Selected Articles:

Boyhood Days

Ted Williams

Rolfe Humphries, "Polo Grounds" (1942)

(In 1987, Emmy Award winning writer Herb Rosen, a close friend of Leo's eldest son Jon Craig, wrote this short article about Leo and baseball. This was to be the outline of a proposed documentary. Unfortunately, Leo's health prevented this project from going forward at the time.)

The names change, the players don't. They are always young and swift and strong. They do the same things year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. The game they play, baseball, is the American game and its wonderous routines, patterns, and drills, its statistics and myths, legends, feats, and nicknames mold yesterday and today into a seamless, reassuring continuum.

In an article in the January 18, 1987 edition of "The Washington Post Magazine", Thomas Boswell listed 99 reasons why baseball is a better game than football. Among them were:

• Faces are better than helmets
• In football, it's team first, individual second...a baseball player is an individual first, then part of the team second. You can study him at length and at leisure in the batters box or on the mound. On defense, when the batted ball seeks him, so do our eyes.
• At a football game, you almost never leave saying, "I never saw a play like that before. At a baseball game, there's almost always some new wrinkle.
• Baseball means Spring's here. Football means Winter's coming.
• Without baseball, there'd have been no Penny Park. Without football, there'd have been no artificial turf.
  Quarterbacks have to ask the crowd to be quiet. Pitchers never do.
• ln football, nobody says, "Let's play two!"

Boswell was right on target. In virtually every way, baseball--from its openness to its lack of a clock to its human pacing--is a superior game. But more than that, for all the inroads other sports have made, for all of football's posturing, for all of basketball's sweaty grace and athleticism, baseball remains, alone, the game imprinted on America's soul. It is so much a part of the life of this country, so much a part of what we were and are, that the historian Jacques Barzun said, "Whoever would understand the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."

Barzun, also, was right. For well over a century, baseball and its heroes have had a special hold on us. We talk of the "Babe" as familiarly, as knowingly, as if be were still homering to the distant reaches of major league parks and then trotting around their bases with those mincing little steps. We still wondcr if Johnson, long dead, longer retired, was as fast as Gooden, age 23, is. We talk of Mays, Snider, and Mantle as if they were all still in their glorious prime. We still call Williams "Teddy Ballgame" and this unmatched batter hasn't been an active player for over a quarter century. The truth is that the images and moments of baseball are part of us, as one with us. But there are very few people who are truly as one with it.

Leo Cloutier is one of those few.

Through what he has seen and noted, or through those he has known, he can, at age 75, reach back to the dawn of baseball's modern era. He has been friends with, acquainted with, interviewed or written about most of the great baseball players of the past eight, almost nine, decades. And most of the near great. And most of the journey-men. He has been a player, a newspaper baseball reporter, a radio baseball reporter, the first television baseball reporter in New Hampshire, a minor league general manager, and elected to the Hall of Fame. In a very real sense, if these were Leo Cloutier's only accomplishments they would be miraculous.

But there's more.

What really defines Leo Cloutier, what really marks him as a baseball natural resource, is that for the past 39 years he has been the coordinator of one of the most successful baseball banquets in the country. Held annually in Manchester, New Hampshire, this banquet has a tradition of excellence and attendence that is impossible to duplicate. A simple recitation of the names of those who've been there is enough to warm most baseball fans through a long, cold winter.

In 1988, this remarkable function reaches its fortieth year. What better time to produce a one hour documentary film honoring the banquet, baseball, and, most importantly, Leo Cloutier. Through him, through his memories, his words and thoughts, we look back, fondly, gently, on the baseball he remembers and the baseball people be recalls. But even beyond that we use this man, this happy event, as an opportunity to explore the intense and dynamic relationship between this particular sport and this particular country, a relationship that shows no signs of waning after more than a century.

What we envision is a film which exists on two separate but related levels. The first of these-the film's superstructure-involves the preparations Leo Cloutier is making for his fortieth banquet. Having done it thirty-nine times before, much is repetition, but some is not-a stray new wrinkle, a new worry, a new twist. By and large, however, the effort is routine-the product of years of practice. That's fine because we're not terribly interested in this level, not really interested in the nuts and bolts of putting on the banquet. What we are interested in is setting up a viable structure, a structure which will move from point "a" to point "b" and while it is doing that will allow us to carry our audience naturally and coherently to our second level.

So, as we watch Mr. Cloutier go about handling endless details, running endless errands, making endless phone calls and generally driving his event toward its once-a-year day, we are also leaving that work-a-day situation, that level, to concentrate on a series of personal reminiscences by Mr. Cloutier. He speaks of past banquets, past guests, and of his life in relation to baseball. What the audience is getting is a guided tour--an expertly guided tour--through baseball time. Perhaps we begin with the letter Connie Mack sent a young Leo Cloutier advising him on how best to make use of his love for the game. Audio tape from Mr. Cloutier's numerous radio interviews will be used where appropriate. Stock footage, filmograph of old photos and newspaper headlines and stories and box scores, and original location photography will serve as our visuals. For all that, however, what must really carry this film is Leo Cloutier and his ability to express his recollections with joy, vigor, and love. Adding depth and dimension and texture to the production will be interviews with as many of the people Mr. Cioutier talks about as possible. Further, narration will, from time to time, be heard. Its job, not an easy one, will be to put baseball's niche in American society into some kind of meaningful perspective.

Essentially, then, the film begins with the banquet six to eight months in the future. As we move the viewer forward through that period of time, that period of preparation, we are also taking him or her backward, looking at and listening to Mr. Cloutier and others. When the film ends, the trip into the past is concluded and the banquet is at hand: the fortieth. It is a marvelous affair: illuminated by baseball's current greats. No narration is heard. The audience is allowed to appreciate the gathering of special talent, an appreciation made all the deeper and richer by a knowledge of the man who made it possible, a knowledge of the world he has spent his life in, and a knowledge of the importance, yes, importance, of baseball in the United States.