Owls and Mockingbirds

Miles Wolff's Season of the Owl (Stein and Day: 1980) is a mystery and a coming of age tale set in the 1950s. The story is reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird; racial tension and murder swirl around behind the life of a young protagonist. In Mockingbird, Scout is that young person dealing with growing up. In Season of the Owl, Tom (whose last name is never revealed), is the nephew of Centerville Owls general manager, Will Hilton. The 1958 Owls play in the Class B Carolina League and are like an extended family to Tom, whose father left him and his mother when he was a child. His mother, not able to care for him, has sent him to live with his uncle.

Despite Tom's description of Centerville as the fifth largest city in North Carolina, there is more of a small-town feeling to Centerville from the moment the novel begins. But it is the team and its stadium that are, actually, the "small town" in Wolff's novel. Tom's school friends run the scoreboard (including a mechanical owl that pops up from behind the outfield fence when a home run is hit) and sell concessions. Will's girlfriend keeps the books, and the star right fielder is a close friend of both Will and Tom. And the batboy is the son of the local councilman.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird, there is a black housekeeper whose role parallels that of Calpurnia. Her role, combined with the team's ticket-taker, Mr. Johnson, is to link the main characters to the real-world events of desegregation just beginning to spark outside the stadium gates. How Will, and the Owls ownership, deals with these changes will affect the future of the franchise.

Wolff is adept at describing the day-to-day activities of running a minor league team, which comes from experience.* We get to see the behind-the-scenes running of the team through the winter and into the season. Players fret about making it to the next level all the while the team's viability is threatened because of boycotts by black leaders. At the same time, there is an investigation underway following the discovery of a body just outside the outfield wall. Who was killed and why are questions that answered slowly during the course of the story.

Through all this, Tom leads the life of a teenager - or at least the life of one who helps run the local baseball team. His story appears to be told from a distant future, remembrances of this season, but Wolff also attempts to set the tale in that year, as if Tom doesn't know what happened, or will happen.

Season of the Owl is a literary work in the same vein as Veteran's Park (Don J. Snyder, 1987) and The Brothers K (David James Duncan, 1992). The story is not necessarily about baseball, but baseball is the vehicle used to bind the characters together and help move the plot along to its ultimate destination. Wolff uses this mechanism well and the book is enjoyable, if not a little slow-paced at times.



* Miles Wolff is a former general manager of several teams in the south, and owned the Durham Bulls, as well as several other teams. He is currently commissioner of the independent Can-Am League and American Association.