My first sergeant walked up to me while I was at my desk during the summer of 2001 and said, “They’re having a farewell picnic for the general next week. It’s going to have a baseball theme, so we need you to arrange ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ for barbershop quartet.”

Maj. Gen. Jim Campbell had an aura about him like none other. He always seemed to be smiling. He always seemed to make you feel appreciated and to show up wherever the 10th Mountain Division Band happened to be playing. And he loved telling the story of the woman who approached him one day at a concert and asked, “What do you do in the Army?”

“I’m the commanding general of the 10th Mountain Division.”

“I’m sure your mother is very impressed, Sir, but I still don’t know what you do.”

“Well, ma’am, it’s a rather complex job I can’t sum up in one easy sentence.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I want to know what instrument you play.”

When I first heard about this “picnic for the general” I imagined him relaxing at a picnic table with his wife and closest associates. The barbershop quartet would stroll up, sing our little song, receive polite applause and then move on.

Back at the office I was encouraged to write an extra verse of my own lyrics just for fun. If they weren’t too offensive we might throw it in for the general.

As it turned out, the visualization I’d had didn’t even come close to how it really played out. After the meal they had a podium set up where a series of guest speakers came up in strict order to sing the general’s praises. Everything was very tightly scripted. And the last thing on the program was my song sung a capella in four parts.

The pressure was on.

As far as I could tell, Gen. Campbell had but one flaw, and it was a fatal one in my view. He was a shameless and outspoken fan of the Atlanta Braves. He never said anything negative about the Red Sox, Yankees or Mets. But just the thought that he would come up here from his native Georgia and treat those Braves as if they were a holy deity, and then travel up to Montreal to cheer them on every time they played the Expos up there …

Heinous. What else can I say?

While working on that extra verse, I recalled that the Braves and the Yankees had some World Series history during the previous decade. In ’96 the Braves came to Yankee Stadium and took the first two games easily 12 – 1 and 4 – 0. But the Yanks took Game 3 in Atlanta 5 – 2. In Game 4 the Braves jumped out to a 6 – 0 lead until the Yanks scratched out three runs in the sixth. With one out in the eighth, Jim Leyritz tied the game with a pinch-hit three-run homer. The Yanks eventually won in extra innings setting the stage for a 4 – 2 Series championship.

Two years later they met again, and the Yanks swept them 4 – 0.

Now for these lyrics:

Take me out to the Braves game, now that Jane Fonda is history We’ll eat some grits and greasy greens, then we’ll know what cholesterol means.

I overheard another guy in the office sing:

And we’ll root root root for Atlanta. If they don’t win it’s the same.

Yeah, that’s good. Keep that. Now, what’s a good strong closing line that rhymes with “same?” Hmm. This might work …

Then my first sergeant came by to see how I was doing. He read my verse and suddenly got this burst of creative comic genius and ordered that I rewrite the first half until it looked like:

Take me out to the Braves game, now that Jane Fonda is gone.

We’ll eat some hotdogs and greasy buns, we’ll play too and we’ll all get the runs.

Thank goodness he stopped there and left my ending intact.

There must have been about 300 guests all sitting at their tables watching us in rapt attention. We sang it down straight at first. Then we went to the altered verse. The first part got a few chuckles. But when we got to the last line after “And we’ll root root root for Atlanta. If they don’t win it’s the same,” all of us singers added this big spontaneous crescendo as if Leonard Bernstein had been conducting and gesturing with all his might for us to give it all we had as we roared out that final line in four-part harmony, “’cause the yank-ees will take ’em again in four straight games!”

In all my life I’ve never heard so many people laugh so hard for so long. You could practically hear them all the way to Montreal. This was the moment we were supposed to have been building up to in order to set the stage and the mood for the beloved general to make his big farewell speech.

Some moment! The poor guy just stood there at the podium and didn’t know what to say! So, he stood there a little longer waiting for the laughter to die down looking like he’d just had a barrel of GatorAde dumped all over him, and so the laughter began to swell again. When it finally died down, all he could manage to say at first was, “I used to be really hot on the band until about a minute ago.”

He did finally manage to stumble out with something akin to a speech, but I’m sure it was immediately forgotten. As for my arrangement of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” however, after about 25 years, I would bet that it still lingers in the memories of all who were there.

I approached him afterward and confessed to being the lyricist. He said he was transferring to Hawaii next and extended an invitation to stop by his new house and stay the night if I was ever in the neighborhood. Me, a little old staff sergeant/guitar player from the band with a standing invitation to bunk up with my former commanding general at his new digs in Hawaii.

Some people make effective leadership look so easy.

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Steve Lester lives in Lake Placid.