As Moonlight Graham was hanging up his cleats, putting an end to a fairly pedestrian baseball career, Doc Graham was preparing to hang out his shingle, indicating the start of his medical practice. Studious and intelligent, he had graduated near the top of his class. While still playing ball in Scranton, PA he had also served his internship at prestigious Johns Hopkins Medical Center. With those credentials he could have started his practice anywhere he wanted. Quiet and unassuming, Archie made Scranton, PA his first choice.
He had spent 3 1/2 summers playing ball in Scranton, becoming something of a local hero. He would have had no problems finding townsfolk looking for a family doctor. But Scranton was an industrial town, with clouds of oily smoke continuously spewing from the factory smokestacks. Archie had developed a persistent cough accompanied by tightness in his chest. He knew staying in Scranton would continue to affect his health and so, reluctantly, he began searching for someplace else he could call home. For a while, he worked at an eye and ear hospital in Chicago. Then, while attending a medical conference at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota a colleague mentioned Chisholm “where the air is pure, and they have the best water on earth.” Since he was already in Minnesota, Archie decided to take a side trip to Chisholm.
Chisholm is located in the so-called iron range, an area rich in iron ore deposits which, at that time, had 15 operating mines. In the fall of 1908, about six months before Doc arrived, the town was devastated by a wildfire which destroyed most of the downtown area. When Doc arrived in April of 1909 much of downtown was still a smoldering ruin and nobody would have blamed him had he simply hopped on the next train back to Chicago. The question of why he didn’t do just that is something only the man himself can answer. Maybe he saw something in the industrious town folk, trying to rebuild what they had lost. He had spent most of his life in large cities so maybe something about this simple life appealed to him. Maybe he just didn’t want to take that long train ride back to Chicago right away. In any event, he decided to stay awhile. The town had placed an ad for a doctor, so Archie made his way to the Rood Hospital and there introduced himself as the new town doctor.
Chisholm, in 1909, was made up mostly of immigrants from Croatia, Serbia, Germany, and Scandinavia. Many of them spoke little to no English. Most of them lived in an area of Chisholm known as pigtown, primarily because of the livestock that wandered the streets. Doc formed an inexplicable bond with these people. He started schools to help them learn English and prepare to become U.S. citizens. If a young child became ill or a pregnant woman was about to give birth Doc would grab his bag and go to their assistance, no matter the time of day or night. He rarely charged for these house calls, other than to request an occasional home cooked meal with the family. It wasn’t long before he became enamored of the place and, what started out as a short stay, became his home for the next 50 plus years.
After an uncertain arrival, Doc Graham remained in Chisholm until his death in 1965. There are several high points in his life that are well documented but, for the most part, his day-to-day life during those years is not well known. Very few people knew that he once played baseball in the minor leagues, much less that he had appeared in one game for the New York Giants. It was not something Doc tended to elaborate on for most of his life except with a few select friends. When he died, he was just another small-town doctor that had passed on. It would be 15 years before he was made immortal by the book, Shoeless Joe, and 24 years before the movie Field of Dreams came out. All of the papers that he had collected over the years were destroyed, no one realizing that they may have had any real value. Perhaps they did and perhaps they didn’t. The fact remains that most of what is known about Doc Graham while in Chisholm is anecdotal. Fortunately for us, Archibald Wright Graham was something of a character and very well-known and well-liked in the town and, after his passing, there were plenty of people with stories about what kind of man he was.
Even though he had now dedicated his life to medicine, the call of athletics wasn’t out of his system yet. Many an afternoon, while walking home from attending a patient in pigtown, he would stop and watch the young men play baseball at the local field. It wasn’t long before he was stepping in to play in the games when they were short a player. He never mentioned his history, other than to say he had played some minor league ball. Surely, no one ever knew that he had had a cup of coffee with the New York Giants. Chisholm had a team in the Mesaba Range minor league. When word got out that the town doctor also played baseball Brin Freeman, the team captain, didn’t think twice about approaching Doc and asking him to play for them. After some hesitation Doc agreed. Now, instead of a baseball player that studied medicine on the side, he was a full-time doctor that played baseball as a hobby, mostly on Thursdays and Sundays. And he continued playing until he was almost 50. In 1910 a scout for the Boston Red Sox even offered him a contract. Archie was 31 and had decided that he was going to be a doctor, not a ballplayer. He turned the offer down.
