"Wally" (1/3)

 

Long before he became Mr. Huxtable, a Jell-O pitchman and ultimately... a federal convict in a fashionable orange jumpsuit, Bill Cosby had a comedy bit in which he described the births and personalities of his first two daughters. The first one, Erica, came out perfectly well mannered, polite and compliant. His second daughter, Erinn, emerged from the womb, as Cosby puts it, with champagne in one hand, a cigarette in the other and demanding to speak to the person in charge.

Mae & Tara

Erica/Erinn...Maelynne/Tara... sort of. Tara has been the “take charge” sibling from the jump... but in a good way.

Before I get too deeply into this story, let me answer the obvious question: why is this entitled, “Wally?”

Because that’s what I have called Tara since she was in junior high.

There must be a great story behind this nickname, right? Nope. One day, I just called her Wally. No reason. Just me being weird. And she has been “Wally” or “Wallace” ever since.

Tara was born on a Wednesday... August 17th, 1983, to be exact. Daughter number two. She graced us with her presence one year and 10 days after Maelynne, our firstborn, came into this world.

She was unplanned... obviously. I mean, who, in their right minds would actually plan to have their first two kids roughly one year apart? So we spent the nine months of Jeana’s pregnancy trying to prepare ourselves for the chaos that two humans in diapers would surely deliver.

But that chaos never really materialized in the way or to the extent that we feared. I mean, yeah... two kids in diapers will always present some challenges but in this case, they fell into the category of "routine" more than "extreme." In fact, over the next few years, our two girls formed such a close bond that they kept each other occupied and really minimized the amount of time and effort we needed to keep them busy and entertained.

By the way... Maelynne and Tara’s close bond continues today. They are each others’ best friend and will be for life.

Tara was a highly curious and discerning little girl. She wasn’t satisfied to simply observe, she had to understand the cause, the motivation, the nuance, the make-up and the mechanics of what she saw. If Tara had accompanied Dorothy to see the great and wonderful Wizard of Oz, she would have immediately been suspicious and she would not have waited for Toto to pull back the curtain, exposing the little man at the controls. She would have had a handful of curtain within seconds of entering the room.

The earliest manifestation of this yearning to understand was watching baseball games on television. I have been a Los Angeles Dodger fan from my earliest memories and during the 1980s I was at the most fanatical stages of my unrelenting support for the “Blue Crew.”

Feeding my addiction, I watched Dodger games on TV almost every day from April through October. Starting at about age 3 or 4, I would find Tara sharing my recliner with me as we watched the games together. She was an active observer... meaning, the questions that came out of her mouth were continual and relentless. She was 100% invested in understanding the game of baseball and I was all too happy to be her tutor.

By the time that Tara started playing softball at age five, she had an amazing understanding of the game and it manifested itself in game one of her long softball career and continued until her playing days ended at age 21, in 2005.

Her first team was the Bears and she played at Artesia Park in Southern California. Her coach absolutely loved her and was amazed at her grasp of the game. I can remember Tara turning unassisted triple plays on multiple occasions. With nobody out, she would catch a pop fly and as the baserunners were on the run at contact, Tara would run and tag the bases the runners had abandoned without tagging up... and with three outs, she’d jog off the field... while the players from both teams stood there, utterly and completely confused about what just happened.

At the end of that first season, Tara’s coach bought the the players shirts commemorating their great season but Tara’s shirt had three extra letters, MVP (most valuable player).

MVP Shirt

Southern California was and is a hotbed for softball as the great weather enables the game to be played throughout the year for the truly serious player. The elite travel teams are formed at early ages and before Tara turned 8, she was selected to play for the park’s all-star travel team, the Artesia Punishers, and I was asked to coach the team.

The next few years, we traveled from Los Angeles to the border with Mexico, playing against the best competition that Southern California had to offer and Tara grew as a player and as a team leader. She literally became a coach on the field as her teammates frequently looked to her for direction.

1993 was a significant transitional year for the Munson family. What started out as an innocent family vacation in Iowa to visit family, resulted in a serious discussion that lasted the whole 1,700 mile drive home... and beyond. That “discussion” revolved around the pros and cons of moving our family from California to Iowa. West coast to the Midwest.

In December of 1993, we packed up our four girls and moved to a different world. We landed in Grinnell, Iowa and fell in love with the community and the culture immediately. Tara was 10 years old and halfway through the 5th grade.

Not surprisingly, she made friends almost immediately. Tara has always been very engaging. She is genuinely interested in other people and loves to hear their story. That’s a great characteristic, by the way, and it draws people to you.

Almost immediately, we discovered what we considered the crown jewel of Grinnell. At the Northeast corner of town was a beautiful, relatively new complex of baseball and softball diamonds. As you’d imagine, we spent many hours on that plot of land over the next many years.

Coming into our first softball season in Iowa, spring of 1994, Tara, age 10, already had 5 years of softball under her belt. She also had 3 years of pitching lessons on her resume’.

Rod & I are the handsome coaches

One of the first people I met in Grinnell was Rod Boggess... a fellow sports fan, a fierce competitor and a father of daughters. In other words... a kindred spirit. Rod is still one of my best friends. We decided to team up and coach our daughters’ softball team.

We taught the girls the fundamentals of softball. We instructed them how, when and why to bunt. We taught them how to steal a base and how to properly slide. We gave them signals from the 3rd base coaching box... bunt, take, steal... etc. We raised their softball IQ and we weren’t ashamed to try our hardest to win every game we played. Some of the other coaches in the league seemed to resent our level of seriousness but our players and their parents loved it!

Rod and I coached for three seasons together in the park league system and never lost a single game. Not one.

I describe this approach because Tara totally embraced it all... the fundamentals, the practices, the perfecting of technique, the competitive spirit and the absolute understanding of the game. And it would serve her well in the years to come.

To be continued...