A Trophy

“Deciding to create a trophy is a massive undertaking. One must plan, and plan perpetually, before there is even a bit of sculpting, gluing, sanding, staining, welding, smelting or engraving to be done.” – Samantha Straw Horse, a Northern Arapaho trophy-philosopher, as quoted in an interview in The Trophy, 1949

“To engrave before you’ve planned is foolish,” someone like Samantha Straw Horse might say, had all the gurus of her type remained active. Long before the modern era of trophy making was the Golden Age and inevitable collapse of the arbitrary award.

Most of the trophy-making gurus had stopped their trophy-philosophizing after President Truman confirmed the existence of the Hydrogen Bomb in 1950. This period of national import was significant to trophy-makers for several reasons:

1) After World War II ended, trophy-making for a brief period saw a major resurgence. Returning soldiers and the children they birthed in the Baby Boom were all ravenous seekers of validation, a trend identified in the leading Trophy-related periodical of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, The Trophy. Soldiers who were less-decorated than their neighbors would receive “Best Soldier Husband” trophies and “Most Romantic Airman” trophies from their ego-stroking wives. Following these hard-working times for trophy-makers, an inevitable collapse in the ballooning trophy market made the trade unworkable for some years. The Trophy published a tear-jerking final issue in the summer of 1951.

2) The creation of a weapon capable of the destruction mythologized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in some ways the ultimate act of trophy-sculpting. In the years to follow, a Cold War would wage between global superpowers, loosely predicated on the fact that one or the other had more of these ultimate trophies of warfare and murderous intent. What award could a trophy-maker, then, choose to craft which would feel so significant as the stockpiled means of Mutually Assured Destruction? Truman’s confirmation of nuclear weaponry devastated the industry, to the point that trophy-makers call his announcement “The Third Bomb,” referencing Fat Man and Little Boy.

Samantha Straw Horse had given up on trophies for nearly 48 months prior to meeting her future business partner in line for kabobs in 1952 – she had even set a trend by quitting the industry. Kabobs had come into popularity in the last several years, marrying the elegance of the US-defeated and propagated Japanese culinary tradition with the American passion for grills and a simple, filling meal.

A lunch counter and truck stop, The Cherry Cricket, had opened several years prior, in Straw Horse’s neighborhood in the still-growing Cherry Creek neighborhood of Denver. “The Crick” as the neighbors called it was so-named to reference the colloquial pronunciation of ‘Cherry Creek,” and after two years of dismal sales, the owner saved her business and embraced the kabob craze, offering kabobs to droves of enthused patrons, some of whom would travel for miles for meat on a stick.

Mary Schemmer was the particularly-racist proprietor, hostess, waitress and cashier at the Crick. Sunburned cowhands would come to the diner on occasion to learn what the kabob fracas was all about. Samantha Straw Horse was, culturally and biologically, a Northern Arapaho woman. Yet her skin was light enough, thanks to her Irish mother, that Mary would serve her. In Mary’s eyes, Samantha appeared to have the same complexion as the cowhands.

As anyone’s bigotry is, Mary’s was simple.

Samantha lived six blocks away. Having grown up one block from her current house, she had never laid hands on a cow and was generally averse to being outdoors or near large animals. Her trophy-making career was one of long nights in her garage, and generally the only exposure she had to the type of light that would alter her skin color was when her welding torch burnt her. She loved to build trophies, so much that her hands would blister, burns were not uncommon, and her eyesight was bad from one-too-many incidences of welding without goggles.

She lived a quiet life punctuated only by the noise of trophy-making. She stuck to herself. She never took a wife, and she was not interested in children. Her legacy was her most famous trophy.

She had been the original designer of the Bart Lawson Trophy, a 1947 trophy for the longest distance a player was thrown through the air in the American Baseball Association. Bart Lawson was a last-rate, third string shortstop and relief pitcher for the Denver Bears. Though not germane to the game, he was once picked up and thrown eight feet during a rather boring and frantic ballgame. With little action on a sweltering hot summer day, the heat-stroked and dehydrated drunk players of the Denver Bears and the Ogden Reds were busy playing tricks on each other on the field, to the amusement of an otherwise unimpressed crowd. The seventh inning saw a very tall fielder pick up a very short shortstop and throw him 2.4 meters. Lawson was injured in the toss, and the game was delayed twenty minutes as he was carted off the field, his derriere pointing to the sky as to not further damage his broken coccyx. His assailant, Belfast Singleton of Ogden, Utah, threw an award show for Lawson as an apology, commissioned a work from Samantha, and the award was born.

