Tampa, Florida					Thursday, September 09, 2010

Muchos Gracias, Senor and Adios Mi Amigo
Sunday, October 30, 2005
TAMPA-- The telephone call came at 10ish yesterday morning to my home. “Tom, this is Al Lopez Junior.’’ “Oh, oh, no, Al.’’ “Yes, my dad died. I know you’d want to know, as soon as possible.’’ “I am so sorry. Such a man. Call me when you can about the plans.’’ He said he would. Only thing I know for certain is that Al will want to rest beside his forever wife, Connie, who left us all years ago, left the fine waterside Lopez home in South Tampa for which Al once said, “we paid almost nothing for it, all these years ago. She loved it. I love it.’’ I was a regular there for visits when Al came home from playing and managing heroics in the bigs with Brooklyn and the Chicago White Sox he took to a World championship years ago. Visited in these last years as the friend I was, the admirer I was, of this man without fault. Al III had told me Al seemed to be doing well these past weeks, after some hospitalization and pain for an aching back from so many years. I wrote of him throughout most of the managing years, of his championship times the years he was so often second to the hated New York Yankees of those days. Then he retired to his beloved Tampa who loved him back. Al Lopez, catcher in the majors for 19 years and manager in the majors for 17 was in those days terrific at those high tension workplaces for those incredible 36 years, all the while calm, all the while courtly, all the time a Tampa guy, and all the while the very first genuine bigtime sports hero from both his native Ybor city and Tampa, and proud of it. Al adored his family, his boys, and their wives and their kids. They returned the love to the last and will forever. In this last years of some problems, he would spend the days at his home, the nights at the home of Al Junior or Al the Third, a housekeeper with him at his own place after wife Connie left. But, in truth, not many knew where he lived. Close ones did, of course, though, so many left this world in recent years, including his regular Friday night Palma Ceia Golf Club dinner date, Benny Fernandez. He still could be the best at his profession (and he made it that), the toughest, and the most expressive, in two languages. He was always neat and well-spoken, as if he were a graduate of, oh, say Columbia and not just the restaurant by that name, but the New York City brain center, not far from the place his Cleveland Indians of pitchers Early Wynn, Herb Score, Bob Lemon and Mike Garcia, played them so tough. Baseball knew him as a bare-knuckled catcher then as a shrewd manager, indeed one of the best. The world knew him, Senor Al Lopez. Around here, we knew him as Al, our friend and our hero. He loved Ybor, and he loved his long time friends there and around Tampa. Calling them by first name. Has just as equally appreciated and endorsed by the media, everywhere.. When Al was moving about a bit better, before the back went and the legs got tired, he and his pals played golf passionately at Temple Terrace, but more recently at his Palma Ceia. He was good. Know that. As he was good at dominoes, played at one of the many Latin clubs in his native Ybor. The other day, a dozen of the tuxedoed waiters at The Columbia Restaurant gathered around a table four senior men who were having lunch in the beautiful Garden room, one of 11 in this historic place, and on cue from the owners, Richard and Casey Gonzmart, standing behind one of the senior diners at that center table, sang, with their slight accents: “Hoppy Birthday to-you, Hoppy. . . and so on.’’ The singing done, with flashbulbs from the reporter of La Gaceta newspaper flashing, the full room and others nearby broke into applause and those of us at the main table and nearby, including the restaurant owners who knew him well, congratulated the laughing birthday man to whom all were pointing. The object of all this attention and all of this affection was enjoying this celebration 95 years after he, Al Lopez, had been born just a few blocks north and west of this landmark restaurant, which was a few years older, five years older. Alfonso Raymond Lopez was born August 20, 1908, the seventh of nine children of this wonderful, hard-working couple who had come to America from Spain in 1906 by way of Cuba with so many others of that origin and purpose, a future of some kind in the cigar business, then thriving in the City of Ybor, a part of Tampa, an assembly place for so many of Spanish and Italian bloodlines. What is left of the cigar business is still located in Ybor City. But, Al Lopez would make his fame in another, very American pursuit—baseball. Indeed, the Al Lopez sitting there at the Columbia on his 95th. at the center table, by the fountain, moved so successfully through baseball he was in 1977 inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame after 19 years a big league catcher and 17 more a big league manager of great success and respect with the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians. He was Tampa’s first--very first ever—big time sports achiever, a man admired and loved all of his 95 years, a man the University of South Florida awarded an honorary doctorate. Except for work, he has never left this place of his birth for long, indeed, what more proof to affirm that lifelong romance than to celebrate his 95th birthday only blocks from his birthplace with friends of a lifetime, and drinking café con leche, having flon and a cake on which his pal had had an Al Lopez baseball card drawn in icing, for his desert. The friends with him included Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, the Fight Doctor of Muhammad Ali, who had been born in the same neighborhood as Al Lopez, who has painted him and written and lectured about him, and would at lunch present Senor Al with a new oil painting of catcher Al Lopez. Lopez had also been a great friend of Dr. Pacheco’s dad, the foremost pharmacist of Ybor City in the growing up days of Lopez and his son, Ferdie, who would become a doctor, a painter, a writer, a ring physician, an author, and the best of the best in television commentary. He also became, and still is, a foremost historian and promoter of Ybor and of Tampa. The friends at the table included also master baker, master