Childhood memories of my brother John, by Curt D. Baker
Curt Baker & John Baker (May 2019)
My memories of my big brother John:
Of all the things I can say about my brother John, he being the eldest was in charge of the rest of us when the folks would be away when we lived on the farm, foremost on my mind is something I got from him that I passed along to my own kids and even grandkids now. And that is, he was the master game-inventor.
My favorite of them all I remember well. On the farm, we had a middle room on the first floor (carpeted), and kitchen with linoleum floor. We had an old potbelly stove in the kitchen (which actually came in handy one winter in particular when bad snow storm knocked out all the power and we basically lived in the kitchen. I was a little kid then so I considered that “adventure sleeping” at bedtime). Anyway, John used that old potbelly stove for a game he invented that all of us loved. Simply take a sock and bundle it into a ball. Stand at the potbelly stove and toss the sock wherever you could, run into the middle room around the dining room table, and back to the kitchen where we took advantage of the linoleum floor to slide into the stove (just like in baseball) before the sock could be retrieved and we were tagged out. We did that for hours and hours...Never got old.
An outdoor game he invented (or maybe co-invented with brother Gary, I’m not sure) involved a football that if caught on one bounce could be drop-kicked back. If not, it had to be kicked back where it was on the ground. It was pretty much a combination of football and soccer with the two big oak trees as one goal and the corn crib door as the other.
Something we all did on the farm that would worry me today if our grandkids tried it: jumping into the corn bin. You know, mice in there with us, that kind of thing... but we never thought anything of it. Was a blast!
We did indoor hockey games in the winter, all kinds of things; but regardless, you could be sure that if John was involved, it would be the Olympics all over again, with Yugoslavia vs. Czechoslovakia and so on instead of John, Gary, Curt, and Dave.
I think of all the games he invented for us (and there were LOTS of them), I’d have to say the top two would have to be haymow basketball and batting cobs.
Haymow basketball was actually a space on the second floor of our barn, and our stepdad [Melvin Hoffman] graciously kept a part of it cleared for us as a makeshift basketball court. We used a volleyball as the basketball, and more often than not it was of course some country vs. another in the playoffs. Never, ever got old.
He had a knack for not only inventing games for us to play, but more than that, games that were much more than just something to keep us occupied. No no...We LOVED it. He never invented a game that, to my knowledge, was not outrageous fun.
Probably at the top of the list was batting cobs. You just go out to where the steer hung out, tell them to scoot into the shed, get an old axe handle for a bat and a carefully-selected corn cob as a ball, and there you go. The plain old steer yard was a bonafide baseball field. And spinning those cobs really made them do tricks on the way to the plate. Hard to hit. Home run fences, foul markers, the whole thing. We did no running, just judged an out or a hit depending on where the cob landed. What I always found funny was the feed bunks that split the steer yard in two. So, letting nothing go to waste, if a fly ball (or in this case, cob) landed in the feed bunk it was considered an error by the invisible defense.
I could go on and on, the above game inventions just the highlights, the ones we liked the best and played the most. But I am certain of one thing: having that example he set for those things is absolutely what led me to invent games for my own boys. I invented game after game for them, and they STILL talk about them today. I’d say that’s an impact, and using imagination to make up games that were really FUN, and all from simple things like a volley ball, a rolled-up sock, or a corn cob. Amazing.
I sent him a little short video of myself doing a pantomime set to music one time years ago, just on the spur of the moment figuring he would get a kick out of it. Turns out he sure did, because at Clark University in Massachusetts he would introduce me to the students on the first day of his class by playing the video of me to them, explaining “that’s my little brother.”
He was a very classy guy.
I remember when [my wife] Heather and I lived in Iowa after we were first married, and we got a call from John. He was in the area and he called us, then came to visit us at our apartment and went swimming with us.
Another time much earlier when I was a freshman at Stillman Valley High School, I was in biology class and John showed up the the door. The teacher asked what he wanted, and John explained he was my big brother and just wanted to see me a minute. So he actually came and sat next to me for part of the class! And I gotta say, that TAKES class.
I could go on and on and on about things like this, but suffice it to say that my eldest brother was a very classy guy who I always looked up to...for good reason.
Curt D. Baker
March 21, 2022