1 The New England Fisks
IN ORDER TO FULLY UNDERSTAND Carlton Fisk, his baseball career and his personality, it is necessary, above all, to know this: he was from New England. Carlton Fisk represented the region and all that it symbolized more than any major league baseball player in history. The principles, the strong will and beliefs, the work ethic, and, perhaps, the stubbornness—he bore New England as a badge of honor.
Carlton Fisk was as New England as any one person could be. He couldn’t have been more New England if his great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather had come over on the Mayflower. He didn’t—but Phineas Fiske did depart from Suffolk County, England, with his young family sometime between 1620 and 1640. He settled in an area of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that was soon called Middlesex County, a county that included settlements at Lexington and Concord, and raised his family near Groton, which today is just north of the I-495 loop around Boston.
The Fiskes (the “e” would be dropped from the family name in the mid-1800s) were like the other arrivals to that part of the New World—they came not to plunder but to build. They built farms, families, and eventually a new nation. Fiskes were not idlers or dreamers, they were doers. And they were not a wandering bunch. It was roughly 150 years before the first Fiske decided to see what was beyond the mountains: Samuel Fiske made the 80-or-so-mile trek northwest to Claremont, New Hampshire, in the late 1700s. Over the next 200 years, the clan would move exactly 11 miles, just south to Charlestown.
Like most of their neighbors, the early Fisks were farmers. As David McCullough wrote in John Adams: “The New England farmer was his own man who owned his own land, a freeholder, and thus the equal of anyone.” Cecil Fisk was born into this line of proud, independent, hard workers in 1913. Cecil learned responsibility and self-reliance from his father, Sabin, who, in addition to farming, served as postmaster and delivered the rural mail around Charlestown in a horse-drawn buggy for forty years beginning in 1914. When snow piled up, teenage Cecil would have to help deliver the mail. He learned you didn’t complain, you just did what needed to be done.
Cecil Fisk grew to love sports, both participating and watching. He was an excellent basketball player in high school, graduating from Charlestown High in 1931. A tough-as-nails competitor with a feared two-handed set shot, he starred for traveling semipro basketball teams that competed up and down the Connecticut River Valley as late as 1947. He and the few other tennis enthusiasts maintained the only court in town, and he won the New Hampshire state tennis championship in 1932 and 1933.
Cecil found his perfect complement in active, outgoing Leona Lundin. They were married in 1941 and soon thereafter bought a white, nineteenth-century clapboard house on Elm Street—just off Main Street—in Charlestown from his uncle. It was a homestead in which they would live together for the next 70 years. There were a lot of Fisks in the area; Sabin had been the youngest of six boys, all raised in Charlestown. Cecil and Leona’s house sat just across a field from the house in which Cecil was born, the house that one of his sons, Cedric, would later inhabit (the Fisks still didn’t move around a lot). Cecil and Leona had a son, Calvin, in 1944. They would add Carlton on December 26, 1947, then Cedric two years later, followed the next year by Conrad, and finally two girls, June and Janet. The kids were born in Bellows Falls, Vermont, because that was the closest hospital.
Like his father, Cecil was a large, powerful man. If he ever took your hand in his big paw, you had better brace yourself—he believed in the value of a firm handshake. With a square jaw and a steady gaze, Cecil was stoic, methodical, and not given to idle chatter. If something needed to be said, he’d look you right in the eye and say it, usually in as few words as possible. Serious and principled, he was known to be a man with an uncompromising value system of right and wrong. He expected 100 percent honesty and honor. He demanded hard work from himself and had little tolerance for others who didn’t share his principles—do something the right way or don’t do it at all.
And Cecil was tough. No one in Charlestown ever knew exactly how tough Cecil was because, quite frankly, no one ever wanted to find out bad enough. “He wasn’t mean,” says one friend, “but if you didn’t know him you might think he was just by looking at him. He just wasn’t very emotional or outgoing. But if something needed to be done around town, you could always count on him to be there to do it.” Cecil was a solid citizen and his word was respected. He was a member of the town finance committee, town council moderator from 1954 to 1973, served on the school board, and was a longtime member of the Charlestown Historical Society.
A sober man, Cecil Fisk had exactly two drinks each year: a scotch and ginger on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Despite his serious demeanor, Cecil enjoyed music and was known to cut an impressive rug on the dance floor on special occasions. “He liked Lawrence Welk and Mitch Miller [of Sing Along with Mitch],” says his daughter Janet. “Other than ball games, those were the only two TV shows he watched.”
Cecil didn’t believe in excuses or concessions to trivial things like age or pain. He routinely played in the school’s alumni basketball game into his seventies. One day, as an octogenarian, he was working up in a tree with a chain saw and came in bloody. “Got nicked on my calf,” he said when asked. Concerned at the amount of blood covering his pants from the “nick,” family members had to work to convince him to go to the clinic to get the thing taken care of—it took 14 stitches. Cecil’s father, Sabin, would live to be 96; his only sibling, Beulah, 92. Cecil himself would pass in 2011, during his 98th year. It would be said that his passing was somewhat surprising; he had been looking good and was chopping wood only the day before. Hearty people, those Fisks.
