Stumptown Kid

Twelve-year-old Charlie Nebraska wants two things he can't get: to make the local baseball team and to have life return to the way it was before his father died two years earlier in the Korean War.

When Charlie meets Luther Peale, a stranger who quietly and mysteriously arrives in Charlie's small Iowa town, the two strike up a friendship. Luther is a former Negro Baseball League player, and he agrees to coach Charlie's fledgling neighborhood baseball team.

But many of the town's white residen...