I was blessed to grow up here, in what was the bucolic north end of Vancouver, Washington, in the days when not even my oldest brother Mike could hit another house with a rock.
It was the early Seventies, Richard Nixon was in the middle of a presidency he would tarnish, and America was divided by war for the first time since 1865, this one fought in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
There were no curbs or sidewalks then. Instead, shallow grass ditches separated the houses and hayfields from a two-mile county road where the mailman stopped no more than a dozen times. Folks here owned acres of land, none more than the Flagg family that grew hay across the road. Our neighbor to the east, a retired pig farmer from Arkansas named Jack Bland, had an electric fence I would crawl under to get a better look at his cows.
Today, the hayfields and cattle are gone, replaced by hundreds—thousands, maybe—of builder-grade homes built on tiny lots. Our house—a lap-sided ranch with a daylight basement and blue carpeting in the kitchen when we left it—is a survivor. Today, it is almost completely obscured by a house that sits in our front yard, inside the circular drive where my brothers and I played Whiffle Ball, and by another in the back where the swimming pool my dad saved for used to be. Must be something to blow the heat off your morning coffee while a beer-bellied neighbor in nickers stares at you through the kitchen window.
On warm summer weekends, after the lawn was mowed, the garage was swept clean, and the pile of rubbish in the pasture behind the pumphouse was burned to the ground, my dad would set up a small black-and-white TV on a chair on the back deck where we’d eat fried bologna sandwiches and potato chips dipped in ketchup while watching the Saturday Game of the Week. On those days, through the scrolling horizontal lines of a Zenith that sizzled like a glass of Royal Crown Cola when you shut it off, heroes were made. There was the sheer dominance of Steve Carlton, winner of 27 games in 1972 for the Philadelphia Phillies. There was the hope gleaned from Micky and Ron Lolich, cousins who grew up in Portland’s Slabtown neighborhood—a 15-minute drive from my home—who proved that Major League players really do come from the Pacific Northwest, a place with steady spring rains that left the unconditioned dirt infields of the era puddled, shiny, and slick as a frozen sidewalk. And there was the prepotent skill set of Roberto Clemente, right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates who remains, arguably, the best player to ever spit between two shoes.
I look back on that time—the early Seventies—as baseball’s Golden Age, even though sports pundits say that era ended loosely around 1960. I cheered Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, lamented the mustachioed dominance of Oakland’s Athletics, and fanned the flames of my own World Series dreams by listening to the captivating play-by-play of Jack Buck, Harry Carey, and Vin Scully on a white Welltron AM/FM/ 8-track radio that looked like a NASA space helmet resting on my nightstand. By the time I was eight, I had every Major League pennant—24 of them—tacked to the walls of the bedroom I shared with my brother, Dan, and I could tell you which division each American and National League team belonged to.
Each spring, my dad would load my brothers and me into the old yellow Oldsmobile and drive us across the state line to Caplan’s on SW 4th Avenue in downtown Portland, maybe a dozen miles south of our rural home and smack dab in the middle of what I was sure was the biggest and busiest place on Earth. Every year it seemed we parked farther from the store, extending our walk through the city’s mayhem. Cars raced through the streets, horns honking. Dirty people in tattered clothing lay sleeping on the sidewalk, beneath the shallow soffits of apartment doorways and storefront windows. The stony heels of black and cordovan Ferragamos clicked and clacked their way through town as the sharply dressed men and women that walked in them moved with purpose, like they were late for a bus.
It felt like we were worlds away from the hayfields that surrounded my family’s home; lost for a brief time, we were, in a lifestyle in which I could not imagine living. Here, neverending traffic was metered by stoplights, and shade was provided not by native fir trees, but by tall buildings with elevators and imperturbable men with squeegees who dangled five hundred feet above the ground. There was a steady hum of road noise as drivers angled for on-street parking in front of busy stores and restaurants. Back home, you might see a diesel-belching Farmall amble by before you saw a Buick, and sleeping outside was something my brothers and I did in down-filled mummy bags after filling our bellies with Jiffy Pop and watching M*A*S*H on color television. Amidst the bankers and the lawyers and the hotels with valet parking, it struck me as an unlikely place to sell sporting goods.
But that’s what Harry Caplan did.
The sounds of the city were silenced when the single French door closed behind us. Through cigar smoke that hung thick in the air, attaching itself to dusty walls, cobwebbed ceilings, and every type of sporting good you could imagine, Harry Caplan greeted my family as I imagined he did all his patrons: gruffly. He wore polyester pants, an un-tucked knit shirt with one too many buttons undone, and glasses thick as a Ringside porterhouse. He had thin, white hair and a chin as wide as a steel-toed workboot. He was the only one in the city with a key to the place, opening and closing the store himself six days a week—never taking a sick day—for the better part of fifty years.
That’s long enough to make anyone salty.
Inside, the creaking of the old maple floor was apropos. A high school boy in a letterman’s jacket dribbled an ABA basketball on it until Harry barked at him to stop. Then the boy spun the ball on his index finger, making the red, white, and blue leather panels blur together, like graffiti-covered boxcars railing past the platform at Union Station. Each time the door opened, the city’s commotion entered, briefly, and dust bunnies danced randomly across the hardwood.
