AN APPRECIATION OF TIM WISE

Viking Athletics in the Golden Era

By Nick Shepherd

My recollection of Tim Wise and athletics at Viking begins in 1958, four years after Tim’s last season at Viking.  That summer, the fledgling Sports Illustrated carried an article listing the ten best summer camps in America.  Viking was no. 7 on the SI list.

In retrospect, the SI piece arguably marked the high tide of Viking’s golden era.  I recall reading the article and wondering at first how and why Viking was singled out for such public recognition.  The camp had seemed to me the private yet modest Cape Cod preserve of campers and counselors privileged to spend our summers on Pleasant Bay.  My more considered reaction to the article, however, was that Viking deserved a higher ranking. 

Admittedly, Viking would suffer by cursory comparison to the other six camps SI rated higher. If viewed objectively and dispassionately Viking’s physical plant was less than majestic.  We had then cabins without running water or electricity, a flotilla of undistinguished sailboats, skiffs and canoes, a swimming area knee deep in muck and eelgrass, plus one tennis court and a ball field that turned to weeds and dust in August.

How then did Viking arrive at the upper echelon of summer campdom and assume its seat at the SI table?  The answer is simply that Viking owed its success and lofty stature to the character and charisma of Ced Hagenbuckle.  Ced’s genius, evident particularly during the golden era of the 1950’s and early ‘60’s, was his uncanny ability to recognize, attract, sign up, bring aboard and retain season-to-season young men seemingly destined from birth to be Viking counselors.

What Viking lacked in physical assets Ced saw to it we, as a camp, more than made up in quality people. With few notable if not legendary exceptions, Ced hired counselors who excelled in their sport and had the gift for instilling their passion for the game they played in the youngsters they taught each summer.

I know now we then sailed, swam, played ball and tennis, shot arrows and bullets and built model boats better than most other campers even at the higher ranked camps, despite our equipment and facilities, because we were in a special place with very special people. The best of the golden era Viking counselors Ced recruited had the innate teaching ability, sense of purpose and commitment required to wrest performance and achievement and measured improvement from each camper, skilled or not.  More importantly, these counselors were of such timber that the boys they taught those summers rarely forgot them.

Perhaps, Ced realized his finest hour and Viking’s golden age began when one such counselor Tim Wise arrived in the summer of 1952.   Tim, in his three seasons, would transform Viking athletics from a placid, vanilla-flavored camp-organized summer recreation program into a vibrant, vital, demanding and competitive microcosm, equally frustrating and rewarding, at times frightening but always ennobling, where a game became a life metaphor.

Viking athletics was baseball.  Of course, we played some touch football and a lot of basketball and one summer we had a track team.  And tennis was always popular and eventually spun off into its own department.  But baseball was the summer game and the one we who loved it played with élan and great joy and all day long if possible.  Baseball is many things to different people. To those of us who put on the cap and spikes and played, baseball is an obsession, a chess game on grass, a game of inches, and, poignantly for us now too old to play, a game of voices lovingly remembered.

     Step close to any ball field, from Fenway Park to the neighborhood sandlot, and you will hear the ritualistic chatter of players and coaches that has not varied since Doubleday invented the game.  Invariably, one voice stands out. It is the voice the players hear encouraging, instructing, exhorting, deriding, joking, pushing, always demanding and settling for nothing less than maximum effort and surpassing performance.  More to the point, that voice commands attention and respect.  Affection is often an afterthought that makes the voice once feared, perhaps, or even revered at last lovingly remembered long after the last game is played. 

Tim had the voice we who played Viking baseball in those years heard first that long ago summer and still remember.  That we recall nearly fifty years later listening each summer day for the voice is a given; why we do is another matter.  Suffice here that Tim was important to each of us as few people in a lifetime are and for diverse and intensely personal reasons.  I for one needed more than wished for his approval and sought it by playing the game every day as long and as hard and as well as I possibly could.  It took me years to understand that when Tim did approve it was more for some faint sign of my maturity and a spark of selfless concern for my teammates than for my play on the field.  

He was a college graduate that summer of 1952 and older than most first-year counselors with an unaffected gravitas that set him apart but did not isolate him from the others.  Tim had played shortstop for Harvard and signed to play shortstop for the Orleans AC in the then semi-pro Cape Town-Team summer league.  He knew baseball in and out.  He studied the game under former big league second baseman (Philadelphia Athletics) and venerable Harvard baseball coach Stuffy McInnis. Tim told us and showed us everyday what it was like to play the game well.  

Tim brought with him to Viking actual competitive college ball playing time and drilled us relentlessly from McInnis’ playbook for each position on the field. He talked to us about and immersed us in the game and showed us how to play situation baseball. He initiated the rating system of rookie, regular, veteran and all-star predicated on the McInnis playbook.  Tim taught us to play baseball the way the game should be played.  We learned from Tim timeless lessons about how life should be lived.

