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Bittersweet visit to Richie Ashburn's hometown

TILDEN, Neb. - Nearly 120 miles northwest of Lincoln, Nebraska's topography abandons its modest attempt at hill-making and yields to the flat inevitability of the prairie.

TILDEN, Neb. - Nearly 120 miles northwest of Lincoln, Nebraska's topography abandons its modest attempt at hill-making and yields to the flat inevitability of the prairie.

Along lonely Route 275, intersecting dirt roads are named incongruously - 88th Avenue, 555th Road, 284th Street - as if some optimistic planner once envisioned a great metropolis sprouting up in the farmland as easily as the corn and summer wheat.

It was just west of the Subs and Suds, not far off the two-lane highway, where on Thursday I finally encountered Tilden. For a lifelong Phillies fan like me, the bucolic town is a place where imagination and reality converge.

It was a pilgrimage I've wanted to make since Richie Ashburn died in 1997. As a Philly kid, I was captivated by the funny and heartfelt stories of his Nebraska hometown that the Phillies broadcaster told so lovingly and frequently.

For me and millions of other listeners during his 34 years on the job, Ashburn transformed tiny Tilden into a locale of the mind, one that became as familiar as any Main Line suburb. Both exotic and homey, in his telling, impossibly perfect Tilden was a Midwest Mayberry.

Ashburn's dry and wry descriptions of former teammates in the Tilden Midget League, of old girlfriends, of baseball amid the cornfields and front-porch neighborliness fit perfectly into the American myth.

So did Ashburn.

The son of a prairie blacksmith who played on Tilden's town team, he was blond, handsome, sturdy, and swift as a deer. In 1948, he suddenly appeared, Roy Hobbs-like, in Philadelphia. Within two years this wheat-field natural had led the famously forlorn Phillies to a World Series.

Occasionally, when I needed a topic of conversation on an awkward hotel-elevator ride or when we shared a table in some press-box dining room, I would bring up Tilden with Ashburn.

"That's God's country, Frank," he always began.

But it wasn't until Thursday, when a break in the Olympic swimming trials at Omaha allowed for it, that I finally visited.

A map pinpoint 25 miles from the nearest Walmart in Norfolk, where another dry-witted Nebraskan, Johnny Carson, grew up, Tilden looked much as Ashburn described it on those distant summer nights. But just as boyhood heroes always disappoint in the flesh, the town wasn't without its sobering flaws.

Wide, tree-lined streets housed rows of neat bungalows. Some were draped in flags and red-white-and-blue bunting in advance of the Fourth of July holiday, when there would be fireworks at Richie Ashburn Field and, at a nearby church, a "Pancake Feed."

The high school, Elkhorn Valley now but Tilden High when Ashburn graduated in 1944, has been expanded over the years, but the old building still retains its Depression-era sturdiness.

On the town's main street, a few cars were parked diagonally in front of stores, a feature Ashburn never failed to note when describing the hometown he'd eagerly returned to each autumn until becoming a full-time Philadelphia broadcaster in 1963.

And on a side wall of what must be one of the nation's only ivy-covered filling stations was this Babbitt-like inscription:

"The Success of Tilden Depends on Your Loyalty."

You could almost hear train whistles howling in the night, as the boyhood Ashburn did while lying in the bed he shared with his brother.

Yet that same quaint main street had several empty storefronts and paint-starved buildings, as if change and tough times had drained the structures not just of their economic vibrancy but their color.

Tilden Bank survives. But many of the stores Ashburn knew are gone, the buildings that aren't vacant now occupied by used-furniture shops and insurance agencies.

The town's population is aging and, with youngsters fleeing farm life for Omaha and elsewhere, shrinking. There were 953 residents counted in the 2010 census, down from its 1930 high of 1,106.

A new town sign, erected in 2008, greets visitors from the east. An older one, painted on the side of a now-empty Center Street store, has faded much like the diminutive downtown to which it once welcomed shoppers.

Center Street dissects Tilden, with Madison County on one side and Antelope County - where, of course, the fleet-footed Ashburn resided as a boy - on the other.

Ashburn, in fact, lived on Antelope Street, though that house was torn down decades ago to make way for a recreation complex that includes a municipal pool, a playground, and the baseball field named for the Hall of Fame homeboy.

Tilden's new library is one of its few modern structures. Inside, it was empty except for the two silver-haired volunteers who made up its staff. One unearthed a book published for the town's centennial in 1980. It makes many mentions of the extended Ashburn clan, which, depending on whom you speak with, came to this isolated farm community from either Virginia or Illinois.

On this hot midday, several teenagers and children played loudly in the town pool. Ashburn Field was empty, as it usually is.

Baseball's popularity has faded here. Ashburn, Tilden's lone major-leaguer, died decades ago. And small towns like this one struggle to remain relevant.

The sun was sinking into bands of pink and blue when I left. If Tilden had seemed deserted at midday, it was a ghost town at dusk.

Maybe the Tilden that Ashburn conjured was just the sentimental construct of a middle-aged man a long way from home.

Not sure if I was disillusioned, I got into the rental car and drove away. As I did, the little Nebraska town I knew, or at least imagined, for all those years disappeared behind me.

I found a Twins-White Sox game on the radio and tried, one last time, to remember Richie Ashburn's Tilden.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz