THE ERIE WORLD REJOICES

Travelogue time! Here are a few images from Your Humble Narrator's recent quick trip to his beloved home town of Erie, Pennsylvania and environs. The Wife and The Kid took a pass on this trip; The Kid couldn't get the time away from work, and The Wife couldn't bear to leave Stewie in a kennel. But I flew into Cleveland, where I began to luxuriate in the heavenly weather--by comparison to Phoenix, that is--the moment I stepped out of the terminal.

On the drive from Cleveland to Erie, I stopped off at The White Turkey in Conneaut, Ohio...

...to enjoy a root beer float...

Wish I had built time into my visit to go to Conneaut's Lake Erie Monster Fest, presumably devoted to "South Bay Bessie," sightings of whom supposedly date back to the 1700s...

Once in Erie, I visited with various beloved siblings, nephews, nieces etc...

Erie's famous Mighty Fine Donuts were consumed...

...as were Romolo's Chocolates...

I got to join our friends Lory and Tom to see our beloved Erie Seawolves...

...though not, alas, on an evening when they were in their Erie Moon Mammoths persona. They beat the Akron RubberDucks 3-2, and I got a very weird-looking selfie with Seawolves superfan and curmudgeon-in-residence "Red" Laurie...

I got to hang out at Coney Island Grill and later at Perkins with two of my oldest, dearest friends, Ron Strecker and, for the first time in almost forty years, childhood pal Mike Wenzel...

...as well as Ron's parrot Kiko, now in his forties...

My pal Stan and I took a road trip east to Westfield, New York, to a marvelous used bookstore there called Mumpsimus Books...

Ever heard of a "mumpsimus," by any chance? I certainly had not. Turns out it's a term dating back at least to the Renaissance--Erasmus mentions it--for an error stubbornly persisted in even after it's been corrected; supposedly it originated with a priest who used "mumpsimus" for "sumpsimus" in the Latin mass and continued to do so after the error was pointed out to him. A great word for our time; maybe the U.S. should be renamed "Mumpsimerica."

Then on Sunday came the Moorhead Family Reunion at the Fiddle Inn in Harborcreek, my Dad's beloved home away from home, where I got to hang out with still more beloved family...

...and eat a delicious walleye sandwich...

...while rain poured outside.

It can feel banal to talk about the passage of time, as if you're the first person that ever noticed it. But it really hit me on this trip, everywhere I looked. I kept remembering stuff like the evening in 1975 when I picked up the phone and heard my late brother-in-law, out of breath, telling me about the birth of my nephew, and how strange it was to think that I was now staying in the beautiful home of that same nephew, now fifty years old, and his beautiful wife.

Then back I went to Phoenix, and the appalling heat. I barely got the Romolo's Chocolate home un-melted.

BRIM VIEW

Moon Mammoths update: Long on back order, my Moon Mammoths cap...

...a kind gift from one of my sisters, has finally arrived!

The Erie Seawolves/Moon Mammoths had a fine season, finishing 39-30 and winning their division before losing to the Binghamton Rumble Ponies (AA affiliate of the New York Mets) in the Eastern League finals. If they bring back the Moon Mammoths identity next season--as they most certainly should--I have a modest proposal for their marketing team: How about a Fuzz E. Mammoth bobblehead? I would be proud to have Fuzz E. standing watch on my desk!

TRUNK SHOW

Another Moon Mammoths update: Despite a loss on the scoreboard, the debut of the Erie Moon Mammoths appears to have been a triumph. According to John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, the Moon Mammoths, aka the Erie Seawolves (AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers), have sold four years worth of merch in just three weeks. I was one of those sales:

This shirt arrived Monday afternoon; Monday evening I wore it to a movie screening in Scottsdale, and two different people at the theater recognized it and complimented me on it. One of them, a stranger to me, said "Tusks up!"

The next day I wore it to lunch, and one of the servers recognized it. Later that day, a passing stranger grinned at me, gave me a thumbs-up, and said "Erie!" I asked him if he was from there and he said no, he was a just a John Oliver fan.

Then, as he walked away, he also said "Tusks up!"

That's four people in Arizona, in less than 24 hours. The country is in the grip of Moon Mammoth Mania!

BEST NOT FORGOTTEN

The July/August issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...features the 2025 edition of "Best of the Valley." Your Humble Narrator was proud to once again be among the authors and officious imperious judges of what is best in this community. See if you can guess which eleven finely-crafted baubles of prose were of my painstaking and polished composition!

Moon Mammoths update: Alas, the Erie Moon Mammoths aka Erie Seawolves did not win their debut matchup against the Chesapeake Baysox of Bowie, Maryland, though it was reportedly a good, competitive game; the final was 6-5. But by most accounts a grand time was had by all, not least comedian John Oliver, mastermind of the rebrand, who scurried from job to job throughout the evening. Oliver threw out the first pitch (to scuba diver George Moon, discoverer of the Moon Mammoth), sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" in the Seventh Inning Stretch, and pulled duty as bat boy, public address announcer and concession vendor, selling fans the special mammoth-themed goodies on the menu that night:

Mammoth tusks and mammoth balls for me, please! Maybe the mammoth ears, too...

IT'S A MAMMOTH OCCASION

Man oh man, is Your Humble Narrator homesick today. How I wish I could be back in my beloved hometown of Erie, Pa, at UPMC Park, for the inaugural game of the Erie Moon Mammoths...