The mantra for Viking athletics under Tim Wise was hustle and for those three magical summers we struggled to divine the essential meaning of the word.  We knew hustle at least meant running. So we ran on and off the field. We ran out every ground ball. We ran to back up each base on every play in the field.  And when we grew tired we simply ran further and faster.  We wanted only to hear the voice say “Atta boy. That’s the way to hustle!” I finally understood that we hustled when we ran because by running we evidenced our respect for the game.  I learned from Tim that hustle meant playing baseball simply for love of the game.  And if we loved the game we gave our full measure of effort and will every time we stepped across the lines to play.

Tim set a higher standard of play and a more stringent code of sportsmanship than we had ever imagined let alone tried to satisfy.  Yet we tried unfailingly to measure up and even to excel once we learned to hustle. Many of us became in three years pretty good ballplayers. However, my appreciation of Tim Wise reflects more that Tim instilled in each of us a sense of attainable excellence to frame our lives.

Years later I had completed college and law and graduate schools, practiced, then taught and coached and finally experienced some success off the playing field.  Only then did I appreciate that hustle and excel carried over from Viking baseball and applied to every facet of my life. The rubric was simple, deceptively so, of course. But essentially the lesson we learned from Tim was to excel we had to hustle and hustle means to live your life loving and respecting whatever you do.  

We won baseball games with Tim as our coach and mentor, against both little league and pony league teams.  And we began to appreciate that Viking was indeed a good baseball camp.  It is a fair summary that during Tim’s three summers and thereafter through the mid-1960’s, Viking set the bar for Cape Cod summer camp baseball. 

We achieved such eminence beginning with those three ephemeral summers, because the stars aligned and Viking athletics first enjoyed that rarity for any program an admix of superior counselors, Bobby Montgomery and Lee Sheldrick come back to mind, and extraordinary campers.

Tim was the one blessed with the voice but his success is equally attributable to the young people who listened to him.  Some were natural athletes like Ian Bennett and Roger Hoit; others made up in desire and competitive spirit what they may have lacked in native ability.  Peter Synnot was one such.  He became Viking’s first all-star through sheer desire, perseverance and love of the game.  Peter personified hustle.   

Viking began in the mid-‘50’s to excel in all departments.  In retrospect, Tim’s legacy is the maturation of Viking as a multifaceted camp with excellent programs in all sports and activities.   Counselors in the other departments emulated Tim and instilled in us that same drive and determination both to improve our individual skills to attain the highest rating and to coalesce as teams to win consistently against outside competition.

Viking to a man, and boy, hustled in those summers.  Of course, we all knew and accepted that Viking was first and foremost “a sailing camp for boys on Pleasant Bay”; however, the Viking spirit was such that every department counselor then believed playing his sport or participating in his activity was why so many of us returned summer after summer.  And, in truth, for most of us there was no other place in summer we wished to be. 

Tim left Viking at summer’s end 1954 in appropriate fashion on the camp train to New York and then on to Wichita to play for the national semi-pro baseball championship as the Orleans town team shortstop. I had that final summer with Tim become Viking’s second all-star, after Pete Synnot, and, for longevity if nothing else, received the trophy for athletics at the final banquet. I recall that last morning my stammering attempt to thank Tim and to say goodbye. The busses to the train were past due and my timing was typically poor. I stood there in front of this man who had come to mean so much to me with a full heart and nothing to say. I think what I wished to say then I am writing now.  Tim was the voice and I hear him still.

I returned happily to Viking in 1960 as head of athletics, after two years away for parent-mandated character-building summer employment.  Ced had hired Sandy Goebel, my friend and teammate from the Tim Wise summers, and Dick LeStage, a Cape Codder and a good ballplayer, to complete the senior counselor staff in athletics.  I saw immediately that we had the counselors in place for a special summer. 

What we needed and found in abundance were kids who wanted to play.  I was home.  The glorious part of it all is that this remarkable concursion of staff and campers continued for five summers.  After Goebel and LeStage came Don Haddock, my college roommate, and Ben Gifford and Rod Cross who for three summers made every day on the field a joy for me, and finally Rick Peace from camper to counselor and still my close friend today.

Those five summers blend together after forty years.  I recall vividly, however, working hard with Sandy Goebel to fashion an athletic program that was true to the spirit of the Tim Wise years.  We set about to teach baseball, as Tim had taught us, and to provide competition for those who wished to compete.  What the kids may have learned from us, of course, is for them to remember. 

