Soundtrack

Hunt Breakfast, Maine style

The low, grumpy moan which is the mating call of the cow moose summoned 1,600 Maine deer hunters to ceremonial breakfast in Old Town's city park last week, three hours before sunrise opened the deer season in five counties. Old Town is known for its canoes, its hand-sewn moccasins and for the ability of Chief Bruce Poolaw of the Penobscot Indians to lift a birch-bark caller to his lips and sound the most enticing moose call this side of Guy Lombardo's saxophone section.

Hardy, red-clad men from 27 states and three countries responded to Poolaw's early morning blast by lining up for a lumberjack's menu of 4,300 biscuits, 400 pounds of ham, 87 gallons of coffee and 3,700 doughnuts. No one counted the beans which had been baking, Maine-fashion, in the ground all night, but they were said to have been enough to feed a lumber camp for a month.

The breakfast, consumed by the light of hardwood bonfires which also served to take off the 40? chill, is Maine's ceremonial way of announcing that it is legal to hunt deer at sunrise in Aroostook, Somerset, Piscataquis, Franklin and Penobscot counties. November 1st is the opening day in the rest of the state, over which 175,000 venison-seekers were expected to roam this season.

For the opening, Old Town strung Christmas lights everywhere and stores kept their lights on all night. By 8 o'clock the food ran out and Old Town was just about empty, its population, permanent and transient, dispersed to the big woods in a 50-mile radius. At noon, a Washington, D.C. physician bagged his first deer?a magnificent 15-point buck that field-dressed at 217 pounds. Good hunting, everyone said.

Tinker to Evers to Oops

It's been about 50 years since F.P.A. penned an eight-liner called Baseball's Sad Lexicon. The title has been widely forgotten; the poem remains:

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double?Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."*

Unfortunately there remain, too, some statistics from that distant era of gonfalon bubbles. In 1906, for example, the Chicago Cubs won the pennant and 116 games, most in major league history. That season the Cubs managed exactly eight double plays that went Tinker to Evers to Chance. A year later the Cubs won another pennant and made seven double plays that went T. to E. to C. And in 1908 when the Cubs won for the third straight time there were just eight more made by the iambic combination.

Over the three years the Cubs were, of course, in three World Series. In all they played 16 Series games. In all 16 games there were no double plays that went Tinker to Evers to Chance.