quips and Quotes from the Diamond Minds"

Excerpts from "Veeck As In Wreck" by Bill Veeck and Ed Linn:

"If I could have picked my own place in the game of baseball, I would have been out there on the field, making stunning plays at shortstop like Lou Boudreau, or turning casually at the crack of the bat to make one of those brilliant over-the-shoulder catches of Joe DiMaggio. ("Yea, Veeck"). As a kid in high school, I showed nothing more breathtaking than a stunning inability to hit a curveball, and so I have done the next best thing. I'm like a book publisher who, unable to write the great American novel himself, passes judgment upon the manuscripts of his betters.

The old adolescent dream has left its mark, though. As all ballplayers can tell you, I am a hero worshipper. Wherever ballplayers of taste gather together, I am spoken of fondly as a ballplayer's lamb. There is almost nothing I won't do for a player, who is putting out for me."

I have never had a serious holdout. As far as salaries are concerned, I would just as soon give a player what he thinks he deserves, if I can afford it. I have always found baseball players' demands quite reasonable. At St. Louis, I once had half-a-dozen of my players sign blank contracts and let me fill in the salary myself. There was a little gamesmanship involved on their part, of course, since I was putting an onus on myself to be more than fair. But gamesmanship apart, they knew Ole Will would give them a fair shake.

We did have a few publicity holdouts just to get some ink during the off-season, one of the more harmless winter sports. In Cleveland, Bob Feller would drop in to see me from time to time for widely heralded contract negotiations. Bob and I would chat awhile about everything under sun except salary, then release a statement that we were still fairly wide apart, but had every confidence our differences would be settled amicably. At last, with the weather turning warm, I'd say, "Hey Roberto, maybe we out to sign.

The actual signing couldn't have been quicker or easier. Bob and I would each write down a figure for his basic salary on a piece of paper and split the difference. The first year, he wrote down $60,000 and I wrote $65,000, so he cost himself $2,500. The next year he wrote down my original $65,000, but my figure was $62,500, which meant he recouped half his loss. He did a lot better than that, actually, I had Feller on an attendance-bonus clause those first two years, and in that record-breaking second year, he earned himself and extra $27,500."