Players come and go, but a loyal fan endures

CEDAR RAPIDS - Who's the best player you've seen in this ballpark, I asked a Cedar Rapids Kernels fan on a recent baseball night in Veterans Memorial Stadium.

“It was probably the second baseman for the Angels,” Jim Stewart said. “He was the most consistent. I can't think of his name. He played here in 2006.”

He later told me he meant Howie Kendrick, who played here in 2004, not ‘06. But that's OK. Because Stewart has a good reason for his sometimes-faulty memory. It's a small price to pay for the successful brain surgery he underwent in 1999.

I went to the stadium to see a 19-year-old Kernels player who got a $6 million signing bonus from the Minnesota Twins last summer. I ended up talking with a 63-year-old man of modest means who never misses a Kernels game.

“I'm a baseball nut,” Stewart said.

It's more than that. He probably gets as much of a sense of community at the ballpark as anywhere else in town.

During this particular game, a young woman approached Stewart to proudly tell him she had gotten a waitressing job at Tommy's Restaurant.

“I'd see her out here when she was this high,” he told me, pointing toward his knee.

Stewart grew up in Cedar Rapids himself. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I'd ride my bicycle here from Mount Vernon Road and 30th Street. Just to watch baseball.

“There's a gentleman across the street from me who used to be a pitcher in the minor leagues with the Chicago White Sox in the early ‘40s. His name is Dale Kennedy. He used to play catch with me. That's how I learned to play baseball.”

I called Kennedy the other day. He's 95, but says he is in good health and is still able to live alone. He was born in Conesville, near Muscatine.

Kennedy said he played minor-league ball in Monessen, Pa., 25 miles south of Pittsburgh. The town had a team in the Class D Pennsylvania State Association. Monessen used to be a big steelmaking town. Its 1940 population was 20,257. In 2011, it was 7,706.

“The war came along and I went in the service in January 1941,” Kennedy said. “I was in for five years.”

There was no more baseball for him after that. He moved on, and moved to Cedar Rapids in 1950.

Stewart, meanwhile, graduated from Washington High School and later moved to southern California. He applied for work four straight days at a plant in Newport Beach that was in the space shuttle industry.

“I didn't go in on the fifth day and they called me,” he said. “I was sweeping the floor when I started there. By the time I was done I was designing parts for computers.

“But when the war with Iraq (in 1991) started, they converted the factory from working with the space shuttle industry to making pieces for bombs over there, if they needed them. I didn't want anything to do with that.”

Without a job, Stewart returned to the Midwest.

“I was in St. Louis, and I was getting 20 to 25 grand mal epileptic seizures a day,” he said. “In 1999 I had two brain surgeries. The first was to put a monitor inside my head to confirm what they thought was wrong. Then they went in and took out layers from the left side of my brain. When I came out, I was the equivalent of a 5-year-old.”

But most of his motor skills, memory and vision gradually came back. He has to take 17 pills a day, but has no more seizures.

“Sometimes I think about it, why it happened to me,” he said. “But almost every day I see someone in terrible condition. That just makes you forget about it.”

Stewart moved back to Cedar Rapids after his surgeries. He has rarely missed a game at Vets since that stadium opened in 2002. It's a place to go 70 times a year, to be around friends who also love baseball, want to talk baseball, talk anything. It's community.

“In my opinion,” Stewart said with clear appreciation, “this is the best team that's been here since this stadium was built.”

That was uttered before the Kernels rallied in the ninth inning for a comeback victory. Which was something one of their most-loyal fans had already done.