Hispanic Heritage Reading: Clemente

Let me start with some background. 

One of my high school jobs was at K-mart, and one of the areas I worked was tidying the toy aisle. It faced rougher treatment than, say, cleaning products.

Those toys included baseball action figures, and that was where I first saw Roberto Clemente. 

I don't remember the series, but Willie Mays was another one. I think Clemente stuck out because I had never heard of him before, but also because his photo was so engaging.

I don't merely mean that he was handsome, though he was. There was this openness and strength coming through. He apparently had that effect on people in person, but it doesn't always come through in a photo.

Later on I learned that he had died while on a flight taking humanitarian supplies. 

I would not have been opposed to learning more about him, but I guess what got him into this round of reading was a Jeopardy! category on graphic novels that were biographies. I had read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, but not even heard of the four others. I have read all of them now. 

The most graphically lush was Mike Allred's Bowie: Stardust, Rayguns, & Moonage Daydreams.

It's opposite was The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television by Koren Shadmi, starkly black and white.

The two made a good pairing for such different lives treated so differently, but similar in excellence. 

(Plus there are scenes where Bowie sees a gremlin on a plane wing, clearly referencing The Twilight Zone as well as Bowie's  discomfort with flying, but in the other book Serling looks out at a plane wing and there is no gremlin, even though you are thinking of the gremlin.)

Houdini: The Handcuff King wasn't that good, and seemed to speculate more than was necessary.

21: The Story of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago was okay, but I felt like there was a lot missing. That is when I decided to read Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss.

Having now covered which books related to Roberto Clemente and why, here are three thoughts:

One small part of the comic was Roberto being irritated with The Lone Ranger and Tonto's name meaning "fool" or "stupid" in Spanish. 

Here's the irritating thing; I read it in July 2021, and I don't remember what they called him in the Spanish comics. There was something else. Maybe Toro?

It resonates more now, after watching Machuca, because they had been building an analogy of the friendship between Gonzalo and Pedro, using the popular comic, with the question being asked of whether an white person and an Indian can truly be friends.

That was the first time in the movie that I really thought about the color difference. Gonzalo was lighter-skinned and it saved him from being relocated with the rest of the shantytown.

Not seeing color is good, right?

Let's move to the next thought.

Clemente did have a lot of pride in his origins. As a Black Puerto Rican, he faced language and color barriers in the States that he did not experience at home; that was a hardship.

There were some issues in Pittsburgh, but it was worst during spring training in Florida, which had more entrenched segregation back then. That meant that there were bars and restaurants that his white teammates could go into that he couldn't. There were times when he could not ride with them, and he could not stay at the same hotels as them.

This would be frustrating anyway, but it stands out because there was a former teammate who was asked about Clemente and said that Clemente never tried that hard to get to know them. The teammate did not seem to reflect on how much of that social time was held in places where their Black teammates could not enter. 

He didn't have to notice, and he didn't; that is one reason why not seeing color -- even if true -- is not ideal.

Finally, there is the matter of Clemente's death. 

It wasn't what I thought. I had this image of a plane having issues mid-flight and just disappearing, no remains being found. 

In fact it was an overloaded, under-maintained plane that had issues right on takeoff, but it was near the ocean, and did go into the shark-infested waters. There were some traces found, but not much of the people inside.

The relief was for Nicaraguans affected by an earthquake. While it was destructive enough to create many problems, those were worsened by the government at the time. A previous shipment had only gotten through because Clemente's name was invoked, and that was why he felt the need to go personally.

Clemente had always felt he would die young, and often that it might be in a plane, and he'd even had a presentiment that something bad was going to happen at New Year's. Those would all be reasons not to go.

He was also someone who believed strongly that if you weren't helping others you were wasting your life. Perhaps all of those feelings reconciled him to the risk, even if he was not expecting that flight to crash.

And yet, there is still so much else that contributed to the death. 

If President Somoza had not been holding up supplies, and exploiting the situation. Or if he were not a baseball fan, and Clemente's name wouldn't have made the difference...

If they had not needed another plane, and been offered one on short notice...

If that plane had not been under-maintained, and overloaded and unbalanced by people who should have known better as the professionals but did not care...

If those many attempts to revoke the plane owner's license had worked, so he wasn't even around offering his services to people who did not know how irresponsible he was...

And the owner died too, and the pilot whom he hired at the last minute, possibly ill-advisedly, so it's not that they were trying to be that incompetent, but it still happened.

Which I guess is to add that you may not realize how important the little corner that you oversee is. The corrupt president of a suffering country may know that he has real responsibility, though not think too much about the impact, but the aviation official who writes up a ticket, and the owner who fights it and the judge who allows the dismissal, the pilot who is tired and is trained, but maybe not thoroughly...

It all adds up.