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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Where Cal Remains King

Mark Kreidler Sacramento (Calif.) Bee

Home. At the Aberdeen Barber Salon, a two-seater just off the main drag of Bel Air Avenue, Frank Derry is finishing a customer and talking about Cal. Two things Frank Derry does just about every day of his working life: Cut hair. Talk about Cal.

“There’s no one person in this country can dispute the attention,” Derry is saying, his voice just clearing the volume of the O.J. Simpson trial on the TV in the corner. “No one person. Cal is deserving.”

“I can’t think of any shortstop in my lifetime who was as great a hitter,” says Ron Yale, the other barber.

Frank: “And he never forgot his roots.”

Ron: “And you never get any bad press on him - the drugs, the alcohol, gambling, none of that crap.”

The customer, a burly man named Jim who drove 25 miles for his haircut, gets done, lumbers out into the low drippy heat of a Maryland late-summer day. Derry wishes him well.

“But here’s the thing,” Derry says, turning full to face you. “We don’t need the hype around here to know. We already know what he is.”

They know Cal Ripken Jr. around Aberdeen, because Aberdeen is home. Hometown to Ripken. Home to the family.

Forty-five minutes northeast of Baltimore, where Ripken on Tuesday night became a baseball immortal by tying Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games record of 2,130, there are no surprises where the kid is concerned. In a town of 13,000, there are few surprises, period.

And on the eve of his greatest athletic accomplishment, surpassing in Gehrig’s a record thought utterly unapproachable, it bears noting that the man being lionized is a small-town guy born into a quintessentially working-class home in a place that is all about baseball, all about the Orioles. Today, all about Cal.

“He grew up in a baseball family,” says Earl Weaver, the Baltimore legend who managed Ripken in the 1980s. “I mean, the instincts were all there, right straight from his home. He grew up in the Oriole organization, basically. Don’t forget the family. Don’t underestimate that.”

Home: Cal Ripken Sr. was a lifelong baseball man - “One of the hardest workers I’ve ever seen,” says his son Cal. “He’s just non-stop, 24 hours a day. … So much of what I’ve gotten, I got from him.”

Ask around Aberdeen, and the story that comes back is the tale of the toe. This was years ago, when Cal Sr., for more than 30 years a coach or manager in the Baltimore organization, also routinely played soccer as a diversion.

On more than one occasion, as a result of getting kicked in the toe while playing, he would return home with blood building up under the toenail.

What to do? Well, a doctor might have drilled a hole through the nail to relieve the pressure. And so did Cal Ripken Sr. With the family power drill.

Cal Ripken Jr. observed his father’s work ethic and his mother Vi’s toughness - she packed the kids off to school, he says, unless something was about to fall off - from the vantage point of Aberdeen, a town known mostly for its military proving ground and proximity to the Chesapeake Bay.

It was a baseball-playing place, and the Ripkens - four children, including former major-leaguer Billy Ripken - played it with abandon.

“His dad was a good player, his uncles were all good players - it was all around him,” says Charlotte Cronin, a local historian and curator of most of the town’s artifacts and files. “And Aberdeen has always been a sports-minded community. It affected him a great deal.”

Aberdeen was a place where work got done, and it got done all day. A military town because of the proving ground, the place where Ripken became a young man and had a rigid approach to taking care of business - real business. When people speak today of Ripken as an “Iron Man” for playing baseball, you can almost feel the blush of embarrassment rising in him.

“It’s not a performance thing,” he says. “Basically, I just have to come out and show up.”

In Cal Ripken Jr.’s hometown, they understand. The only Ripkens left around Aberdeen are Cal Sr. and his wife - Cal Jr. moved closer to Baltimore years ago - but the Ripken presence is everywhere, the impact huger than huge.

“It’s kind of like Babe Ruth in (Ruth’s hometown of) Baltimore,” says retired Army Lt. Col. Pete Britten. “I mean, which comes first, the legend or the legend-maker? But we know about Cal here. There’s no doubt about that.”

Frank the barber: “He’s never forgotten his roots. He’s never gotten the big head. He’s never quit a game.”

Ron the other: “We used to have a football player like that in Baltimore, Johnny Unitas. Three broken ribs, whatever, he didn’t give a damn. Cal’s like that.”

In Aberdeen on Thursday, the city will honor the man who will have just passed baseball’s original Iron Horse, Gehrig. Cal Ripken Sr. will be there. Cal Ripken Jr. will not. His team will be traveling to Cleveland. To work. His hometown will understand that, too.