As a kid, my goal was to be a baseball player when I grew up. Of course. Most of my friends had the same dream.

This was post-war baseball, after WW2, after the Yanks had saved the world from tyranny in Europe and the South Pacific, truly the National Pastime and passion.

Jackie Robinson and other Black pioneers, magnificent players — Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso, and others, changed the face and nature of the game.

The three best teams in baseball were in the same city, New York, until the Dodgers and Giants split for the Coast in ’57 (though the Braves and Indians had their day in the sun).

The Yankees had elegant Joe DiMaggio, and we had truculent Ted Williams, a war hero.

Reality intruded on that dream of mine fairly quickly. I was never the best player on my teams in the PAL (Police Athletic League) or at Lewiston (Maine) High School.

I had a backup plan. I would be a sports cartoonist.

I would be Vic Johnson.

Most days, my dad walked home from work at nearby Bates College, stopping at Ernie’s Store to buy the Boston paper, first the Herald, later the Globe. I got the sports section when he was through with it.

An original cartoon from Middlebury College cartoonist Karl Lindholm (hey, that’s me!) from a 1965 edition of the Campus announcing the appointment of Wendy Forbes as varsity hockey coach at Middlebury.

Newspapers in those days had a resident sports artist who illustrated game accounts, heroes, and newsworthy stories, both local and national, in striking pen and ink drawings.

Boston had six major daily newspapers in the mid-1950s. The artist at the Herald was Vic Johnson. Man, I loved his work. The Globe had Bob Coyne.

From the very beginning, I liked to draw — and I liked to see my pictures up on the wall at school. When I was 11, I drew a picture of a Red Sox player at Spring Training in Florida and sent it off to Vic Johnson.

A couple weeks later, I received a lovely note from him, on Herald letterhead, dated April 5, 1956 (I still have it, yellowed and brittle).

“I want to thank you for sending me this drawing you made,” he wrote, “and must say it is very good for an 11 year old boy. . . . Just to show my appreciation for your interest I am sending you one of my original cartoons.”

The note was encased in a tube along with an approximately 13”X16” artistic rendering of a doubleheader sweep by the Red Sox over the Chicago White Sox on June 26, 1955. It was the actual drawing, in India ink on a sheet of heavyweight drawing paper, which appeared in the newspaper the next day.

The central image is of two ball players, Red Sox pitchers, subduing a Chicago mobster: one, Willard Nixon “pitched and BATTED Boston” to the win in the first game, and the other, Tommy Brewer “tied up the toughies with ease,” to win game two.

Surrounding this diagonal central image are smaller depictions of the games’ highlights, along with snappy, often alliterative prose: “Little Nellie (Big Chew) Fox had six hits”; “The swinging Swede (Jackie Jenson) swatted his 15th (homer)”; “Meandering Mister Myatt moseyed from his mooring“ (that’s White Sox third base coach George Myatt) and was thus ordered by the umpire: “Back to your playpen, pronto.”

It’s one of my favorite things, collected over a lifetime, a treasure. It has hung on the wall every place I have lived since I first had my own space.

As time went on, I continued to enjoy drawing and submitted cartoons to my high school newspaper and yearbook, and then in college at Middlebury, to the Campus newspaper.

It became a satisfying hobby. Somewhat like my earlier aspiration to be a ballplayer, reality imposed an awareness that my gifts were really not that special.

That’s OK. I found teaching (and coaching), writing, working with young people allowed ample outlets for my creative impulses.

• • • • •

This Vic Johnson story has an interesting coda:

In the fall of 2015, I went to Cuba with a dozen or so other Beisbol aficionados with a group called Cuba Ball, led by EJ “Kit” Krieger. Though he grew up in Brooklyn, Kit has lived in Vancouver, B.C., Canada since 1969.

We called him El Jefe.

Kit has developed over time deep connections to Cuban baseball, visiting Cuba over 30 times, 20 trips with Cuba Ball delegations. It was a terrific experience for me. I told you all about it at the time! (reads the columns online at tinyurl.com/KarlInCuba.)

An original cartoon by Canadian artist Bob Krieger of Brett Millier, a “perfesser” at Middlebury College who taught a Canadian literature course at Middlebury (hence the Margaret Atwood novel in her glove). Brett worked at over 200 San Francisco Giants games from 1984-86 as the message board operator (Bob Brenly was her favorite Giants player).

For many years, Kit organized an annual raffle among his Cubaballistas, 50 bucks a ticket, 100% of the money to benefit Cuban ex-ballplayers who were indigent. The prize of the raffle was an original cartoon, a caricature of the winners themselves on a baseball card format, drawn by Bob Krieger, Kit’s brother.

For 32 years, Bob Krieger was the resident editorial and sports cartoonist for The Province, a major newspaper in Vancouver and British Columbia. His work is stunning and wickedly satirical.

I won that raffle in 2017 and was ecstatic. Bob wrote and asked for a couple pictures and a summary of my baseball experience. I asked if he would do a caricature of my wife Brett instead. It is so hard to find gifts for her on her birthday and holidays: this would be special.

Brett has a genuine baseball biography. She operated the message board at Candlestick Park for the San Francisco Giants for three summers (over 200 games!) as her graduate school summer job before coming to Middlebury to teach American literature in 1986.

Bob depicts her in her Giants home uniform, a Stanford Cardinal patch on the sleeve, a book by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood in her glove (she taught a Canadian literature course at Midd), and the stats of Bob Brenly, her favorite Giants player on the message board.

Brett and I live like rich folks, with original art on our walls by Vic Johnson and Bob Krieger.

Lucky us.

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Karl Lindholm is the emeritus dean of advising and an assistant professor of American Studies (retired) at Middlebury College. He can be contacted at [email protected].