Welcome to Bucky Jacobsen's world in Hermiston, Oregon

HERMISTON, Ore. — There are still places like this, places where the harvest comes mid-July and hot, weary hands pluck the potatoes and melons from the earth, loading them onto pickup trucks that roll through summer plumes of dust.

Places where at 7:15 in the evening the bank clock at First and Main says it is 98 degrees and the men walk around in jeans and work boots saying, "It ain't that hot. This is a cold front for us!" Those same men meet every morning before the sun climbs into the sky, sitting in laminate booths at the Gotta Go, really nothing more than a convenience store with gas pumps and a coffee pot.

This is a town where word travels fast, where someone in the chamber of commerce hears visitors from Seattle are coming to ask about the boy who used to teach swim lessons down at the pool, the boy who's all grown, big and bald and suddenly famous. And so somebody in the chamber makes a few phone calls and the main road into town comes alive with a billboard parade.

"You're in Bucky Country," reads the marquee in front of the Petal Pusher.

"Go Bucky #33" says the sign in front of 60 Minute Photo.

"Congratulations Bucky Jacobsen. We're loving it!" screams the reader board at McDonald's.

In a Mariners season scorched dry by mid-July, Bucky Jacobsen is the one who has come to give it life. A giant of a man, looking more WWE than AAA All Star — all beard, bald head and rippling forearms — and it was as if he had walked in from nowhere.

In his second game as a major-leaguer, big Bucky Jacobsen, all 270 pounds of him, hits a ball 416 feet into the Mariners' bullpen and Seattle was sold.

It turned out that nowhere was here in Hermiston, Ore., just 200 miles away from Seattle, over the mountains and straight down State Route 395 from McNary Dam on the Columbia River. The story of the summer in Seattle runs right into town past the lumber yards and the fast-food shops until it ends here in DeAnne Malmberg's nail salon.

The air conditioner hums in the corner of her shop, actually a room in a storefront that also contains a Merle Norman and a hair salon: a kind of one-stop beauty plaza for the ladies of northern Umatilla County. On a shelf the radio is tuned to the Mariners' game.

Already her son has hit a home run and you never heard so many women talking baseball all at once. But DeAnne Malmberg doesn't want to talk about the game on the radio or the home run that came off the American League's pitcher who started in the All-Star Game. She's still thinking about something that happened the week before, when a Cleveland pitcher named Scott Elarton pluncked Bucky in the side with a fastball.

"Bucky just looked at him and went 'nyahhh,' " she says, scrunching her shoulders and sticking out her tongue. "He was saying, 'Thaaaat didn't hurt me.' "

She curls her lip as she says "didn't," then bursts into laughter. The other women giggle.

If you want to understand Bucky Jacobsen, if you want to understand how a giant of a man can say things like "I'd like to thank my mother and father for naming me Bucky," and make a weary city smile, then you need to come to Hermiston.

And you need to meet his mother.

Pass the polish

DeAnne is pulling out old snapshots now. She looks nothing like the slugger, her hair is brown and teased, her face round and bubbly, and when she laughs little dimples form at the corners of her mouth. She reaches for a picture frame by her work table, where there's a shot of a scrawny Bucky back in high school, freckles bursting, and here's another with his hair cut in a bright red mullet.

She begins to laugh again.

"Tell Bucky if I can do anything to embarrass him I will do it," she says. "He has to know I can do it."

Then she turns back to a customer sitting across from her, picks up a small file and begins to chip away at the old polish on the woman's nails.

"You know, Bucky sat right here last year and painted his girlfriend's nails," DeAnne suddenly says. "He brought her in back in the winter and wanted her to get a French style with the white tips on the end. I couldn't do it right then so I told him he could do it. I told him what to do and he painted her nails right there."

One of the other women laughs.

"He's going to be mad at you for saying all this," the woman says.

"Oh, I know," DeAnne replies, then smiles.

The family tree

She has always had a thing for Larrys. And not just any Larrys but Larrys who liked to call themselves "Jake" — if you can believe there are two such men on the earth. Turns out DeAnne found them both.

And she married them.

The first Larry/Jake is Bucky's birth father. They had him in Riverton, Wyo., in the summer of 1975 and named him Larry William Jacobsen. But at the last second, his father threw in "Buck" as a tribute to a high-school track coach who had the same name. This didn't appeal much to DeAnne, who thought Buck sounded too harsh for a little child so she softened it by adding a "y."

