Having A Ball At Midnight

There are strange things done in the midnight sun...That would make your blood run cold.

There sure are. Baseball, for one. When Robert W. Service wrote those lines at the turn of the century, the Bard of the Yukon was talking about such mundane matters as life, death and cremation—not about runs, hits and errors. Presumably Service did not know that baseball was to be played just around the glacier—in the gold-rush camp at Fairbanks—and that people would keep playing it morning, noon and midnight for the next 75 years. Well, they did and they do.

Morning and noon aren't all that remarkable, perhaps, but every year, on the longest day of the year—and it's really long in Fairbanks, which is only 160 miles south of the Arctic Circle—the Alaska Goldpanners of Fairbanks play a barnstorming team from Japan, Canada or the Lower 48 in a curious exhibition called the Midnight Sun Game. It starts at 10:30 p.m. on June 21 and can last until nearly 2 a.m. on June 22. Sometimes it's played in full daylight, sometimes it's not.

Last June's game was not. The 71st renewal of the exhibition, with Red Deer, Alberta as the Goldpanner opponent, began in bright twilight as the sun dipped toward Chena Ridge northeast of the city, and it ended in flaming triumph, both for the Goldpanners and the ascendant sun. But from the fourth through the seventh inning a lot of blood ran cold. Thanks to a formation of dense, purple clouds along and above the ridge, the middle innings might just as well have been played in a mine shaft. That accounted for many of the 11 errors committed by Fairbanks and Red Deer, but no one could explain how the teams accumulated a total of 28 hits, many on pitches that could not be seen from the stands.

As a demonstration of the quality of Alaska baseball, the game was a travesty, but seen for what it was—a rite of spring, the equivalent of a dance around the Maypole in less northerly latitudes—it was a rousing success. The 4,000 spectators, only a few of them tourists, were enchanted, the Goldpanners won 12-11 and the club sold a lot of beer because the game took so long. All in all, it was an apt way for Fairbanks residents to celebrate their delight at emerging from the long, black winter, during which temperatures drop to 60� below and ice fogs sometimes cancel the city's scant hours of daylight.

The Midnight Sun Game also exemplifies Alaskans' respect for tradition, the first such game having been played in 1906 by gold rushers whose only diversions were the Three B's (booze, bawds and baseball), and their faith in certain frontier virtues (bravery, for example) not demonstrated all that frequently in the Lower 48. Anyone who is afraid of things that go bump in the night could not have survived those middle innings. Though it was as dark as any June 21 in a decade, no one even considered turning on the lights. Nobody ever has. Another great traditionalist, the late Phil Wrigley, would have loved Fairbanks.

Wrigley also would have loved the town because it and several other Alaskan locales have become greenhouses for major league baseball. In the last 13 years, nearly 70 players who have taken part in Alaska's summer collegiate baseball program have made it to the majors, and several are performing prominent roles in the current pennant races in the major leagues, among them Yankees Graig Nettles and Chris Chambliss, Boston's Bill Lee, Philadelphia's Bob Boone, Oakland's Pete Broberg and Cincinnati's Tom Seaver. Sixteen of the Alaska alumni have gone to the big leagues after apprentice stints with the Anchorage Glacier Pilots, but an incredible total of 47 played their Alaskan ball in Fairbanks, a pleasant town (in summer, anyway) of 55,000 souls that is nestled in the eastern end of the enormous Tanana Valley, deep in Alaska's interior.

On any July or August evening one can look in all directions from the roof of the Goldpanners' stadium, Grow-den Memorial Park, and see games in progress on 11 diamonds, not counting the Panners' own. No other sport competes for the time or money of the Fairbanks citizenry. Alaska's small population does not encourage costly sponsorship of satellite TV sportscasts; as for participatory sports, tennis and jogging are just now making a timid entrance. Baseball may no longer be No. 1 in the Lower 48, but it has never been anything else in Fairbanks.

For more than a half century the game's presence there was an even better-kept secret than it is now. Word of it still might not have reached the outside world had a volatile, flame-haired French-Irish high school dropout named Red Boucher not appeared in town in 1958. Boucher, who had spent most of his life in either a Catholic orphanage or the U.S. Navy, founded the Goldpanners, inaugurated the summer collegiate program, became mayor of Fairbanks and, only 12 years after his arrival, was elected lieutenant governor of Alaska.

Shortly before the start of last June's Midnight Sun Game, which was played in his honor, this "living legend" offered his explanation of the Panners'—and, by inference, his own—rise to glory. The words flowed like hot lava from a volcano that, at 57, is still in nearly constant eruption. "The program is love!" Boucher declaimed. "Love of family! Love of community! Love of country! Patriotism, inspiration, loyalty, pride, self-reliance"—here Boucher paused for a breath—"yes, and apple pie and mother! All that baloney! Only I don't think it's baloney!" Neither do most Alaskans.