...alter-ego of the Erie Seawolves. The team, the AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, has been (temporarily) rebranded by the great John Oliver and the staff of his HBO series Last Week Tonight. The renaming is after a fossilized mammoth skeleton discovered in 1991 by a scuba diver named George Moon at the bottom of Lake Pleasant, a glacial lake in Venango Township in Erie County.

The bones were taken to my alma mater Gannon University where they were examined by Professor M. Jude Kirkpatrick.

I had Dr. Kirkpatrick for Sociology, a class he seemed to find a chore; his real interests seemed to be archaeology, anthropology and paleontology. Though a fine specimen, the skeleton was apparently deemed too fragile for reconstruction; it was publicly displayed for just one day before being socked away at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.

Anyway, Erie is set to party hard this weekend, and the game, against the Chesapeake Baysox, is now underway, so I'm being taunted by images from friends who are there:

Well, as I have written here before, I myself was once part of the pregame festivities at a Seawolves game, reading a baseball sonnet back in 2009; you can still watch it on YouTube. So I've composed a new sonnet for the Moon Mammoth; here it is:

MOON MAMMOTH

Frigid fathoms down into the depths

Where bass and sunfish breathe the brineless murk,

And algae straining sunlight intercepts

And dims the realm where grim hellbenders lurk,

Reposing in this glacier-shoveled grave

In layered silt the fleshless bones would lay,

As petrafaction form immortal gave

A trunked behemoth of another day.

Twelve thousand years elapsed, then to the light

A wetsuit-clad invader it exhumed;

A single day it basked in public sight,

Then academically was re-entombed.

But now the mammoth rises once again,

To urge our local Nine on to the win.

GO MOON MAMMOTHS!

THE MINOR THINGS

 A couple of weeks ago, the admirable John Oliver devoted a segment of his HBO show Last Week Tonight to the wonderful weirdness that is Minor League Baseball.

Alas, I can't find a YouTube link to the full segment, but it's hilarious and worth watching if you can (Season 12; Episode 10). It comes at the end of a horrifying, blood-boiling main segment about the current deportation crisis, and it's a heart-lifting cool breeze of American decency by contrast.

In that segment Oliver's only criticism is that some minor league teams aren't pulling their weight with regard to eccentricity and creativity in their branding, merch and promotional stunts. He offered to put the efforts of his staff to the task for one team, provided that the team agreed in advance to have no input into the rebrand, and to do whatever they come up with. In a follow-up on last Sunday's show, also worth watching, he announced which of the 47 teams that applied--about 40% of the league, he gleefully noted--the LWT group would work to rebrand.

After dismissing several teams for being so strange already that LWT couldn't do better, he finally told us which lucky team they had settled on. Sure enough, it was the Erie Seawolves, the AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers from my beloved hometown of Erie, PA.

Among the problems which they plan to fix with the rebrand is the fact that the city, though an important port on the Great Lakes, is nowhere near the sea. The name and the mascot, piratical lupine C. Wolf, date to the team's earlier affiliation with my father's beloved Pittsburgh Pirates.

Anyway, I was thrilled by this news because, of course, I've been a Seawolves fan for decades. My family and I go to the games at UPMC Park (formerly Jerry Uht Park) whenever we can get back to Erie in season. I've worn the shirts and hats...

The Kid has canoodled with C. Wolf...

...and other canines at "Bark at the Park" night.

We've been witness to a fireworks show at the park that sounded like a full-scale artillery bombardment...

A Seawolves magnet adorns our fridge...

...and The Kid has accumulated a couple of autographed game balls...

But most memorably, I myself was featured in the pre-game festivities at a Seawolves game. Back in 2005, I wrote a sonnet inspired by a wild, field-flooding rainout I saw at the park. The poem was published in 2008 in the baseball literary journal Elysian Fields Quarterly (sadly since defunct).

On the off chance that you don't have the back issue lying around, here the masterpiece is:

In 2009, through the intercession of my friends Tom Maggio and Lory Varo, I was invited to read it before a game, which I proudly did (you can watch it here)...

I was feeling quite triumphant when I returned to my seat after a round of polite but pleasant applause and, you know, nothing flung at me from the stands. But I found The Wife scowling furiously. A guy down the row from us had yelled "GET A LIFE!" at the conclusion of my reading.

Not bad advice, but after getting a look at the guy...

...I'm not sure I thought he was in a position to offer it.

Anyway, I can't wait to see what Oliver and Company come up with for the Seawolves. Maybe the Erie Kleps (after Eddie Klep, an Erie native and the first white player in the Negro Leagues)? The Erie Pepperoni Balls? The Erie Misery Bay Sox? The Erie Blue Pike? The Erie Lampreys? The Erie Hellbenders? The Erie Pizza Bombers? 

The Wife, more of a stodgy baseball purist than I am--she's offended, for instance, by the Globetrotters-esque antics of the Savannah Bananas--is uneasy about the rebrand, and she tells me that internet is full of indignation at the prospect. But the whole thing is likely to be very temporary anyway, of course, and should raise the team's and the town's profile nicely, if fleetingly.  

Maybe rename them, after my poetry fan, the Erie Heckling Philistines? Just a thought...