She never thought the name would stick. How would she know 28 years later, a whole city would think her boy had the perfect baseball name?

The marriage did not last long after Bucky's birth, however. Within two years, DeAnne and the first Larry/Jake were divorced. She met the second Larry/Jake on New Year's Eve in Idaho in 1977 and they were married a year later. Not long after, they moved to Hermiston when Jake took a job with J.R. Simplot.

Together they were the Brady Bunch, raising four kids from two different relationships. DeAnne had Bucky and his older sister Kristi from her first marriage. The second Larry/Jake had custody of his two daughters from his. And somehow the six of them became a family, none of them comfortable with using the word "step" to describe any of the others. A fifth child, Lance, is the only one from their marriage.

If you're confused right now, imagine the poor credential man at Safeco Field the day Bucky was called up to the Mariners. Family members are given badges similar to those of team employees. And the credential man had just finished making a pass for Bucky's father named Jake when a second father named Jake appeared.

But stories like this, when a new star comes out of the ether, can have so many twists and turns. Things aren't always as they seem. Mariners fans have seen the footage of the first Larry/Jake clad in a Mariners jersey jumping up and down when Bucky homered in his first big-league game. This is not the man who raised him. That would be the second Larry/Jake, who most fans haven't seen. He wears baseball caps and tends to blend into the crowd along with DeAnne when they are around Safeco.

"I like to stay in the background," he says.

So it is the first Larry/Jake that fans have come to recognize. He's the one who brought a pair of professionally made signs to the ballpark when Bucky was first called up. One reads "The Buck Starts Here" and is affixed to the second deck to the left of home plate. The other dangles from a railing in left field. It says "Bucky Git R Done."

The tale of Bucky has so enraptured fans that it's hard to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Like, for instance, the story circulating that says the first Larry/Jake is the same Larry Jacobsen who won the Outland Trophy for Nebraska in 1971. On the day Bucky played for the first time in the majors and his birth father was jumping up and down in the Safeco Field stands, the Larry Jacobsen who won the Outland Trophy was signing autographs at a charity golf tournament in Nebraska.

Sometimes a good story is just too good to be true.

"I didn't do it!"

It would probably shock Mariners fans to discover Bucky wasn't even the best athlete in Hermiston when he was growing up. That was a kid named Ryan Ferguson, who was a multisport star at Hermiston High School. In fact, the most startling thing is that Bucky barely looked like the Bucky you see with the Mariners today. As a high-school freshman he weighed only about 100 pounds.

When a physician did routine physical screenings at Bucky's junior high, he was concerned Bucky might have a developmental problem. DeAnne had to drive her boy to the Shriners Hospital in Portland to have him tested for sclerosis. It was then that the doctors dropped a surprise.

Bucky could expect to grow to be 6 feet 5. Everybody laughed.

The thing is, the growth didn't happen until after high school. Even in his last year at Hermiston High, the only one in which he played football, Jacobsen was an angular boy. He talked about trying to play college football somewhere. But his real love, everyone in Hermiston says, was baseball. How DeAnne and her husband know. Their lives those years were built around baseball tournaments. Every weekend it seemed there was something going on someplace and somebody was going to have to do the driving.

And here's another thing: Bucky wasn't even that good a baseball player, at least when he was really young. The Mariners' best home-run threat these days grew up wanting to be a pitcher. Only pitching clearly wasn't his calling. Both DeAnne and her husband remember a Little League tournament in which he was getting pounded. Every pitch it seemed was whacked for a home run. And little Bucky Jacobsen, who so tormented the Cleveland Indians his first week in the big leagues that they threw behind his back, stood on the mound and cried.

When a teenaged Bucky signed autographs for his aunts and declared, "You better keep these because they're going to be worth something someday," they smiled the way you smile at a little boy who declares that he will grow up to be a fireman, astronaut and president of the United States all at once. Then they undoubtedly tossed the childish scribbling into the trash.

This, by the way, is a memory that has come up a lot in the family ever since Bucky's minor-league baseball cards started selling for as much as $50 on eBay.

Ask about those early years, what Bucky was like and the words spill out quickly: "ornery," "difficult," "a pain in the ... " He was the only boy in the house and it seems he acted like it.

