Read Pete Rose: An American Dilemma for Free Online

maybe, to have a little more; you were never anything but proud of the life at hand. There remained, for all the folks living down and around the Ohio River there, the simple and relevant geographic fact that to get just about anywhere you had to go uphill.
    (There was a clatter too in these parts, a literal clatter, from folks working on their cars or in their yards or fixing up the siding on their houses, and from the traffic speeding by on River Road. Nowhere was noisier than Braddock Street, with the Whitcomb Riley train full of passengers barreling past at morning and night, Chicago-bound or from, and the conductor sounding the horn from far down the tracks, leaning on it sometimes for half a mile at a time just because he could. The noise of the train mixed with the honking of the barges, and with the roar of the planes taking off from the airport across the water. Loudest of all on Braddock were the trucks on River Road, U.S. 50, shifting into gear, starting up again with a great grind and a wheeze—and sometimes a long, bone-shaking hornblow of their own—after stopping at the light at the Anderson Ferry Road.)
    The kids from right there around Anderson Ferry or from over on Fairbanks Avenue by Bold Face Park or from further along on Rapid Run or Twain, all shared a certain underlying conviction, passed down from their parents who shared it too. A belief that in the hardest times you would find a way to survive, that when the river rose up or work was hard to come by, you would persevere. Their conviction was tied also to the feeling that if you did really make it somehow you would make it in the manner of this community, by these same bare-knuckled rules. A certain arrogance this was, a defiance even, in the way it showed itself. You knew without saying so that you could whip any kid your age from over in Hyde Park or Linwood or one of the other places where the money lived, on the other side of town, east of Vine.
    Each summer, in the slapdash tangle of trees and thickly coiled brush around in back of Braddock and in the cornstalks there, Pete and Dave and the other boys would make their own little ballfields, cutting through the stalks or getting someone to drive a car over the growth, flatten it out. They played Wiffle ball and argued over fair and foul and found wooded places to hide together and plot whatever needed plotting after dark. If these boys were not exactly pricking their fingers and swearing blood oaths to Tom Sawyer’s gang of robbers, still they were making their own way on their own river banks. It was later on, during Pete’s first years in the big leagues, that a Reds p.r. man took a good look at him and started calling him “Huck Finn’s long lost brother.”
    Even though he didn’t get drafted out of Western Hills (still just too small, not enough glove, not enough power), and even if for a while it looked as though his days on the Bentley Post Legion team, playing with guys like Brinkman and Flender, might be the last and the best of it (and that he would not follow Don Zimmer, 11 years before him, out of the West Side and into major leagues), Pete did then get his break with a minor league contract from the Reds, procured for him by uncle Buddy who had been doing some scouting for the team. Pete took the contract and went to Class D Geneva that first summer and when he came back after hitting .277 he had grown to near 6-foot and added 25 pounds. Then he was sent for a season a level up to Tampa, and there he busted his way into 30 triples, most in the Florida State League. “And this was a guy who was maybe 10th fastest on the team,” says Dan Neville, a pitcher on that Tampa club. “If that. He made those triples happen. Some of them didn’t even look like sure doubles off the bat, but Pete went after it. He’d be turning at first base by the time you looked up. I have never seen anything more amazing in baseball than the way he hustled that year.”
    Pete came home in the