* * *
Located along the Connecticut River in the southwest corner of the state, the town of Charlestown was small, having about a thousand residents by 1950. It was a rural area: a couple of stop signs, a flashing caution light, one drugstore, two small grocery stores, a few gas stations, several churches, a bar, and a post office. And that was about it. Bowling alleys, movie theaters, and restaurants were luxuries to be found in the towns 15 or 20 miles away. But Charlestown was a pretty little town, surrounded by beautiful rolling wooded hills, with tree-lined streets and well-maintained nineteenth-century Federal style homes along Main Street (actually Main Street was just an area where you slowed down temporarily on Route 12 while driving from Walpole to Claremont).
Charlestown didn’t have a mayor. Town business was run by an elected board of three selectmen. Citizens were encouraged to voice their opinions at town meetings; everyone had an opportunity to have their say. It was the traditional form of New England democracy, with a natural distaste for tyranny or having one person telling everyone what to do. Independence was not just a word thrown around; it was a way of life, firmly representing the New Hampshire motto of “Live free or die.”
There was no anonymity in Charlestown, for better or for worse. Everyone knew everyone else and also knew their parents and grandparents. They met and discussed their lives regularly at church, while walking in town and at school and public events. Houses and cars were left unlocked and nobody seemed to notice or care. It was a friendly, peaceful place with few problems. Typical was Chief of Police Ralph Willoughby’s annual report to the Board of Selectmen for 1964, which revealed five arrests for assault, two for drunkenness, two citations for throwing refuse on the highway, and one for reckless driving—no one ever referred to Charlestown as “Little Chicago.”
Charlestown residents were proud of their town and their upbringing. Those who later moved from the area frequently returned for the Old Home Days celebrations held every five years. It was the type of place where everyone always knew where they were from; the heritage was ingrained.
Also ingrained was their allegiance to the sports teams of Boston. Whereas during the previous century, residents of the region had aligned themselves politically and economically with Boston, so it was when it came to professional sports. Every town in the area big enough to have two churches with tall white spires had a radio station that blasted Red Sox games throughout the summer. Everyone was a Red Sox fan. There were no other teams as far as they were concerned. They’d listened to the games since birth. Their parents listened to the games. Their grandparents listened to them. The Red Sox meant a lot.
There were jobs to be had across the Connecticut River in the mill towns of Springfield and Bellows Falls, Vermont; the type of jobs in which useful things were produced with pride. The mills that dotted the banks of the river especially boomed during World War II, and made washers, bolts, nuts, rifles, parts for jeeps and tanks—everything a country needed for modern warfare. They also produced iron castings, organs, carriages, paper, and farm machinery. Cecil, like a lot of his neighbors, took employment over there. He worked as a machinist at the Jones and Lamson Machine Tool Company in Springfield for 39 years, until retiring in 1978. He was a hardworking craftsman, skilled with a lathe.
Cecil Fisk also worked his land. Good old Yankee resourcefulness was learned in the Fisk household. He had a 1950 tractor that he maintained himself and kept running well enough to pull a float in the Old Home parade in 2010 when he was 97 and the tractor was 60—and they both looked to be in good shape. Cecil and Leona grew most of what their family ate. They had vegetables, fruits, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. They kept a dairy cow, beef cattle, chickens, and pigs. Each year, Cecil took his vacation from the Machine Company to coincide with haying season. Cecil would later tell an inquiring sportswriter, “In these parts, survival meant hard work.” They weren’t idle words. His son Carlton would tell the same writer, “My parents provided for six kids very well on $6,000 a year.”
It was a good thing that Cecil grew what the family ate. The boys were big eaters. “I never knew that all boys didn’t eat like my brothers until I moved away,” says Janet. “I had no idea. But it’s unbelievable how much they would put away. They’d come home from school and eat five or six big cinnamon rolls and drink a quart of milk—each. During corn season, they would each eat four or five ears of corn, and that was with the rest of their meal. Looking back, they should have all weighed 400 pounds. You can’t believe how much they would eat.”
Dinner was a ritual in the Fisk family. Everyone was there, every night, no excuses. They all took their set spots around the large oval table, which dominated the small dining room. Cecil, at the head of the table, next to a stack of plates, presided. He dished out what he felt each kid should eat and passed the plates. No one left until it was all gone.
