The Under Review - Issue 4 | Summer 2021

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Marty (Brennaman) and Joe (Nuxhall) on the radio.
She was a full count of delicious contradictions. Impeccably dressed, hair done, red lipstick, compact at the
ready, she smoked Virginia Slims and had the raspiest voice I’d ever heard and the most liberated
cacophonous cackle of a laugh – one that just did not square with such an otherwise refined image (I
inherited the same cackle). These ostentations annoyed my mother, but they fascinated me. Only now as
an adult woman do I understand why I watched Grandma so carefully, with such curiosity. I didn’t know it
at the time, but she was my coach too.
Doris Burton knew how to take a pitch.
Some coaches would describe taking a pitch simply as deliberate inaction.
Take one too often, and you become passive. Hesitant. Inert.
Some coaches would describe taking a pitch as a smart, patient strategy. Taking a pitch means you’re
willing to watch and wait. It means you know how to size up the pitcher. You know how to anticipate. You
play the odds. And you take your swing when the time is right.
In 1945, Grandma’s big brother Dee was killed by a sniper on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, six
weeks before the war ended. She watched the war reports. She waited for him to come home. He didn’t.
In early 1953, Grandma and her first husband divorced; my dad was twelve and my aunt was ten. Grandpa
moved to Michigan to work for the Detroit Free Press. Over the holidays that year, Dad took a Greyhound
bus north to spend a few days with him. They went to the Lions game against the Browns; my 80-year-old
father still remembers the score was 17-16 Lions. After that visit, no one heard from Grandpa again for
twenty-five years. She watched; she waited – for contact, for child support. Neither came.
In 1958, she married again and divorced five years later.
In my mind, I can hear her saying, “Well, enough of all that!” She started taking her swings.
By the year 1980, when I was five, she had been working as a bookkeeper and office manager for 30 years.
She had been flying solo for nearly 20 of those years, and it seemed pretty glamorous to me. This woman
owned her own home, took care of business, rarely suffered fools, and did what she damn well pleased,
ISSUE 4 | SUMMER 2021