Happy Father's Day, troops. If you haven't figured out the perfect gift for dad, Mental Floss has a great list of Strange and Unique Father's Day Gifts (via the lovely and talented Miss C).
My dad passed away 12 years ago, and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of him.
When he died, Larry Henry, the Sports Editor of the Everett (Washington) Herald ran the following story:
Thursday, January 9, 1997
This fan will be sorely missed
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Everything right when Bill Tucker was in the ballpark
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It was a nightly ritual with the radio play-by-play announcer at Everett AquaSox home games. Mark Aucutt would look out over the stadium to see who was there. If the regular fans were in place, that is, if Bill Tucker was standing over there in the bleachers behind third base, Aucutt knew it was time to play ball.
He would smile to himself, take in a deep breath, and begin to speak.
Things were as they were supposed to be. The pitcher’s mound 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate. The bases 90 feet apart. The umpires dressed in blue. The grass a healthy shade of green. The smell of grilling hotdogs in the air. And Bill Tucker in the ballpark.
These were the absolutes of baseball.
It was like being a kid and coming come after school and knowing that your mother was going to be there with a hug and fresh-baked cookies. The rest of the world might be messed up, but your own little corner was right and secure.
Bill Tucker was what was right about the world. He always greeted you with a smile and a handshake and wanted to know how you were doing. He was always happy, always positive, said Susan Wade, AquaSox media relations director. You always felt better after you talked to him.
Some of Bill’s happiest days were spend at the ballpark. Bill Tucker was a passionate baseball fan from way back.
“Let’s face it,” he once said, “I’m a baseball freak.”
As a young man, he played right field for his town team in Henry, Tenn. They’d play every Sunday afternoon in the summer, the townfolk gathering to watch. They were simpler times, there wan’t much to do and baseball was king.
With Bill, it remained king for life.
He liked it, he said, because it was a “thinking man’s game.”
It was a game that fit Bill’s personality. You didn’t have to watch every pitch. You could visit with the people sitting around you or you could go out and have a smoke during the game, turning the scorebook-keeping over to your wife or daughter.
That was something Claire, Bill’s wife, had to learn: how to keep score. Melody, the oldest daughter, knew how from, well, probably the first time she ever went to a game with her dad, back when the Rainiers were still in Seattle.
When the Mariners came to town in 1977, Melody went down to greet them. She came home that day and told her dad that the M’s had offered her a job in marketing.
“You mean in baseball?” Bill said.
“That’s right.”
Bill didn’t steer her one way or another. He just said what he always said to his kids when they had a big decision to make: Think it over and do what you think is right.
A few days later, Melody told her dad she was going to accept the M’s offer.
“Well,” Bill said, with a big grin, “I guess we’ve got some baseball games to go to.”
Indeed they did. Bill, Claire and Melody had season tickets for M’s home games from 1979 until a couple of years ago. They always sat in the same place: section 111, row 19, seats 1-3.
Bill seldom missed a game. Because he was a mainstay, everyone in that section knew him. And if the umpire signaled “play ball” and Bill wasn’t there, people got concerned. But that rarely happened.
You’d go to a Mariner game, Jackie Thomas, a season ticket holder, would recall, and you’d look over and see Bill and you’d know that all was well.
The first time Jackie and her husband Mark saw Bill was in spring training, long before sojourns to Arizona for exhibition games became the fashionable, the “in” thing to do. Back when the M’s were a bunch of nobodies going nowhere.
Bill was sitting behind the home plate screen holding pitcher Edwin Nunez’s baby. Something about Bill’s body language spoke clearly to Mark Thomas. “That,” he said, “is a nice man.”
Through the years, the Tuckers befriended dozens of Mariner wives. Bill kiddingly called them his “daughters.”
Bill’s oldest daughter Melody was as much a baseball fanatic as her father was, and for a few years after leaving the M’s, she was the general manager of the Everett Giants/AquaSox. You don’t think that didn’t make dad proud.
Bill got disenchanted with the way major league baseball was going a few years ago and started attending the Everett team’s games instead of the M’s. It didn’t matter that the kids were fresh out of high school and college and that they made errors and couldn’t throw strikes. They at least tried and that was more than Bill could say for some of the big leaguers.
Besides, it was baseball. That was all that mattered.
Bill wasn’t a boisterous fan. But if you were standing close to him and an AquaSox player hit a long fly ball, Melody said you could hear her father quietly willing it to get out of the ballpark.
Baseball is going through some turbulent times. It still hasn’t won back all the fans it lost because of the players strike. But one man who didn’t desert the game was Bill Tucker. He still listened to M’s games on the radio and last summer when he suffered a heart attack and was drifting in and out of consciousness, he would ask what the M’s score was.
When Susan Wade brought a get-well card to the ballpark, dozens of fans - old and young, asked if they could sign it.
Last Sunday, Bill Tucker died. He was 77. He was a Navy man who survived the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, a man who spent that day pulling survivors out of the water. “It’s something you don’t like to think about,” he said.
Bill Tucker was a compassionate man. Maybe you learn compassion from something like Pearl Harbor. Ernie Lundberg, an usher at AquaSox games, remembers that when he went through some difficult times, Bill would hear him out, give him a pat on the back and say, “Tomorrow will be better.”
Baseball will miss Bill Tucker. Humankind will miss him even more.
Happy Father's Day, everyone. Especially you, dad...
