Good for the Soul
Before me, a member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, appeared this first day of February, 1916, one Robert Frederick Warner, alias Buck Warner, lately a professional player of the game known as baseball and now part owner of an automobile garage in Hopsboro, a suburb of Cincinnati, and voluntarily and without threat or coercion did dictate a confession, the full text of which follows:
I
The wife says that if I didn’t quit grouchin’ round the house she’d just plain leave me and go and live with her Aunt Julia. Well, the wife’s a good scout and Aunt Julia’s home is a farm twelve miles from Dayton, so I promised I’d try and cheer up.
“Yes, but you promised the same thing before,” says Ethel; that’s the wife’s name. “You promised the same thing before and that’s all the good it done,” she says. “It’s your crazy old conscience that’s botherin’ you. You’d ought to go to the hospital and have it took out.”
“Operations costs money,” I says.
“Well,” says Ethel, “I’d rather be broke than have old Sidney Gloom for a husband.”
“I’ll try and cheer up,” I says again.
“You’re the world’s greatest tryer,” says she, “but your attempts to make everybody miserable is the only ones that’s successful.”
It was at breakfast yesterday mornin’ that she was payin’ me these compliments. At supper she pointed out a piece in the evenin’ paper and told me I should read it.
Seems like some old bird about seventy, worth a couple o’ millions, had been a clerk in a grocery store when he was a kid, and one day he helped himself to twenty dollars out o’ the till, and he was scared to death they’d learn who done it and send him over, but for some reason it wasn’t never found out. So, as I say, he finally got rich and had everything that’s supposed to make a man happy, but he hadn’t been able to sleep good for several years on account o’ thinkin’ about his crime. So the minister o’ the church where he attended at preached a sermon on what a good thing confession was for sinners, and the old boy couldn’t even sleep through the sermon, so he got the drift and made up his mind to see if a confession would cure his insomnia and not bein’ able to sleep. So he wrote one out, describin’ what he’d did, and sent it to the minister to be read out loud in church, and that night he slept like a horse.
“Well,” I says, when I was through readin’, “what about it?”
“It’s worth a try,” says Ethel.
“You go in town tomorrow and find somebody that’ll listen, and tell ’em all about your horrible crime. And then see if you can’t come home to me smilin’.”
“That’ll be easy,” I says, “if you’ll leave me drink a couple o’ beers.”
“You can do that too,” she says, “if you think it’ll wash away the blues.”
I thought she was kiddin’ at first; I mean about the confessin’. But she made me understand she was serious.
“But I’d have to bring in the names of others that ain’t entirely innocent,” I says.
“Go as far as you like,” says she. “You certainly don’t think they’re worth shieldin’; ’specially Carmody.”
So here I am and she says I was to tell it all and not keep nothin’ back.
It won’t be necessary to start with where I was born and so forth. A year ago last August is where it really begins. Before that I’d been in the National League six years, and if they’d left me stick to shortstop all the time, they wouldn’t of nobody had me beat. But they found out I could play anywheres they put me and they kept shiftin’ me round like a motorcycle cop.
In the six years I’d did even worse than not save no money. I’d piled up pretty near four thousand dollars’ worth o’ debts. The biggest part of it I owed to fellas on the club that’d came through for me when I made a flivver out of a billiard hall in Brooklyn.
So, as I say, a year ago last August found me four thousand to the bad and that’s when I met Ethel. We was playin’ in Pittsburgh and she was visitin’ some people I know there. She had eye trouble and liked me the first time she seen me. But she didn’t like me nowheres near as much as I liked her.