Cecil Fisk cast a giant shadow over the childhood of his kids. They learned to be accountable. The only “self” he taught them about came in self-effacing, self-control, and self-reliance. Think before you do something. Don’t let someone else do something for you that you can do yourself. With Cecil, there was right and there was wrong; nothing else. Gray areas were for people who couldn’t make up their minds. He made sure that he passed his work ethic and his ideals to his growing family. There were always jobs that needed to be done around the house and the kids were expected to do them as soon as they were old enough. And old enough came pretty early—Janet learned to drive the family tractor when she was nine. If the chores didn’t get done, there was no television that night or, sometimes, the long switch that hung above the back door got taken down.
The cow had to be milked every morning, no matter how cold (or through how much snow) the walk from the house to the barn. Each kid had a section of the garden to keep in the summer and an area of the driveway to shovel in the winter. “We had chores to do,” Carlton said in 2000, speaking of his childhood. “We were expected to be involved and responsible, accountable within the family. A few of us sometimes decided we didn’t want to be accountable and it turned out to be painful. There were consequences. I’m sure that had a lot to do with the work ethic we approached our careers by.”
“He taught us a value system,” says Calvin. “You shoveled your neighbor’s walk because it needed to be done and you didn’t ask for anything. If you didn’t weed the garden right, you went back out and did it until it was done right. Be humble, don’t brag or tell people how good you are.”
Cecil didn’t believe in giving allowances just for doing the chores. There was no reward for doing something that needed to be done. If the kids wanted money, they knew how to get it—work. Young Carlton had a paper route for years—not an easy task in the frigid New Hampshire winters. He walked to each house and placed the paper between the storm door and front door. Carelessly fling the paper toward the house from the road? Not acceptable. Do the job the right way or don’t do it at all. He shoveled snow, mowed lawns, and, as a teen, worked for the sewer department and poured concrete for a contractor.
Along with the other town kids, Carlton and his brothers also worked in the fields on nearby farms during hay season. They’d spend the day helping get hay in, baling it and heaving it up to the barn lofts—hard, sweaty, itchy work. Once Carlton complained that a farmer paid him 50 cents an hour for baling when earlier he had gotten a dollar an hour from another. He got no sympathy from his father. “What would you do for money if you weren’t getting the 50 cents?” was Cecil’s reply. Unable to argue with that logic, Carlton resumed his haying career.
Cecil laid down the law and demanded a lot from his children. A lot. “He mellowed a bit later but when we were growing up he was a taskmaster,” says Janet. “It was hard. Expectations were very high. It was just built into our personalities and character that we should succeed in anything we set out to do. Good enough wasn’t acceptable.”
“All their kids were grounded and well behaved,” says one friend. “They made good grades in school and never got into any trouble. In high school, some of the rest of us might be out having a beer sometimes, but never any of them.”
Whatever Cecil said was the way it was. His kids never won an argument, even if they were right, until he said so. Athletic even into his seventies, Cecil would occasionally remind the kids that he was still the top bull in the herd. Once when Calvin was in high school, he was shooting baskets when Cecil came in from work. Cecil took off his heavy coat and boots and challenged his son to a free-throw contest: “Shoot until you make one, then shoot until you miss.” Calvin, who happened to be the state’s leading free throw shooter as a senior, made 19 in a row and thought, “That should be enough for the old man.” Cecil proceeded to sink 58 in a row. Never be satisfied, you can always do better.
Years later, in the clubhouse of the Boston Red Sox, a coach would say to Cecil, “Hey, you’re Carlton’s dad, huh?” Cecil replied matter-of-factly, “No, Carlton is my son.”
The Fisk house seemed very small with all the big kids crammed into two bedrooms; and one bathroom for the whole house. Privacy was not something to be found in the Fisk house; or in the neighborhood. It was not a place for loners. The Fisk kids were active and competed regularly. “Everything we played was competitive,” says Calvin. “But I think it was more of a personal competitiveness; you competed against yourself to see what you could do.”
While they may have competed against themselves, they showed little mercy against their siblings. It was not uncommon for Leona to watch the kids head off to play basketball and then see them show up later bloody with black eyes. “Yeah, you bet we were all competitive in the family,” says Janet. “It was ‘Anything you can do, I can do.’ Even for us girls.”
No child of Cecil Fisk would have ever been happy with a mere participation trophy. All the Fisk kids were great athletes. Calvin, three years older than Carlton, may have been the best of the bunch. Not quite as tall as Carlton, but just as rugged and perhaps stronger, Calvin could play any sport. You name it, tennis, Ping-Pong, golf, anything he picked up, he was a natural. He was a star on the school’s soccer, basketball, and baseball teams. He could throw an axe and split a block of wood from a dozen paces. Conrad pitched the local high school to a state championship in baseball, but a disc injury sustained in American Legion ball ended his career. Cedric had a higher batting average in high school than any of his brothers. June played on several state champion softball teams in high school (coached by her mother). Janet, in addition to playing on the championship softball teams, also won several state championships in basketball. She was such an athlete that while learning to play tennis in her early twenties, she beat one of her brother’s professional baseball teammates, Dwight Evans.