fisherman, master fight promoter, and lifelong pal of Al	Lopez, as were so many others of the Alessi Family, admired so in the food and baking, boxing and philanthropic arenas. Alessi’s craftsmen in baking handcrafted the cake for Lopez, as they would the next Tampa citizens, Leonard Levy and Tampa Bay Lightning executives Ron Campbell (president) and Bill Wickett (PR) told Lopez they’d see to it he got a new, neat Lightning shirt. Then, there was the fourth at the table of El Senor Lopez, me, so long the sports editor of the Tampa newspapers (Times, then Tribune), so long befriended by Lopez, who in my early times in the business saw to it I met the right baseball people, got where he could help me get, watched with admiration his work and his good humor and his grace in all circumstances. Lopez taught all who knew him civility and good citizenship, without being a whimp or a nerd. Even on this day he told a few locker room stories plaintively. Now, in days of yesterday, of another time, travel anywhere in business or sports, and presented as being from Tampa, and the questions always were: “How is Al Lopez? How is the Columbia (and Cesar Gonzmart, dad of Richard and Casey, with us this week)? Or, got a good cigar on you? Then, a few years later, Can you help me with a reservation at Bern’s Steak House? Of course, with Tampa’s move into the bigshot business, the big sports business, the big time business overall, while other questions will be asked (Can the Bucs repeat?, Al Lopez remains Tampa’s sports fountainhead and so far, its only native born Baseball Hall of Famer. And, on that day, that was his 95th birthday, he was called upon by us all, but mostly historian Dr. Pacheco, who flew up from Miami for the lunch tribute), and Alessi who triggered the old thoughts of the old Ybor. Pacheco had been a waiter at The Columbia. He authored the Ybor City Chronicles, in which he tells the great tale of spilling hot coffee on Santo Trafficante, a man of association on whom no one would want to spill coffee, of any degree. He also authored with Adela Gonzmart, late mom of Richard and Casey and wife of Casey, and granddaughter of the founder of the Columbia, the Columbia Cookbook. Pacheco is a man of many talents, may achievements. He is a man of remarkable memory and recall, hey, but, so is Al Lopez. “No,’’ said Al, “I didn’t work here. But I delivered bread, fresh Cuban bread, before daylight, for Ferlita, to provide the Cuban sandwich bread for the cigar factory workers. By horse and buggy. We would hang it in a paper bread, on a nail, by their front door.’’ Alessi pointed out, “so the rats could not get it.’’ “Right,’’ said Al. “Right.’’ He went on then to talk of his youth in Ybor, signing for $150, catcher of Walter Johnson, getting tossed out of two games, “including my own park here in Tampa right after you got it named for me. I told the ump in the spring game,, he couldn’t throw me out of my own park. Well, you must know what he said. He chased me,’’ laughing. Yes, he remembered, he caught 1,950 big league games, all those years of squatting surely responsible in part for the bad back that forced him to give up the golf he loved to play so well, mostly at Palma Ceia and Temple Terrace in Tampa. He was good. Al shot 71 at his peak. That’s good enough, eh? And yes, people came over to say hello to this grand man of Tampa and of sports, He was ever gracious, but, frankly, anxious to get at the café con lecher and get back to his beautiful home that faces Tampa Bay and where his gin rummy buddies gather almost each day for the game, two cents a point, he said, “but, we will play Hollywood, which mean, as you know, three games at a time.’’ Three games at a time. His sons and friends thought the daily gin kept his mind working as sharply as it did into the Nineties. He does not disagree with the theory. At this birthday lunch at the Columbia, he told a few Minnie Mimosa stories, a few Bill Veeck stories, Casey Stengel stories. Dizzy Dean stories, Yogi Berra stories, more of them Stengelese stories than any others, because they were so good, and because he could speak that dialect the great Casey used to confuse. He told stories, too, of the great Cleveland Indian teams of Early Wynn and Herb Score. And he talked of the great World Series championship Chicago White Sox team in 1959. But, he spoke more of the Ybor stories, and why not we were in the middle of them all that in the Columbia restaurant landmark. “Tough place. Ybor City was, once,’’ he said. “I went to work one day and had to step around a couple of guys who’d been murdered, in the streets,’’ but that was so long ago. “Great place, Tampa. Never, ever thought of leaving. Think the Bucs can do it again? Fun, wasn’t it? Like their little coach. Gruden. He’s real guts.’’ Only, Al, a plain-spoken man, did not use the word guts. Used a Spanish word for a part of the anatomy suggesting you got guts. Then, we were gone, so Al could get his place ready for the gin games, after shaking the hand of everyone in the room who knew him. Most did. Then we were gone. Phil and I dropped him off on his neat home on Tampa Bay where the gin room is the memorabilia room but the centerpiece is the gin poker table, in front of the bar made of baseball bats, the table ready with stacks of new decks of cards, two of the players already waiting and grumbling. Al was a few minutes late. The sessions would stop in a matter of months because of losses of some to the players to time. Not Al, he could have played with the last until his time came too, Sunday morning. Al, junior, a lawyer who played for the Florida Gators and that made The Senor a Gator too, said the docs told him his dad died of a “massive heart attack.’’ It would have to be massive, that heart of Senor Lopez, massive and strong, sensitive and good, but tough even now at 97, though smaller than it was. There was good reason for that. The Senor had given so much of his heart away. Gracias Al, for the part you gave me these 50 years of our friendship, of your guidance, generosity and patience in my early sports writing times, as well as your counsel throughout. You made everyone feel important. You first put (and Ybor) on the Tampa major sports hero list..Vaya con Dios Senor Lopez.
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