Читать книгу Bad Boys, Bad Times. The Cleveland Indians and Baseball in the Prewar Years, 1937–1941 онлайн

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On Monday, May 10, Feller left Cleveland on a chartered airplane bound for Des Moines, Iowa. He was returning home to Van Meter to rest his arm and attend his high school graduation. He was taken aback by all the local folks waiting to greet him and asking pointed questions about his pitching arm. Feller thought he could go home and escape all the attention; however, any plans to rest quietly and study for finals were quickly foiled. He spent any time he could find cramming for final exams, which took place Thursday. The subjects tested were physics, literature, American history, and psychology. Feller passed with ease, scoring two seventy-nines, a seventy-four, and a seventy. Not bad at all when you consider he had left school over two months ago, yet still retained a good portion of what he had learned over the winter.

The much-anticipated graduation took place on Friday evening. The high school auditorium had just four hundred seats available, usually more than enough for any occasion. It proved to be totally insufficient, as approximately eight hundred curious people jammed inside the tiny hall. Among the crowd was an army of newspaper reporters and radio men with microphones. WMAL radio, all the way from Washington, DC, set up their equipment for a live broadcast to be aired nationally. The parents and relatives of the twenty graduates were shocked by the ruckus around them. This kind of attention was usually reserved for the president of the United States.