Final Exits

Back then, traffic moved fast in El Paso, especially after dark on a Friday night, the array of streetlights and the blare of headlights merging into a dizzying blur. It would be disconcertingly easy to end up in Juarez if you stopped paying attention and missed the final exit.

Once I maneuvered out of the torrent of cars climbing the bridge approach, I had time to concentrate on why I was here. I’d stumbled across Hal Chase a couple years before and had been stalking him ever since, researching to write a biography of a rare baseball talent with the soul of a grifter.

But why detour through El Paso on the way home from a work trip to San Antonio? Perched on the very edge of western Texas, El Paso is isolated and remote, not much like the rest of the state or even the rest of the country.

S. L. A. Marshall was here. Or at least, his papers were. All 53 linear feet of them, housed in a dedicated room in the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department at the University of Texas El Paso. UTEP for short. Best known as a military historian who developed “after action interviews” as a means of reconstructing events during battle as well as his controversial “ratio of fire” theories about personnel behavior during combat, Marshall had lived in El Paso as a young man. What’s more, he’d worked as a columnist for the El Paso Herald after coming home from World War I, and served as Secretary of the Copper League during the years when Hal Chase was playing for the League’s Douglas Arizona club.

I was certain there were some tidbits lurking in the Marshall papers. I’d come across intriguing hints before about an unpublished autobiography. So when the San Antonio trip came up, I leapt at the chance to schedule the return trip through El Paso, tack on an extra night or two on my own tab and spend Saturday in the library.

The sky was brilliant when I left the room Saturday morning to seek out the university library, the peaks of the Franklin mountains away to the west razor-sharp against the horizon. The campus itself was eerily quiet, a self-contained universe  with the striking Himalayan Buddhist architectural style known as Dzong. It suited the austerity of the landscape, the squat , shallow-roofed buildings, standing against the dramatic mountains in the background as do their namesake mountaintop fortresses in another remote corner of the world.

The C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department was organized and empty, save for the older gentleman who accepted my request list. No white gloves here, but the firm reminder that any copies would require his handling. The unpublished autobiography was delivered to my table in a long, 11 x 17 inch flat gray manuscript box and when I lifted the lid, there was a three inch stack of typewritten sheets.

I knew if there was a gold mine here it would be in the early years, when Marshall was only a young reporter with a knack for clever phrases and an interest in the outlaw brand of baseball played in the Copper League. His weekly column titled SLAM Bangs! combined a gossipy tone with insider tidbits on the notorious League players who had been banished from Organized Baseball back East. Marshall realized that outlaw players like Black Sox teammates Chick Gandil and Lefty Williams and “Peerless Hal” Chase didn’t come along every day in the near-frontier atmosphere of the1920s borderlands. Much like the exiled big-leaguers he cultivated, Marshall had an eye for a story and an ego to match.

I struck gold before noon. There, sketched out over a few pages, was a story—I had to believe—no one had ever uncovered before. Marshall described a dramatic hospital room confrontation between Hal Chase and ‘Sister’ Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic preacher, not unlike Sister Sharon from Elmer Gantry (in fact, she was the inspiration for Sinclair Lewis’ character), during which Chase threatened blackmail and exposure.

I didn’t know yet that McPherson had been a worldwide celebrity in the 1920s, that she’d captured headlines across America and dominated the radio airwaves in southern California. I didn’t know yet that her scandal–the kind that seems to dog evangelical preachers–mesmerized the nation for months. When McPherson disappeared from a Santa Monica beach in 1926, few would expect her to reappear six weeks later in a town just across the border from Douglas, Arizona. None would expect her to encounter Hal Chase in a dramatic hospital room confrontation. But according to Marshall’s autobiography, that’s exactly what happened. The description seemed entirely in character with the Hal Chase I had come to know well at that point.

There’s a special thrill of discovery reserved for researchers, I believe, and it’s a vein of deep, pure euphoria that captures both the countless hours spent reaching that point as well as the magical element of luck in playing out a hunch. I savored the joy all afternoon as I explored El Paso, without realizing that the horizons of my pursuit had just expanded–beyond a Hal Chase biography, beyond baseball.

The last exit in El Paso turned out to be an on-ramp to writing fiction, researching and writing about half-forgotten women who achieved remarkable things ‘in their spare time’ and the mysteries of destiny and faith. I just didn’t know it yet.

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