As the town doctor he excelled. The town was hit by a typhoid epidemic in the summer of 1910, just a year after his arrival. Archie did his utmost to administer to the townsfolk throughout the epidemic as well as suggesting ways of preventing its spread. In 1914 the town was hit again by another epidemic. This time it was polio and again Archie stepped to the forefront to fight off the disease. In 1918 the town faced another medical crisis. This time it was a worldwide flu pandemic that claimed 50 million lives. Doc Graham instituted an inoculation program for the schools and very few of the youngsters in Chisholm were afflicted with the disease.
With a population of around 10,000 Chisholm was small by most standards. But, despite the low tax base, the town was cash rich. This was due in large part to a consortium of mining companies which operated the local mines that employed most of the townspeople. The mine owners believed in a healthy and well-educated workforce and therefore set aside a substantial amount of their profits towards the local hospital and school system. The new Rood Hospital was state-of-the-art, and Chisholm boasted one of the best school systems in the state. In 1917 Archie was lured away from the Rood Hospital by his friend James P. Vaughan, superintendent of the Chisholm school system. Vaughan hired Archie as the staff physician for the entire system. It was a position he maintained until his retirement in 1960 at the age of 80. For 43 years Doc Graham helped generations of Chisholm’s children prosper and grow into healthy young adults. He loved the children and loved seeing them grow up and succeed in life. More so because he and his wife, Alecia, were unable to have children of their own.
In 1926 he started a program whereby he took the blood pressures of children from kindergarten through grade 12. Most of his colleagues, had they known he was doing this, would have asked why? It was generally believed, at that time, that hypertension was an affliction that targeted adults and did not affect young children. What old Doc Graham was doing was unnecessary and a waste of time. Still, Archie took monthly readings of all the children in town for 15 years collecting over 25,000 readings during that time. His findings were not earth shattering. What they did was to establish a baseline of what was normal blood pressure for children in different age groups. His findings indicated that blood pressure among children did increase with age especially as they approached puberty. It also tended to hit adolescent girls at an earlier age than adolescent boys. While attending a medical conference at the Mayo Clinic Archie brought his findings to the attention of doctors Robert P. Gage and Edgar A. Hines Jr. Both men were highly respected in the field of hypertension and were duly impressed by the thoroughness of Archie’s research. They both urged him to publish his findings and threw their full support behind his work. That study of childhood hypertension was considered groundbreaking and was quoted in pediatric journals for decades after Archie first published it.
All his life Archie remained a fan of athletics in any form. He fully supported the high school sporting clubs of Chisholm. Whether they be baseball, football, basketball, or whatever sport the school teams happened to be playing. He attended most every home game and often traveled with the team when they played other schools, his schedule allowing. He stalked the sidelines rooting his boys on. If one of them went down with an injury Doc was on the field with his black bag to administer first aid. As such, he was probably one of the first doctors to practice what is now commonly known as sports medicine.
Not all of his medical procedures were orthodox. For example, he had a unique way of administering hearing tests. At the start of each term the students would line up outside his office for their hearing test. His method was simple. He put a hand to the ear of the child and whispered a number. If the child repeated the number correctly, he or she passed the test and it was on to the next student. There were two problems with this, aside from the obvious one. First, Doc always used the same number each term. The first child in to see him was whispered the number 12 and last child in to see him was also whispered the number 12. The second problem was Doc had a tendency to raise his voice. Needless to say, in all of his years administering hearing tests to the children of Chisholm not one ever failed.
One of many anecdotal stories about Doc’s love of the town’s children comes from Jim Vitali. Jim was the junior class president of the local high school in 1950. Among his duties, he was to preside over the junior class prom. A shy young man, he came from a poor family and was not able to afford the cost of a rented tuxedo or buy a corsage and dinner or any of the other amenities that were expected of him. And, due to his shyness, he didn’t have a date. Somehow Doc Graham got wind of the situation. On the afternoon of the prom, Doc summoned Vitali to his office. When he arrived, Jim discovered the Doc had somehow obtained a corsage, arranged for dinner, and found transportation. He even found the young man a date and slipped $25, a large sum in 1950, into his pocket to cover additional expenses.