Most people engaged in the discourse of trophy-philosophizing will forcefully assert that Samantha Straw Horse’s design of the Bart Lawson Trophy was so inspired, and so ornate, that it sealed the fate of the award as annual, rather than singular. How could such a beautiful trophy only be given once? Yes, of course it should be named for its first recipient. But how could such an award be denied to future generations? It was beautiful. Everyone who would see the trophy would momentarily begin wishing to join the American Baseball Association and orchestrate being tossed further than anyone else that year. In an era so awash in awarded memorabilia, it is a huge accomplishment that a single trophy could capture the national imagination.

In years to come, the trophy would become hotly contested in the farm teams of America’s nascent baseball fracas. ABA rules were rewritten to clarify that the point of the game was to earn runs, throw and catch balls, and strike out batters, not to pick up a teammate or rival and throw them. ABA saw a drop in game attendance in 1951 commensurate with this clarification.

Samantha Straw Horse was the unwritten subtext of the seemingly useless trophy for baseball players tossed a few meters, and though the trophy was glorious, it meant little to her. She was never publicly acknowledged at any of the ceremonies as the creator of the glorious award. After creating a second, identical Lawson for the 1948 ceremony, she signed off on allowing trophy-philosophy undergraduates to make future years’ Bart Lawson Trophies as senior projects. The number of undergraduates currently studying trophy-philosophy was not taken into account when Samantha gave this permission. The result was a massive, uncountable stockpile of Lawsons being built up between 1949 and 1952. Trophy-philosophy saw almost no interest in college enrollment in 1953, given the market collapse. The stockpile could easily have lasted into the year 49999. The second Lawson was the last trophy Samantha had made, as of that hot day in 1952, waiting to buy meat on a stick from a white supremacist. She’d made a fortune off the rights to the Lawsons, and lived humbly in spite of the large sum in her bank account. Only her accountant knew her truth, down to her taste in women.

Her wisdom influenced generations of trophy makers, even when she had stopped trophy-philosophizing and begun to focus on her deep ennui toward the meaninglessness of the baseball players she had thrown. She referred to every recipient of the Lawson as “the man I threw this year.” Without her inspired design, only Lawson would have been tossed, and his award, like all the others during the Golden Age of the American trophy, would have been relegated to the wistful memories of the Greatest Generation.

Samantha stood in the sun waiting for her turn at the kabob counter. Her black hair was pulled back behind her head, with a few wisps dangling on either side of her round face. She would carefully dress in what she imagined a lady cowhand would wear when she went for a kabob, having once been turned away for wearing a ribbon shirt her Indian father had given her as a birthday present. Her buttoned-up cowhand shirt neatly tucked into her wide, cuffed blue jeans, her eyes shaded by a straw Atwood, sweat forming on her forehead from a hotter-than-usual Denver day, she joined a line of ten kabob-hungry citizens of Denver and the surrounding region.

Howard shuffled from his bed to work in the same routine for a decade. His station in life was that of a researcher, and his research was all that occupied his thoughts as he took a precisely-timed trip from his bedroom, to the bathroom, to the closet, to the kitchen, out the back door, to the driveway, to the parking lot, to the sidewalk, to the door of the building, to the elevator, to the door of his employer, through the maze of desks and books, to his own desk, and his own books. Thirty-one minutes, with up to eight additional minutes for traffic, and as many as two minutes granted for sheer luck of stoplights, would have him back to his research. And then Mary Schemmer converted the Cherry Cricket into a kabob counter.

Mary’s capitalizing on the kabob craze had brought havoc to Howard’s routine. Traffic on the way to his office regularly added ten minutes to his commute. Kabob tourists flooded the office parking lot and surrounding side streets. Greasy paper trays and wooden sticks with bits of chicken or beef littered the walkways. Eleven or more people waiting in line to enter the Crick could form a line directly in front of his workplace entrance. The buttons in the elevator, and the handles to both doors would be greasy, sometimes saucy. The office would smell of charred meat. On more than one occasion, a book he was using in his research would have semi-transparent fingerprints in the corners of the pages. Trays and sticks were making their way from being outdoor litter, to elevator litter, to office clutter beginning to rival the stacks of books.

He had to wake up earlier to be on time for work. He had to dodge meat-hungry tourists on the highway and the sidewalk. He had to step over their refuse, wipe his hands more frequently, and sometimes squint to read greased-over words. While all of this made Howard’s day more difficult, he would never curse the amazing innovation that was the kabob. Mary’s restaurant was changing everything about his day. But the inconveniences melted away when he would bite into a hot piece of teriyaki steak, which often happened several times per week, or even per day.

