Crim: Spending time with Tommy Joe is treasure that lasts forever

MACON, Mo. — My cellphone rang the day after Christmas. I looked at the screen to see it was Tom Sneed, or Tommy Joe as he was called growing up, a moniker some of us in the family still use. He’s a second cousin on my mother’s side.

It had been a while since we last talked. Too long, really. He asked about my kids and grandkids and parents, the latter continuing to deal with health issues. He wanted to know more about Muddy River Sports and joked how I apparently had not mastered doing nothing in retirement.

He wanted to know if I was aware he had moved, which I was. Too many stairs to navigate and too many falls in his house here, he said, so his wife’s daughter and son-in-law offered a place to live by adding on to their house in Madison, a small town off U.S. 24 east of Moberly.

“They take us to the grocery store and to the doctor, cook us meals,” he said. “I get back to Macon at least once a month to do my banking. It was hard to leave. Lived there nearly all my life.”

For an hour we talked about family and sports, our common denominators. Most of all we joked and laughed and laughed some more while recounting some of our shenanigans from years ago.

“Don’t tell your mother or she’ll skin me alive,” he would laughingly instruct me after one of our adventures when I was a kid. 

With his 80th birthday on the horizon, Tommy Joe remains the kid at heart he has always been, although slowed in recent years by his own health issues. He’s the man who suggested when I was a teenager that growing up was overrated, and then set out to prove it.

All of us, I’m sure, can look back and pinpoint someone aside from our parents and grandparents we enjoyed being around for one reason or another, someone who encouraged and influenced us. For me, that someone has been Tommy Joe.

He’s 13 years older than I am, an age difference more pronounced when I was growing up in this north-central Missouri community. Think about being 9 years old and getting to hang out with a 22-year-old who seemed to know everybody, and everybody seemed to know him.

He was like a cool older brother you were never mad at, except for the time he cracked the 26-inch Stan Musial autographed wooden baseball bat I had received as a giveaway when attending my first Cardinals’ game in 1965. He told me I would get over it, and I did.

He would stop by to play pitch-and-catch in the backyard, toss around a football, or take me to the baseball field to hit grounders and throw batting practice. We talked about the Cardinals and Mizzou sports. I remember whizzing along country roads on a snowmobile he once owned. 

He gave me his baseball card and sports magazine collection from the 1950s and ‘60s before anyone knew they might be worth money. (My Dad later pitched most of it because it was taking up too much room in a storage area, a decision he grew to regret when the memorabilia market exploded.)

Tommy Joe loved all sports and grew especially fond of sprint car racing. He was involved with a car team at one point. He would drive to Knoxville, Iowa, on Friday nights and to Jefferson City, Mo., on Saturday nights to take in the races.

He often would ask me to tag along. I didn’t know much about sprint car racing or share his passion for it. What was appealing was going on the road and palling around with Tommy Joe for a few hours.

It was about the time I was in sixth grade that Tommy Joe took a part-time job covering the Macon High School football team for the Macon Chronicle-Herald. The small, family-owned newspaper relied on stringers like him to handle high school sports coverage.

He couldn’t type a lick, instead writing his stories on a legal pad, but he had played for the Tigers in high school, knew the coaches and history of the program, and was passionate about it.

I would often accompany him, roaming the sidelines or sitting in a press box to help him spot. He showed me how to keep running play-by-play. Sometimes I offered observations. I listened as he conducted postgame interviews and read his stories the following day.

I thought about how cool it was to be paid to go to games and write about them, to see your name in print. It helped shape my eventual career path.

After Tommy Joe gave up the job, Jack Briggs, the newspaper’s editor, offered me — a high school junior who already had decided he wanted to become a newspaperman — the opportunity to take over the beat. Bylines have been a big part of my life since.

Over the ensuing years Tommy Joe and I would occasionally attend sporting events together. He kept tabs on what I was doing and boasted about me back home. We got together to swap stories and laugh when I visited my hometown. He still seemed to know everybody, and everybody still seemed to know him.

He did another stint with the Chronicle-Herald after retiring from his job at the municipal power plant. He helped coach youth baseball teams. He spent 15 years as the statistician for the Macon High School basketball teams, taking home game video to watch to ensure his team and individual statistics were correct.

“Had to give that up when they told me I couldn’t drive at night anymore,” he said.

Finally, announcing he probably already had taken too much of my time, we told each other to take care and said our goodbyes.

He was wrong about taking too much of my time, though. Spending time with Tommy Joe Sneed has always been special. I have the memories to prove it.