Doc Graham was known for being quirky and had many odd habits. Perhaps one of the strangest was his nervous habit of chewing paper. He’d have a spare sheet on his office desk, tear off a strip and begin chewing on it. After several minutes he would spit the wad into the trash, tear off another strip, and begin the process anew until the entire paper was gone. On more than one occasion he accidentally grabbed a sheet of paper that was of some importance and had pretty much devoured the entire page before he realized his mistake. He also fancied himself an inventor. One of his friends was Andrew Niemalla, the owner of the local auto shop and a student from the class of 1930. Together the two of them spent years trying to develop a perpetual motion machine. Doc was convinced it was something they were destined to do and kept after it even after failing on every attempt. Both men were convinced they would invent something big and strike it rich. In Doc’s case it was probably the pursuit of wealth that motivated him more than actual wealth. At some point he became interested in real estate and eventually owned several properties. He was a poor landlord though, generally letting the properties fall into disrepair. It wasn’t because he was cheap as much as he was absent minded. Tenants would tell him things needed to be fixed and Archie would simply forget. The same way he would forget to deposit their rent checks, sometimes for months at a time. And when someone was in need, such as Jim Vitali, Doc had no compunctions about using his own money to help them out. By all accounts he should have been a very rich man but was just a poor money manager. Not that this was something that overly concerned him. As one longtime friend put it “Doc just went about his business, and everything took care of itself. That was the way he lived. Nothing ever seemed to bother him.”
After retiring as a doctor in 1960 at the age of 80 Archie, not one to sit still, dabbled in politics, eventually being elected to a seat on the city’s school board. But he was slowing down. On August 25, 1965, Archibald Wright Moonlight Doc Graham passed quietly in his sleep one month shy of his 50th wedding anniversary. His friend, Veda Ponikvar, well known and well-respected editor of the local newspaper wrote a moving editorial entitled “His Was a Life of Greatness”. The editorial was eventually entered into the congressional record later that same year. Twenty years later, when the script for Field of Dreams was being written, portions of it were used in that as well.
Had he been asked, Archie Graham probably would have said that there was nothing special about him or his life. There are hundreds of young men that have labored in the minor leagues for years and many have had the proverbial cup of coffee at the Major League level. Most never even get that far. Archie was far from alone in that respect. And there are countless unheralded small-town doctors that have been just as generous and giving of their patients as was Archie. That is probably part of being a doctor. But, in truth, Archie Graham lived an extra-ordinary life. Posthumously, he was immortalized in a book by an author, W. P. Kinsella, that was looking for a story about a man who had been banned from baseball for life for cheating. And in Moonlight Graham he found a simple yet inspiring story. His was the story of self-sacrifice and redemption and Moonlight Graham has become a symbol for faith and forgiveness and second chances.
And with that I want to point out a few of the inconsistencies between the real-life Moonlight Graham and his fictionalized counterpart. In the film Moonlight plays just one inning in right field but in fact he played two innings and was in the on-deck circle when the game ended. In the film the Fenway Park scoreboard says he played that one game in 1922 when in fact played it on June 29, 1905. In the film that game was on the final day of the season when in fact it was mid-season and Moonlight manages to stick around for a few more days before being sent back down to the minors. In the film Moonlight retires after that game to become a doctor but in reality, he played another three seasons in the minors while finishing his studies. In the film he takes Ray Kinsella to his office in downtown Chisholm in 1972 when in fact his office was at the Washington school east of downtown and in 1972 Graham had been dead seven years. Archie tells Ray that he was born in Chisholm when in fact he was born in North Carolina. His father was an educator, not a doctor as depicted in the movie. And finally, Moonlight was a left-handed batter, not a righty as seen in the movie. A few minor mistakes and nothing glaring, mostly to fit the story. What W. P. Kinsella likes to call creative fiction.
This blog has run a little bit long which is why divided it up into two parts. Part one, if you missed it, dropped last week and is about Moonlight Graham the baseball player. What you have just read is about Doc Graham the doctor. I had a lot of fun researching this particular blog and have only put a very small part Archie Graham’s life into less than 3000 words. If you want to know more about the real-life Archie Graham, I highly recommend the book, Chasing Moonlight by Brett Friedlander and Robert Reising, a thoroughly enjoyable read.
Next week I am going to look at real estate once again. We will be discussing private money lenders and how to choose them. Hope you enjoyed learning about the extraordinary life of Moonlight Graham. Please leave some comments. Till next time dear readers.