By the time, less than a year later, New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson died in a plane crash, Bostock was an afterthought, reduced to little more than a notch in Gary's ever-mounting homicide rate. But five days after Bostock was killed, Pope John Paul died of a heart attack following a mere 33 days as pontiff, news that seemed to wipe Bostock's name from print.
Jibber jabber talk back watch trial#
Oh, the ongoing murder trial kept his name in small, bottom-of-the-page AP updates here and there. "It was a huge story." And yet, as suddenly as the word of Bostock's death exploded, it just as quickly seemed to disappear. "I probably worked 20 straight hours fielding all the requests for information," Harbrecht says. Reporters from Brazil and Australia, England and Japan telephoned Tom Harbrecht, the Gary Police Department's public information officer, desperate for details. When he was murdered that chilly fall night in Gary, the news went worldwide. The reason it is necessary to reopen the wound now, Whistler feels, is that three decades after his last breath, far too few people remember Bostock at all. They recall a man nicknamed "Abdul Jibber-Jabber" for his jovial nonstop banter, a man whose favorite song was Chuck Mangione's 12-minute version of "Land of Make Believe " a man who dreamed of one day owning a motor home a man who, former Angels center fielder Rick Miller recalls, "was one of the best people you'd ever be blessed to know." 311 lifetime hitter who, former Orioles manager Earl Weaver once predicted, "will win five or six batting titles before his career is over." They recall an uncommonly giving man who relished teaching youngsters the art of the swing and who, after struggling as a high-priced free-agent signee with the Angels in 1978, begged owner Gene Autry to take back his salary. Those who remember Lyman Bostock recall an Ichiro-esque bat technician, a. It is not easy, but it is, Whistler has decided, necessary. 23, 1978 - bringing the dead back to life. Youvene Whistler visited her husband's grave regularly until realizing she "needed to move on with life."Īnd yet, here she is, sitting at a table in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Washington, picking at a dish of cantaloupe cubes and - for one of the few times since the immediate aftermath of Sept. Why are you doing this to yourself?' I've never gone back.
"And one day I went and I said - it was like a voice was speaking to me - I said, 'You know what? He's not here. "I used to go and kneel at his grave and cry," she says. It's the same reason Whistler rarely mentioned her late husband's name through years of therapy, the same reason she stopped visiting Lot 342, Grave D at the Inglewood Park Cemetery near her home outside Los Angeles, where Bostock rests beneath an easy-to-miss stone reading simply: So, no, she doesn't want to open the box, doesn't want to read the yellowed newspaper clippings from Bostock's four-year major league career, doesn't want to look at the Polaroids, doesn't want to run her hand along the smooth barrel of Bostock's game-used Louisville Slugger. The 20-something baseball wife who used to hide fruit in her purse and sneak it into Anaheim Stadium is now a 58-year-old woman, confident and mature and light-years removed from that life. She has traveled the country, experienced love and loss, joy and pain. She has remarried, raised an 18-year-old daughter, gotten a divorce, become a program manager for a community-based nonprofit. In the 30 years since Bostock was shot and killed in Gary, Ind., Whistler has earned bachelor's and master's degrees. ET on Sunday on ESPN.Īnd then - on the verge of reliving the death of Lyman Bostock, her beloved husband - she will do nothing. For more, watch "Outside the Lines" at 9 a.m. The murder of Lyman Bostock shocked the baseball world in 1978.
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