Despite the talent and accomplishments, praise from their father was given about as easily as allowance for chores. Cecil was a perfectionist who raised his kids to be perfectionists. Once, Calvin scored 29 points in a basketball game, 14–16 from the field and 1 of 2 from the free-throw line. After the game, his dad had one comment: “How’d you miss that free throw?”
“I never heard Cecil compliment any of the kids about anything they did,” says Jim Hogancamp, a friend of the kids who lived a few doors down. “That was their mother’s job. I didn’t think of Cecil as overbearing, but he always felt you could do better. That was the way it was for him. There was no room for error. No excuses. He always told us kids, ‘whatever you do, you ought to do it right.’ There was no reason for anything other than perfection.”
“With him you didn’t dwell on the things you did right,” Carlton said of his father later. “Those were pretty much expected. What you thought about instead was the things you didn’t do right. That was something my father taught all of us: you might not be good enough to be the best, but at least you were as good as you could be. You never accepted second best out of yourself.”
“It was a motivating factor for all of us just to receive some sign of approval,” Carlton said in 1990. “He had a hard view of sports. He wouldn’t tolerate people who didn’t bust their butts, no matter if it was just a pickup game.” That trait would rub off on some of the kids.
Cecil Fisk loved his children and was proud of how they grew up, but he was not the kind of guy to show it. He was a man of his generation, only more so. His job wasn’t to be their buddy, it was to make sure they turned out all right.
* * *
While Cecil was the undisputed ruler of the house, Leona Fisk cast a giant shadow in her own way. She was a woman of boundless energy, optimism, good spirits, and infinite talents. Known to everyone as Lee, she provided the emotion, the hugs, and the outward expressions of love for the family. Everyone in town loved and respected Lee Fisk.
A remarkable woman, Lee not only performed the multitude of daily tasks involved in raising six children, she embraced them. She took care of the garden and did all the cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Her flowers around the house were the envy of the town. She put up endless jars of canned corn, beans, jams, and jelly. She served as Cub Scout den leader (all the area kids wanted to be in her den), did crafts for church, taught kindergarten several years, and later coached the high school girls softball team. She had a beautiful alto voice and sang at church into her nineties. And she still took time to play with all the kids in the yard and never missed one of their athletic events.
Like Cecil preached, she wasn’t satisfied with just doing these things, she excelled at them all. “If I needed a dress for something, I would tell her what kind of collar and sleeves I wanted and by the end of the week it would be made,” says Janet. “And it would be perfect.”
“She was a great cook,” adds Calvin. She was renowned for her homemade cinnamon rolls, which she made almost every day and placed in a large stack on the kitchen table, ready for anyone who came by—and a lot of people came by just for the cinnamon rolls.
“They were great,” says Walter Piletz, one of the kids’ friends. “We’d stop by the house and there were always some there.” Later in high school, she would bring a basket of them to pass out on the baseball bus.
“She had this shredded wheat molasses bread that was just unbelievable,” says Janet. “We would all fight to see who got the middle piece—it just melted in your mouth. My mouth is watering now just thinking about it.”
“Lee was the ideal mother in my opinion,” says Jim Hogancamp, who, although he left town for college 51 years ago, still stops in to visit and take Lee to dinner. “If you went to the Sears and Roebuck catalog and ordered a perfect mother, it would be her.”
Lee was also said to be one of the best athletes in town. She had been a great fast-pitch softball player growing up and had frequently played on men’s teams. She once broke up a no-hitter with a late-inning hit in a men’s game. She held records for years at the candle pin bowling alley in Claremont. Legend had it that she bowled so hard she once split a head pin in half. Lee frequently came out and joined in games in her yard with neighborhood kids. They got the impression that she was having more fun than they were. And they never ceased to be amazed by her athletic ability. “She could throw and hit as well as any man,” says Brad Weeks, a year younger than Carlton. “You’d never want to get in a game of burnout with Mrs. Fisk.”
“She could throw perfect spirals with a football,” says Hogancamp, who later played college basketball. “When we were in high school, she could kick a football farther than me. And I wasn’t exactly handicapped.”
Sunday mornings Lee would fix a large breakfast, get dressed, put a roast in the oven, then walk everyone the four blocks to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where she taught Sunday School. Afterward they would return home and she’d put a big Sunday dinner on the table. “Mom did all that stuff all the time,” says Calvin. “She was a wonder woman.”
“And she never complained,” says Janet.
Lee gives a dismissive wave at Janet’s comment. “What was there to complain about?” she asks. “It was stuff that had to be done.” And there is the Fisk work ethic in a nutshell: Don’t complain, just do it; because it is there and has to be done. It was a work ethic ingrained in the DNA of their children and reinforced by daily example.
Copyright © 2015 by Doug Wilson