Lying in bed, twenty-two-year-old Paul Lindblad stared at the ceiling of his efficiency apartment in Daytona Beach, trying to ignore the crying two-month-old baby girl across the room. It was 3 a.m., just nine hours before he was scheduled to make his first spring training start for the Birmingham Barons, his first test of the sore elbow that had derailed his promising initial year in pro ball at Burlington, Iowa. The injury had sent him to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and raised serious doubts about his baseball future.
As the baby continued to cry, he slowly swung himself to the edge of the bed.
“No, you stay in bed,” whispered his wife, Kathy, twenty-one.
Ignoring her offer, he picked up his daughter Paula and paced the room, holding the child close to his chest. In the crib at the foot of the bed, his and Kathy’s other child, nineteen-month-old Cindy, continued to sleep.
This was the fourth night in a row the young father had been up in the middle of the night. Still, he was glad he’d brought his family to spring training. Not many minor leaguers did. In fact, some organizations only allowed players in the big-league camp to bring their wives.
After finally rocking Paula to sleep, Paul lay back down and closed his eyes, imagining starting off the first hitter tomorrow with a slider, his best pitch… and the one most likely to test his injured arm.
Arriving at the park for his spring training debut, Paul felt surprisingly calm. He kissed Kathy and the kids good-bye.
“I’ll pick you up after the game,” said Kathy.
Paul and Kathy had met in 1959 when he was seventeen and a senior at Chanute High in southeastern Kansas. A three-year letterman for the Blue Comets in basketball and a state champion in the javelin (in 1959, Kansas did not have high school baseball), he was the oldest of five brothers and lived a few miles out of town. His dad worked for the railroad and spent more time in Kansas City, a hundred miles away, than he did with the family. Kathy was a year younger, a shapely, brown-haired, blue-eyed cheerleader, a regular in the church choir, a member of Future Homemakers of America, and—despite her cheerleading—very shy. Paul was also shy, especially with girls, or so Kathy thought.
As is often the case in a small town, where people seem to know each other’s business, secrets abounded. Paul Lindblad, the star athlete, and Kathy Overby, the cute cheerleader, both held tight to family secrets… secrets so deeply rooted that even after they married, they were reluctant to reveal them.
It wasn’t just Paul’s athletic grace and nice smile that first attracted Kathy. When he was gliding up and down the basketball court, she couldn’t help checking out his broad shoulders, long legs, and dark, thick, tousled, Elvis-like hair. Her friends had told her that he was soft-spoken, modest, and polite to his teachers. That was a good thing—she wasn’t interested in the guys who were too slick or rowdy.
In addition to his good looks and athletic grace, he also had the coolest car, a turquoise ’49 Plymouth convertible with the name he’d given it—Red River Rock—pin-striped on the front fender. On weekends he worked at Tommy Anderson’s gas station, pumping gas and washing windshields. Once, Kathy had been sitting in the backseat when her stepdad pulled in for a couple bucks’ worth of gas, but she’d been too shy to say hello or even smile. If Paul spotted her, he didn’t let on. Besides, she and her three sisters were convinced their stepdad, a former used-car salesman and then co-owner of a motel in town with Kathy’s mother, was a bad person. When he died in a boating accident after her junior year, she didn’t shed any tears.
Paul was a decent enough student at Chanute High, especially in math and drafting, but sports were his passion. In basketball, he wasn’t the best player on the team, but he relentlessly hustled, often slamming into the wrestling mats hung behind the baskets to protect players from crashing into the brick walls. As a cheerleader, Kathy could barely keep her eyes off him. Although the cheerleaders didn’t go to track meets, sometimes after school she’d go to the track and retrieve the javelin for him.
Like most teenage boys in Chanute, Paul liked to cruise Main Street. On Saturday night, he’d pick up Kathy and head for Barker’s Dairy Bar, where they’d share the house specialty, a large scoop of chili in a sugar cone. Or he’d take her to a John Wayne movie at the Guild, or for a soda at Cardinal Drug Store. During the summer, he’d bring her to his American Legion games.
When he’d pull up in front of her house in his Red River Rock, she never knew what to expect, like the time he took off his cap and smiled sheepishly. He’d shaved his head… a look not exactly fashionable to Chanute in 1960. He’d done it in response to his teammates on the track team razzing him about always brushing back his ample hair.
Or there was the time he led her blindfolded to his car and told her he had another surprise for her. Because he was always tinkering with that car, she figured maybe he’d painted it blue and gold, the school colors, or hopped up the engine, but when he took off her blindfold and opened the passenger door, she discovered he’d removed the front bench seat and replaced it with two unanchored folding chairs, his precursor to bucket seats. As they cruised down Main Street on that freezing winter night, with the top down, wobbling in their seats, she held on for dear life.
In truth, she just loved being with him. She’d gone fishing with him down at the Neosho River, even though she didn’t fish; she’d gone quail hunting with him, even though she’d just sit in the car and freeze.
Chanute, population ten thousand, was the center of their universe. Surrounded by cornfields and with the oldest soda fountain in the Midwest, it had the look of a town in a Norman Rockwell painting. It was not, however, at the cutting edge of the civil rights movement. There were a few black kids at the high school, but none on the basketball team with Paul or on his summer American Legion teams.
The Kansas of Paul’s youth was the state where Oliver Brown of Topeka had tried to enroll his third-grade daughter in an all-white elementary school, and when she was refused admittance, Brown joined with the NAACP and took the Topeka Board of Education to court, eventually winning the 1954 landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision that decreed, “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.” It was a decision that would have dramatic consequences on Birmingham, the city where Paul hoped to play in 1964.
As Kathy dropped off Paul at the ballpark in Daytona for his spring training debut, he wasn’t thinking about Brown vs. Board of Education. He was zeroed in on his three-inning stint, anxious for the day to unfold.
The morning dragged by. For Paul, it was fielding bunts, pickoff moves to first, and backing up third and home on hits to the outfield. With each new drill, he went full speed. In high school, he was always the last one to leave practice.
Finally, it was time to head to the bullpen to start warming up for his big test.
“Nervous?” Hoss asked.
“No,” he lied.