DeAnne and Jake are filled with tales of their son's resistance to anything resembling hard work. Getting him to mow the lawn was a chore worse than mowing it themselves. Having him take out the trash was next to impossible.

Their joke is that his favorite sayings were: "I didn't do it" and "It's not fair."

The Malmbergs made friends with another couple that had four girls. The irony is their friend, Terri Piquet — who later became Bucky's godmother — has red hair even though none of her children do. And since neither DeAnne nor Jake are redheads, Bucky looked like he really belonged to Terri, a coincidence that came in handy when Bucky would throw a tantrum and DeAnne would invariably turn to Terri and say, "Now, Terri, please control your child."

All these years later, sitting in her nail salon, DeAnne laughs again. She reaches over and grabs a bobblehead doll that is supposed to be a replica of her son but looks more like Bucky Dent than Bucky Jacobsen. It was given away one night last summer by the Cardinals' Class AA team in Kodak, Tenn.

"You see this doll?" DeAnne says, shaking it with her hand. "It looks like Bucky — ummmm, I think not! In fact I told Bucky the only way it looks like him is if you shake it and go 'It's not fair! It's not fair! It's not fair! I didn't do it! I didn't do it!' "

Peach of a boy

But even then, even in the ornery days, something about her boy melted her heart. She has a story now, a story she loves to tell. This is when they were newer to Hermiston, when they had a place behind the Circle K. Next door, the neighbors had a garage and in the garage was a bucket of peaches.

Somehow Bucky found his way into the garage. And as young boys are wont to do when they encounter an empty garage and a bucket of peaches, he began flinging the peaches across the floor until the bucket was empty and the neighbor's garage was covered with the ooze of shattered fruit. When DeAnne saw this she screamed.

"What have you done!" she shrieked.

Little Bucky, with his shock of red hair, looked up at his mother and said, "I just wanted to see them ... " and he hushed his voice for this, "sliiiiide."

She sent him home, locked him in his room and some time later, with her clothes and hands drenched with peach juice, she stormed in through the door, her face stained with tears.

"What am I going to do with you?" she cried.

Bucky began to weep as well and as they sat there with their faces red he turned to his mother and said, "Mommy, just love me."

DeAnne smiles and shakes her head.

"He knew just how to work the system," she says.

Coming home

Three years ago, DeAnne was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctors insisted on chemotherapy and soon her lush brown hair began to disappear. This was in the middle of baseball season and Bucky was trying to finally break his way through the Brewers' organization. He had at last made the Class AAA team in Indianapolis.

But Bucky wasn't playing well. His mind was not on baseball. After all, his mother had been there for him through the years, showing up to games in Odgen, Beloit and Stockton. Eventually he said he wanted to come home, and the Brewers granted him a two-week leave. DeAnne has a photo from those days, the two of them hugging, both bald as Kojak. Now that she has been in remission for three years, the photo is now in her nail salon for everyone to see.

And when Bucky left home again and reported to Indianapolis, the Brewers had a new assignment. They were sending him down, back to Class AA. The price for coming home was two more years of wandering the minor leagues.

Then again, maybe it was the best reward of all. Because had the Brewers not given up on him that year and the Cardinals two seasons later, leaving him on baseball's junk pile last winter, the Mariners might not have found him. And he might not have come back to save the summer for Seattle.

It would be just another hot, dusty July in the potato fields of Hermiston. And the magical summer of Bucky Jacobsen might never have happened.

Les Carpenter: 206-464-2280 or lcarpenter@seattletimes.com.

Bucky by the numbers
Year-by-year statistics for Bucky Jacobsen:
Year	Team	G	HR	RBI	Avg.
2004	Seattle	14	5	10	.265
2004	Tacoma	81	26	86	.312
2003	Tennessee	131	31	84	.298
2002	Huntsville	61	11	39	.253
2002	New Haven	34	4	21	.294
2001	Indianapolis	86	12	53	.247
2001	Huntsville	27	10	28	.441
2000	Huntsville	81	18	50	.276
1999	Huntsville	47	3	19	.193
1999	Stockton	46	5	22	.250
1998	Beloit	135	27	100	.293
1997	Ogden	67	8	52	.328
Source: Seattle Mariners