There was stuff everywhere on the main floor. Harry Caplan did not care if the ball you played with was pumped or stuffed, by God, he was going to stock it. And if he didn’t, he’d buy a hundred of ‘em, just in case you came back in again. He hung out near the cash wrap desk in the middle of the room, surveying his wares while leaning on a tempered glass case that protected a half-dozen eight-by-ten action photos of Major League baseball players. Nearby, two-toned persimmon fairway woods, along with full sets of unforgiving bladed irons, peeked out from two dozen oversized golf bags that were leaning against both sides of an A-frame display rack. The perimeter walls, and the storage shelves and bins between them, seemed to close in on you, each one merchandised fully—if not creatively—with sporting goods to tickle every amateur athlete’s fancy. There were ping-pong balls, knee braces, long white sanitary socks and stirrups of every color imaginable; sweatbands, jock straps, cans of Wilson and Penn tennis balls, sleeves of Titleists and Top Flights, handball gloves, golf gloves, hockey sticks, kicking tees, batting tees, and quart-sized metal cans full of sticky pine tar that smelled warm, earthy, and of the calloused hands that harvested it; there were letterman’s jackets and CYO football uniforms, rosin bags, and cubbies full of white baseball undershirts with colored ribbing around the collar and three-quarter length sleeves to match; there were squash racquets and hanger rounds loaded with stark white tennis shorts that awaited the city’s wingtipped bankers and lawyers who wore ties wide as an Hermès scarf.
But the Sperry boys did not come to shop on the main floor. Instead, we sought Mr. Caplan’s permission to seek our treasure below ground where pallets of cardboard boxes with “Louisville Slugger,” “Rawlings,” and “Wilson” stamped on the side were stored after being unloaded from trucks at street level, then sent fifteen feet below 4th Avenue through a freight elevator in the sidewalk. With rows and rows of cardboard boxes stacked on pallets and splintered wooden shelves, there was enough combustible material in the dimly lit basement of Caplan’s to set the city of Portland on fire with little more than the fallen ash of a Swisher Sweet. Nevertheless, this is where you were sent, alone, if you asked Harry where the baseballs were.
“You know where they are,” Harry growled with a nod toward the stairs and an unexpected wink that went undetected by my brothers.
Access to the basement was through a rickety set of stairs in the back. They led you to all those boxes, each full of baseballs packaged by the dozen, Louisville Sluggers, blue-striped Adirondacks, or the best baseball gloves money could buy. The main floor had a few retail gloves hanging on the wall, their palms branded with the names of Catfish Hunter and Jim Palmer—the kind of things that got soaked in mink oil by fathers who did not know better before eventually finding a home on the dirty floor of a closet in the garage. But if you had the dough to spend on an A2000 or something crafted from the Heart of the Hide—the kind of leather big leaguers actually used—you could find every model made in Harry’s basement. They were stiff as a plywood napkin and the smell of the leather was intoxicating.
My brothers and I pulled bats from the boxes, angling for enough space to test the subtle differences in heft and handle thickness. The narrow aisles did not allow for full swings, but they did little to stop the more vertical pre-pitch windmill of Willie Stargell that Dan demonstrated, to our delight.
We always returned home with a dozen Rawlings A1010s and new wooden bats to replace the ones we had salvaged by driving screws into their cracked handles—metal bats were for sissies, as far as my old man was concerned, like sticking your index finger outside your mitt and the golf glove Rod Carew wore in the batter’s box. We would play Pepper for hours on the front lawn, being careful to use only one ball at a time and to rub the grass stains off using a licked palm when there was a break in the action.
In 1989, when I was 23 years old, Hank Jones of the Los Angeles Dodgers signed me to a minor league contract and then sent me to Caplan’s with a blank check to buy a new catcher’s mitt. He was chapped when I handed him a receipt that included a new infield glove as well. He should have known better than to set me loose in that place. An hour later, I was on my way to play in the Northwest League, unaware that I had set foot inside Caplan’s for the last time.
Under his gravelly exterior, it is rumored that Harry Caplan had a soft heart. Hell, the cigar smoke wasn’t even his, but rather that of an employee who was afforded a few minor indiscretions. If he liked you, he would toss a few golf tees in your bag at checkout. If he didn’t, you’d probably never know the difference.
It’s been gone for nearly twenty years, but people still ask me about the place. Disheveled as it was, you could find anything you wanted at Caplan’s, particularly if you wanted the best products available and were willing to wade through the basement without help to find them—like shopping online, but with the ability to actually touch and feel and smell the goods.
Years later, the concept of “big box” engulfed the sporting goods industry, and soulless corporations like Dick’s and Big 5 began popping up in and around Portland. Harry sold the store in the mid-Eighties before I signed with the Dodgers. I noticed then that the new owners had cleaned the place up and in the process swept away every bit of charm and personality Caplan’s once had. They hawked the precious inventory downstairs, eventually began focusing exclusively on golf equipment that they peddled by mail order to wealthy businessmen in Asia, and finally left downtown for suburban Beaverton a few years after Harry died. Good thing they waited; leaving downtown would have killed the old man.
Harry was kept on for a few years after the sale to help with the transition, but sadly, disrespectfully, was relegated to the back room where he was kept mostly out of sight. For fifty years, he was the first one to arrive and the last to leave a store that bore his name and reflected a personality as unique to Portland as the Rose City’s view of Mt. Hood when the setting sun casts the Cascade Range in the warm pink hues of summer.
Many of us have suffered the pain of changing times when the beloved hayfields of our youth are dug up and supplanted by something we did not ask for. We know the feeling of being kicked to the curb, of getting thrown out with the trash by people with new ideas. We long for the way things used to be. I don’t know how Harry Caplan handled what I imagine was such an unsavory departure from the business he built and the industry he loved.
If I was him, I think I might have taken up cigar smoking and made my way to the tinderbox basement before escaping through the freight elevator for good.
Thanks for the great article, brings back great memories of Harry and especially the basement, a special person and a special place for sure!
Harry was what us true old school merchants, shop keepers. One of the best there ever was. Another terrific nostalgic, romance about baseball. Keep ‘‘em coming !