And so with only a minor twinge of resentment, he wove through the crowd of kabob-craving Coloradans (and unbeknownst to Howard, one Wyoming resident in town on business) and found himself approaching the entrance to his office building. He slowed, his mind cleared of the research he intended for the day, the crowd disappeared, the litter stopped smelling of soy sauce and tahini. He laid eyes on Samantha Straw Horse, wearing her cowhand costume, and he fell in love.

Samantha was oblivious to Howard. She had never loved a man intimately, and her father was one of only two men she had ever shown any physical affection, the other being her now-deceased brother Elan. She was solely attracted to and romantically-inclined toward women, and she knew it, but she was also deeply afraid of what would happen to her if her desires became public. She’d heard stories of black men being lynched in her area. She’d been denied meat on a stick once for appearing Indian. And while no gay community that she knew of existed in her town, the mention of homosexuals in popular culture was nearly-universally derisive, insulting and mean.

Howard F. Dunwarder was a researcher at the Denver Applied Research and Technology Institute, but he was not very observant. He researched, designed and patented nothing on the scale of the atom bomb, but devices which would change the world no less. He had crafted precise instrumentation to take measurements of obscure phenomena. His inventions were perceptive, but not him. Howard had never crafted a device that could detect anyone’s sexual orientation, nor did he give much consideration to the possibility that the woman he suddenly loved was unavailable, not just to him but to all men. His tradition-infused upbringing had never educated him in alternative human sexuality.

Howard managed to avoid military service years prior by convincing the draft board that he was working on technologies that would help to detect the enemy, though truthfully he spent the better part of World War II attempting to detect yolks inside of various species’ eggs using low-intensity radio waves. None of the men in his family fought the Nazis. His father had remained in the U.S., confined to a wheelchair after a fall off a roof in his late teens. His uncle and grandfather were both far too old, though the latter had attempted to re-enlist and was deemed unfit.

Howard’s clarity in staring at Samantha was suddenly interrupted with a buzz of thoughts. He had to speak to her. What to say? How would he approach her? How would he tell his traditionalist father and mother that he’d fallen in love with a Mexican cowhand? He did what researchers do all the time when there are many options. He began calculating. By a rudimentary process of elimination, he first decided against, “I am Howard, and I just fell in love with you.” Then he said no to, “What’s your name?” He quickly rejected, “Can I buy you a kabob?,” although he would learn that this would have been a more successful approach than the line he chose.

He cleared his throat and attempted to smooth his hair in the window of a parked car. His attempt was unsuccessful, as his hair was perpetually tussled, even moreso as he went increasingly bald. He pulled up his slacks, and they fell back to their starting position. He walked, feigning confidence, to Samantha’s side, and said, “Excuse me, miss. This is my building.” He had calculated that their eyes would meet, they would both smile, and she would introduce herself. Cowardice was clouding his judgement.

Samantha didn’t turn to meet his loving, googly-eyed gaze. She was deferential to men, particularly white men, as a means of protecting herself. She stepped aside politely to let him get to work. Howard’s heart sank. Her deference and politeness read as indifference and disinterest. He stepped through the line, toward the door, and turned around. “Miss?” he said, not having considered any options other than this. And, “finally,” Howard found himself thinking, “for the first time,” she looked him in the eyes.

Howard was a handsome man, and he often used this to his advantage when a woman piqued his interest. One former lover, in the throes of passion, told him that he had the ability to make his eyes sparkle, which she found incredibly sexy. Since that day, Howard had attempted seduction by squinting somewhat, though this squint was not the action his partner had referenced. He looked like he was trying to read words on a greasy page.

Samantha was a far more perceptive and aware person than Howard. As he squinted, she immediately recognized his misplaced affection, and correctly guessed that he had been spending at least five minutes preparing to approach her. She incorrectly assumed he was squinting because of the sun, but she saw the corners of his mouth pulled back in a sly and bashful smile. And she was charmed. She was not attracted to him, nor would she ever be, but she was charmed that a man so handsome would take an interest in her.

She smiled, waiting for him to continue. Howard was so excited that he’d made eye contact, and so self-assured that his squint was enchanting Samantha, that he forgot to continue to speak, not that he had a plan. Her smile was nearing a laugh as the silence grew long. He somehow perceived that he was supposed to follow up. Having had no time to prepare, make a list, or evaluate his options, he reverted to a line he’d initially cast aside.

“Can I buy you a kabob?,” he asked her. And because she was a woman, because she was an Indian, because she was a lesbian, and because she was charmed, she accepted.

She would never fall in love with Howard, but she would grow to respect him deeply. He would remain deeply invested in a romance with her. In his obliviousness, he would never grow to understand why they would only be friends. Though they would never conceive a child, their friendship would lead to a business venture that would change the course of world history.