Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 5 The Lucky Strike

Driving a Harvester full of ten-cent gas in Depression-era Keota, in Keokuk County, Iowa, responsible for every last detail of the corn in the southeast quadrangle of his family’s farm, and studying hard at school, Jenk Orrix had time for little else. Still, every day he managed to hurl a few dozen baseballs through the tire swing. Twenty-first Century Reader, let me clarify. There weren’t a few dozen baseballs. There was one baseball and a hay bale for a backstop. He threw the ball through the tire swing sixty feet six inches away. Then he walked to retrieve the ball, and then back to the mound where he wound up and threw again.

There wasn’t enough money for him to go to university, until the Hawkeyes’ Coach Otto Vogel saw him fire once and only once at the State High School Spring Tournament championship game. Although the match-up was being played on the university’s diamond in Iowa City, Coach Vogel had been unable to free himself of pressing obligations until late in the ninth inning, just as Jenk wound up on a 1-2 count and unbottled a sinking sliding streak of mystifying lightning that pretzeled the batter and gave the Eagles their victory.

Jenk always called it the lucky strike. He’d made nine Ks that day, so there was no luck in the actual fact of his mechanics or the missile’s dynamics. He believed, as he told everyone, including me, that without that one pitch, without the simple act of it being observed, an act that upset some equilibrium in the cosmos, he would have stayed at home with his sisters in their threadbare but better-than-seed-bag dresses. Only a year later they were forced off their original Homestead Act property when his father, in an act of desperation born of humiliation, was thrown in jail for threatening to hang a judge who was ruling on its foreclosure. Life was a grindstone for them until war broke out in Europe, and then here in the US of A, and the biggest stimulus program that ever was—some would call it a bubble—swept over the land. But with that one pitch, with the chance he got because of it, Jenk became an engineer, an inventor, an entrepreneur, a captain of industry, and the father of another.