Make That ‘C’ for Colossal

The car maker Edsel B. Ford II is on the phone. He is speaking of a silver-haired, 66-year-old retiree from Thousand Oaks who has been on the receiving end of lavish praise and pats on the back for a good week or so, having just been honored with a lifetime achievement award for his many outstanding contributions on the job.

Ford, though, knows something else about this fellow. Something that has nothing to do with work.

What he knows about George Anderson is that--without fanfare, without financial reward, without even a mention in countless stories told about him--an organization that Anderson began 13 years ago has done more to memorialize him than anything he ever accomplished in his chosen field.

This grown man some call “Sparky” is known to many as a manager of professional baseball teams. It is something he did so successfully that the Hall of Fame shrine in Cooperstown, N.Y., has scheduled his induction for July 23 of this year.

What won’t be engraved on his bronze bust is that Anderson is also the founder of CATCH, a children’s charity in Michigan that has come through for kids in ways far more meaningful than Babe Ruth’s promise to swat a homer for a boy in a hospital.

“No doubt about it,” says Ford, who serves as CATCH’s chairman of the board, “Sparky’s association with this town comes principally from the fact that he took the Detroit Tigers to the World Series, but he also has a reputation here for what his charity has done.

“The thing is, when he no longer managed the team, he could have easily said: ‘I’m just going to retire now, go live full time in California. You guys close up the charity now, I’m leaving, take care of it.’

“He didn’t. So while his being immortalized in the Hall of Fame gave us goose bumps, we know that his good deeds here will also live forever.”

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Baseball is an occupation of colorful characters with monikers to match, Yogi and Dizzy and Gabby and Pee Wee and such. In his years in the field, Sparky Anderson had his own idiosyncrasies. While seldom guilty of the memorable jabberwocky of a Yogi Berra, the former student at Dorsey High in Los Angeles did have his own distinctive idiom, a grammatically challenged way of speaking English.

The joke around Tiger Stadium used to be that Sparky would eventually be disabled with a fractured syntax.

Even at the CATCH headquarters in Detroit, executive director Jim Hughes still proudly quotes Anderson’s outlook toward the charity as: “I always said this ain’t going to be no short-term deal.”

After his baseball career, Anderson found employment in broadcasting, language sometimes being secondary to knowledge. He was an Angel television analyst for a few years. When both the Angels and the Dodgers needed managers, a rather prominent one was just a local phone call away. But they looked elsewhere, on occasion choosing men who had never managed a big-league club before.

Meantime, back in Michigan, work continued by the organization Anderson calls “the greatest accomplishment of my lifetime.”

A teenager with cerebral palsy was given a chairlift by CATCH. The boy’s father, who had carried him daily to and from a second-story bedroom, had been murdered in a random act of violence.

A father wished to spend time with his terminally ill son. After he took an unpaid leave of absence from work, CATCH paid his rent until the child’s death.

A woman laid off work for eight months was forced to put her children in four separate homeless shelters. CATCH helped her financially until she was back on her feet.

A youngster with a brain tumor was in the hospital when his Christmas toys were stolen from his home. CATCH bought him new ones.

A boy with cancer had a last wish--to graduate on time with his classmates. His family couldn’t afford a summer school program that would enable him to catch up, so CATCH took care of it.

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Thus far, CATCH--it stands for Caring Athletes Team for Children’s & Henry Ford Hospitals--has raised $1.4 million through events and donations. Edsel Ford II, who is director of Ford Motor Co. and the great-grandson of Henry, recalls Anderson visiting pediatric patients in these hospitals in the 1980s and says, “They just melted his heart.”

So when there inevitably comes more talk of all Sparky did in baseball, winning a World Series with two teams (Detroit and Cincinnati), becoming only the 16th manager to make the Hall of Fame, perhaps it will be remembered that he did much more with his life than manage a Kirk Gibson or a Pete Rose.

The only disappointment for Detroit is that Anderson’s bust in the hall will depict him in a Cincinnati cap.

“Too bad he can’t wear a ‘D’ instead,” Ford said the other day to the charity director, Hughes.

“No problem,” Hughes replied. “The ‘C’ can stand for CATCH.”

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail:

mike.downey@latimes.com