tinkering continued. Some of the modified softballs had wires connected to them that needed to be taped together, MacGyver-style, in order to activate the sound. One early prototype had a zipper, but that was found to be hard on the hands, so zipper ball was scrapped. Ultimately, Fairbanks rigged up a speaker and circuit board connected to a rechargeable NiCad battery, and he put this contraption inside his disemboweled softball, which itself had a small recessed jack. When the ball was plugged into a wall, the battery charged up, and as he removed the plug from the ball, a mechanism in it closed, activating the circuit board’s speaker. Eureka! Audio ball.
Fairbanks’s friend and collaborator, Ed Schnegelberger, remembers working on the ball many nights until 2 a.m. “His wife would holler down and ask us to quit,” he said. But Fairbanks kept at it. “He liked to find things that were broken and fix ’em.”
In total, Fairbanks tried six designs, and the beep emitting from all of them was strong, but he wanted the sound to keep up all day. If the schoolkids hoped for a marathon session of some game they’d invented, he needed his ball to ring off the hook.
“They just wanted to be able to play sports just like any other normal person could,” Fairbanks told the Houston Chronicle in 1991, the year he saw his first Beep Baseball World Series.
To give them that chance, he collected different compounds to place inside the balls that would cushion the circuit boards and make the ball more reliable. But he had to do more mad-scientist work to get the shapes he needed. One night, as his wife cooked chicken à la king for the family, Charlie heated foam rubber in a pot on the same stove. After supper, he reshaped his concoction and inserted it into the balls, creating armor for the machinery. He’d whistle show tunes and the ball would beep its accompaniment.
After months of trial and error, stewing and sewing, Charlie Fairbanks’s design worked. It could withstand being thrown around. But when he delivered an early version of the ball to the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, he realized it needed to be even stronger than he’d planned, because the little kids weren’t the only ones interested in the invention. Though the audio ball had originally been meant to help them play tag and keep-away—just a toy—the older students decided it could help them start an even more exciting game.
These were the days of Harmon Killebrew and Willie Mays winning home run titles with prodigious blasts—49 and 47 homers in ’64, respectively—and just a few years after Roger Maris’s historic 61-home-run record. Baseball on the radio was a mainstay for the blind, and in Colorado Jack Buck and Harry Caray were their friendly radio idols, broadcasting live out of St. Louis on KMOX-AM 1120, the station whose thousand-mile reach made the Cardinals a national team. Caray and Buck colorfully described those games and filled in the imaginations of children, sighted and not, from Bismarck to Danville to Baton Rouge to Denver. Late in his life, Buck said, “The biggest kick I get is to communicate with those who are exiled from the game—in hospitals, homes, prisons—those who have seldom seen a game, who can’t travel to a game, those who are blind.”
Those blind kids dreamed of hitting home runs, too, so it wasn’t long before Charlie Fairbanks’s Colorado bunch started swatting the audio ball with bats the deaf students on campus used. And though Fairbanks would soon hand off the production of the ball to telephone industry colleagues—reportedly dismayed by others’ desire to profit off it—he had started something big. The blind students weren’t exiled from baseball anymore.
“We were invited to go down to graduation at the blind school the year he gave the ball,” Deb said. “They wanted to thank my father. And he said, ‘You don’t thank me, I thank you.’” At that point, Charlie Fairbanks teared up and had to sit down. “He always said that, in our family, our bladders were too close to our eyeballs,” Deb recalled.
In later years, Fairbanks felt embarrassed by the credit he received for his role in creating beep baseball. In 1991, a player gave Fairbanks his MVP trophy, but the Grandfather of Beep returned it right away. The audio ball was only one of his side projects, and he didn’t think he deserved any kudos.
That year, the players made Fairbanks and his daughter Deb honorary members of the league and invited them to play at the exhibition “Midnight Beep” game. Deb remembers that she and her father protested, pointing out that it was too dark outside.
“They just laughed,” Deb said. “They blindfolded Dad and I don’t think he ever hit the ball. He got closer and closer.”
As he took his cuts at the updated version of his ball, Charlie Fairbanks tasted what his invention meant for visually impaired athletes. When I asked Deb what motivated her father to help out in these quiet ways, she didn’t know for sure. She just remembered that when he brought dolls to a homeless shelter—another side project—he made sure that they had those eyes that would open and close. And she remembered a photograph they had in their house of a blind boy holding a beep baseball to his ear and smiling.
“You know how you’re in church and there’s this lady that’s behind you and has the loudest voice? That was Dad,” Deb said. “Even though he appeared to be really gruff, he was a marshmallow. He hated sad movies or sad endings. He didn’t want any part of them.”
• • •
Five decades after the invention of the ball that made his sport possible, long-armed Ethan Johnston, a twenty-something from Denver, takes extra infield practice before his team’s World Series game against the Minnesota Millers. He’s lanky and bouncing, light on his cleated feet down by third base as he locates beep after beep. When two practice balls roll toward him at the same time, the sound is like a London crime scene, and Ethan is blind Sherlock.
Ethan doesn’t really know a lot about Charlie Fairbanks, even though they share a state and a game, but Fairbanks, who died in 2007, would have wanted it that way. In the words of his former boss at the phone company, Will Sinton, “Charlie didn’t ring his own bell.” Neither does Ethan Johnston. He hit .600 in the 2013 Series, but he laughs off some of his accomplishments.
“Blind people crack me up,” he told me. “They think they’re great athletes, but if it wasn’t for the pitcher and the spotter, they would suck.”
That may be partly true, but Johnston is impressive anyway, with a sweeping uppercut swing and a calm demeanor in the field that helps him rack up close to a third of his team’s putouts.
Ethan wears the white and blue of the Colorado Storm proudly now as he tracks the ball, but at his first practice in 2007, he showed up in a Kobe Bryant jersey and mesh shorts. He wasn’t sure what to make of blind baseball then, didn’t think it was realistic. Basketball was his game, as long as he played in natural light so he could make out the square above the rim. But after he threw himself around at beep ball practice, he changed his mind. The bruises made it feel real, and baseball became a possibility for him in spite of (or because of) his sore hips.
Born Esubalew Truneh, Ethan grew up poor in a remote village in Ethiopia during that country’s civil war and shortly after a widespread famine that left nearly four hundred thousand dead. I say that he’s twenty-something because Ethan doesn’t know his actual age, but sometime when he was still a little boy, his mother left him in the care of two men—“typical skinny-ass Ethiopians,” he described them—who promised to take him to a school in the capital city, Addis Ababa. On the way, the men attacked Ethan with sticks and a chemical, conniving to blind him so he’d be a more pitiful and successful beggar for their crime syndicate. In place of school, he received his education on the hectic streets of the capital.
Many of those streets, Ethan’s old confines, are named after the countries of Africa, so on Chad Street he’d be instructed to hold onto the back rail
