A Player For The Ages

Ah, but there's quite another past to French Lick. It's not just a typical small town in Indiana. Not at all. There are mineral springs in the Valley, and French Lick and its sister town. West Baden (where Bird actually resides now), have long had reputations as Fancy-Dan resorts. Once there was music and dancing, champagne, gambling and beautiful, loose women. Everyone from Al Capone to Franklin Delano Roosevelt holidayed there.

The mineral springs featured Pluto water, a natural—and very powerful—laxative. Indeed for some 75 years one of the largest enterprises in French Lick was the bottling and distribution of the local water, using the slogan: "When nature won't, Pluto will." The locals amended that and yukked: "If nature won't, Pluto will; if Pluto can't, goodbye Bill."

By the time Larry was born on Pearl Harbor Day of 1956, though, most of the Valley's glory was gone. By the early 1970s even the Pluto Corporation had changed from bottling water to household cleaning products. Even though the Springs Hotel in French Lick is still there, many of the younger people, unlike Larry, have cleared out, and Orange County is one of the poorest in the state.

Young Larry knew damn well that he was poor. No, it was not oppressive. But, yes, it was there. The Birds had enough coal to stay warm, but too many nights the old furnace would break down, and the house would fill with black smoke, and they would all have to stand outside, freezing, while Joe Bird tried to fix things. By then it was morning and time to pay the bills.

The creditors never let up on Joe. "I always hear he was the kind of guy would give you the shirt off his back," Larry says. "A lot of people tell me them things now because of who I am, but I know the ones who're tellin' the truth."

His mother, Georgia, was employed mostly as a waitress. "I remember, she worked a hundred hours a week and made a hundred dollars, and then went to the store and had to buy $120 worth of food," Larry says. "If there was a payment to the bank due, and we needed shoes, she'd get the shoes, and then deal with them guys at the bank. I don't mean she wouldn't pay the bank, but the children always came first." Often things were so tough, one way and another, that Larry had to move in with his grandmother, Lizzie Kerns. He adores her. But Grandma Kerns didn't even have a telephone then.

While having been poor—"it motivates me to this day," Bird says—led to his million-dollar dream, it didn't occur to him that basketball would be the thing that would lead him to that cache. "I never once worried about college when I was in high school, and I never worried about the pros in college," he says. "When it was the Celtics drafted me, I could've cared less."

In fact, once he made up his mind that he just wasn't happy at Indiana and that he was going to quit, once he went back to French Lick and got a maintenance job with the town, he was quite happy. This was the period, ever celebrated (or smirked at), when he worked on a garbage truck. Actually that was Bird's assignment only one day a week, but he enjoyed it immensely, "having a blast," tossing garbage sacks around with his old buddy Bezer Carnes.

"I loved that job," Bird says. "It was outdoors, you were around your friends. Picking up brush, cleaning up. I felt like I was really accomplishing something. How many times are you riding around your town and you say to yourself, Why don't they fix that? Why don't they clean the streets up? And here I had the chance to do that. I had the chance to make my community look better." Bird is a damn sight more impressed with the work he did for French Lick that year than he is with the boulevard named after him that cuts through town.

"I've always enjoyed French Lick, and I could care less what they say about it," he says. "I think maybe if you grow up in a small town you learn better to weed out the good and the bad. There's always going to be a lot of petty jealousy in a small town. If you understand that—and I always have—you can learn better to make your own judgments."