Some people do great things in their lives but fly well under the radar when it comes to getting credit for it.
Joe Martin was such a guy.
I can’t say I knew Joe all my life. Truth be told, I hadn’t seen or heard from him since our Little League/Cub Scout days of the ’90s. Still, it was an awful shock to look in The Item the other day and see that he’d died.
Joe and I had a few things in common. We had sons in scouting. We had children in Lynn’s Pine Hill Little League. We both fought the Battle of the Bulge, and I don’t mean the World War II conflict.
And we both loved to play guitar and sing. I remember the two of us trying to entertain a group full of 8-year-old boys and their parents at a Cub Scout Christmas party with our rudimentary guitar playing and our rather ordinary voices. I don’t know what either of us was thinking, but we did it anyway.
He and his wife, Kathy, once came to our house during a stretch of unsettled weather to play guitar, sing, and entertain each other. Our favorite songs were “Aimee” by Pure Prairie League and “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger. It was in the middle of singing that song that a clap of lightning exploded directly behind our house and next thing I knew, I was on the floor.
Sadly, Little League relationships aren’t built to last. Once the kids turn 12, and go onto other things, that’s often the last you see of the people you practically lived with for the previous six years. Joe and his family went one way, and I went the other — onto Babe Ruth baseball and activities beyond that. If we ever saw each other again, it was only in passing. I think once, at Stop & Shop, we met in the condiment aisle and had a brief conversation.
I know people can heap a lot of derision on Little League types who try to make up for their perceived failures by riding their kids (and their kids’ friends) harder than the jockey who rode Justify to the Triple Crown. We’ve all seen them, and they are every bit as obnoxious as their caricatures make them out to be.
Joe was the counter-balance to that. Whether it was scouts or baseball, Joe really was in it for the betterment of the kids, and not to feed his own ego.
I mean, neither one of us was Gandhi. We didn’t spend our lives trying to manage 10-year-olds into a cohesive team because we saw it as our mission. Of course we derived some satisfaction out of it, whether it was the knowledge that we taught them an appreciation of an important part of Americana, or whether it was the knowledge that the kids were outside, enjoying the fresh air, and having fun.
I’d say Joe leaned more toward the “having fun” part without completely missing the point of why we were all there. Of course we wanted to win. Nobody goes through this with the idea we can’t wait to lose the game. And that’s true even at levels where the final score isn’t the most important part of the process. But Joe was one of those guys who never lost the message that, win or lose, these were children, and that at the end of the day their parents had entrusted them in our care for a couple of hours every day.
Sometimes, we adults completely miss that. Joe never did.
It’s sad that so many good people go through life in anonymity while the empty barrels make enough noise for the rest of us.
But I’m sure Joe wasn’t anonymous to the people who mattered the most to him, and the people to whom he mattered the most.
And that’s all that matters.