Hustle remained the watchword for Viking athletics and for a camper to become a “veteran” under the Tim Wise rating system in the Shepherd years he had to recite the balk and infield fly rules verbatim from the rule book and to define hustle.  For a camper even to aspire to the coveted “all-star” ranking, he had to play the game well and, more significantly, exemplify hustle, as Tim had taught us, in his respect and love for the game. 

Rick Peace was the next all-star and like Pete Synnot before him, Rick compensated by will and effort for the ease and grace of the more natural athlete.  Given a choice I would field a team of Synnots and Peaces for a must game in any sport. 

We had our share of both the gifted athlete and the battler in my five years.  No one hustled more than Tommy Lichtenstein and Tom Lincoln battled harder than anyone to compensate for dubious baseball skills.  Peter and John Meacham and Chuck Quintana were gifted young ballplayers.  John Scheide (Viking’s “Mr. Baseball”), Sam Casey, John Foehl, Jean and Jay Mason, Copey Coppedge, Steve Pete, Bruce Dunnington (affectionately “Pidge” to the counselors), Quinn, the kid in left field who was a dead ringer for Steve McQueen, and so many others, played Tim Wise baseball for us. I remember them all with great affection.

The camp, of course, is a memory for all of us.  Many of my own memories are personal and some even a bit haunting. I will not forget Tommy Lichtenstein principally because I so closely associate him with Tim Wise.  The voice still speaks to me, and rather accusingly too, about the day and the game I denied Tommy the right to strike out, ingloriously, to be sure, but with some dignity.

Tommy was then a quiet kid, tough, determined and gutty.  He was probably a better football than baseball player but he would battle on any field and like so many of the youngsters who played for us made up in hustle and effort what he lacked in natural ability.  If we had a team captain then, Tommy would have been my choice.  His attitude and demeanor bespoke character and maturity beyond his years.  Ben, Rick, Rod and I, as his coaches, liked Tommy and cared about him.  But I let him down that summer day in Chatham and the voice has not let me forget it, and rightly so.

Early in the season Tommy had been hit on the head by a fly ball during a typical evening free-for-all on the athletic field. He was not hurt physically but the incident had an emotional overlay that persisted throughout the summer.  Tommy’s interest and enthusiasm for the game never flagged but he did not play as well as he had and we all knew he could.  We were sympathetic, of course, but intent on putting Tom back on track.  Tommy struck out in his first two at-bats in that Chatham game. When he took two fat pitches for strikes his third time up I called time and sent up a pinch hitter to complete his turn at bat.  Tommy reacted stoically to the substitution, put his bat in the rack and sat down on the bench.  

Tim Wise would not have done what I did, not to a Tommy Lichtenstein, not to any youngster who hustled, not to win a game, not to teach an object lesson by humbling another, and definitely not to vent his own frustration.   I charged, tried and found myself guilty on all counts.  The voice only confirmed what I already knew in my heart that I failed a good kid who trusted me as his coach to do the right thing. 

On a separate occasion I publicly berated our third baseman for a bonehead play, embarrassed him and called undue attention to myself.  The voice spoke to me that day too but this time from directly behind me rather than from its usual vantage point somewhere in my conscience.  Unbeknownst to me, Tim was at the camp, watching the game, observing and passing judgment in his inimitable fashion.  He had quiet words for me after the game to the effect good coaches brace their players in private and to instruct rather than criticize.  Tim’s message and its delivery mode were not lost on me.

These were life lessons I learned from Tim and over the years I have tried to apply them well. Tim was a splendid baseball coach, the archetype head of athletics and a continuing presence in our lives. Tim was a special person and he with Mun Moore, Eddy Estey, Jack Grant, George Jewett and Charlie Reynolds and so many others, made Viking a special place for all of us privileged to be aboard during the golden era.   Viking now is a state of mind; in the 1950’s through the mid-60’s it was, Sports Illustrated rankings be damned, simply the best camp ever. 

My last official act at Viking was to award all-star certificates at the final banquet to John Meacham, Chuck Quintana and Tommy Lichtenstein.  I stood one last time in the heart of the camp and tried to find words appropriate to the occasion but sufficient to say goodbye and thank you, once again to Tim Wise, and now to those three boys who had truly hustled, to Ben Gifford, Rod Cross and Rick Peace, to Ced, and to all at Viking who had given me the best summers of my life.  If I failed then adequately to express my love for Viking, may this Appreciation of Tim Wise say it all for me now as we lovingly remember the voices and summers of our youth.

INSCRIPTION

This book recalls in picture and text the long-ago time when we were young and summer was always Cape Cod and camp.  And it reflects particularly our abiding affection for CEDRIC R. HAGENBUCKLE, a singular man, who created and nurtured at Viking Point on Pleasant Bay a seamless camp in a timeless place to which we returned summer after summer simply because there was no place else we wished to be.