Some memories last longer than others. Some retain a measure of our best selves. A handful hold a ration of success and pride that becomes embedded in our DNA and cannot be forgotten, lost or stolen. Some last a lifetime. Some, we’d like to think, perhaps even beyond that.
I have one of those.
******
In the Summertime, we played baseball. Every day. If there were two of us, we played catch. For hours at a time. If there were three of us, we played “caught in the middle” or “rundown” and took turns being in the middle, avoiding a tag.
Any more than that and we played “Indian ball” or “Peggy” which required only a pitcher, a batter and several fielders scattered around the field.
If there was just me, I pounded my worst, dog-eared ball against any brick wall or concrete steps I could find and fielded the return. Or some days, when no one was home, off the sloped tin roof of our house. Generally this was accompanied by a non-stop play-by-play voice which acclaimed the stops, catches and pickups I made as sensational!! “Never seen that before!” screamed Mel Allen. “Simply amazin’!” reiterated Red Barber. “That kid is a magician!”
All of these iterations of Baseball, I might add, were Big Fun.
On a lot of days, however, when there were maybe 8-12 of us in the same place, we would choose up and have a ‘real game’. There would be rocks or 2x4s for bases. A piece of plywood for home plate. Someone who was hurt or for some reason wearing their good shoes that day would be the umpire. Everyone knew the ground rules of the particular field we were playing on. ‘Anything off the telephone pole is a dead ball.’ ‘No advancing on lost balls or if the ball goes in the creek.’ ‘Protect the ball from the storm drain at all costs.’ Play Ball!
There were other days, special days, memorable days, in which someone from our school, St. Dominic’s, would contact someone they knew at another school—generally Springfield Public School or St. Rose, the Catholic school where the country kids went--and organize a game. No adults were involved, so I don’t know how the kids from the country got there. But get there they did. There would be nine or more of them, and they would bring at least one catcher’s mitt and a mask, several decent balls, a few bats, and it would be Game On.
You have to remember that this was, for us, the equivalent of playing the Brazilian National Team. Or maybe the Japanese All-Stars. Though we had all been born and grown up within 10 miles of each other, we didn’t know each other. It is hard to imagine now, but we only knew the kids at our own schools. There wasn’t a whole lot of intermingling. But there were lots of rumors. We heard that Springfield had a guy who was 6’ tall and had a mustache. And St. Rose had a kid who chewed tobacco and could lift the front end of a car. So to challenge them and play against them was pretty heady stuff. This was For-Real Baseball.
The games were played at one of the school’s home fields. The infield was always dirt and the outfield grass was kind of mowed and sort of level. There was never a pitcher’s mound. The fields were generally bordered by streets or alleys, and as a rule, there was a home plate and a backstop. The rest was left to us. Someone marched off an agreed upon distance and laid down the bases and scratched a pitcher’s rubber in place. The umpire would be someone from the team at bat, and they would alternate inning to inning. There were some arguments of course, but the absolute rule was “No Cheating”. Or at least “No Obvious Cheating”. And it was strictly enforced.
One miraculous day, I showed up at our field, and someone had organized a game against Holy Rosary school. This was the ‘colored’ school. And it was unchartered territory. We had seen each other around, but knew each other not a lot. Rumors abounded. There may not have been a lot of trust there.
But we had a field. We had boys with gloves and balls and bats and an open afternoon in the middle of glorious Summer. There would be a game.
But most of the kids from both teams were 6th and 7th graders. I was a 5th grader. And St. Dominic’s had more than enough players. So I wasn’t chosen. I would only sit on the wooden bench this afternoon, grip my bat and dutifully cheer for our team. I was crushed actually, sentenced to watch a beautiful game played outside my reach.
But as I sat there, Damian Churchill, a kid from Holy Rosary, walked up to me. “Wanna play for us? We only got 8.”
*****
Some background information may be in order here. I grew up in the mid-South at a time when Jim Crow was the Law of the Land. The City and County formed Little League teams in 1958, but Negroes were not permitted to play. The public pool and movie theatre were ‘Whites Only’. There were no ‘colored’ kids at my parochial school. Holy Rosary was a ‘separate-but-equal’ Catholic Church and school, not very far from our own. It was in an all-Black part of town, on the edge of the city limits, called ‘Briartown’ for a reason that no one seemed to know.
The rules were all different back then. My father hired Black men at the Mill which was not always the case with other businesses in the County. But it was a good bet that none of them made as much as any of the White men.
The Black women I knew, if they could find work, were all maids. The ‘Help’. They cooked and cleaned and washed and ironed and were pretty much responsible for running the household. At least our household.
There was a fine woman named Elizabeth Reed who worked for us for years. She raised me in many ways, though she had kids of her own. Elizabeth moved to Louisville shortly after I graduated from grade school. I always wanted to find her and visit her and thank her for everything she did for me and my family. But she died of cancer before I could accomplish this.
The point is that Race--who you associated with and who you rubbed shoulders with and connected with-- those were all complicated question at that time. And Damian had asked me a question I had to think about. It was a sure enough conundrum. There were those who would have refused the offer. And there were those who would surely think less of me for playing on a team with those boys from Briartown.
And I was no colorblind Social Activist. No kind of social justice Warrior. The status quo had been very good to me, and I saw no reason to attract attention to myself or draw fire from my peers. But I was 10 years old-- just a kid looking for a game. A team that would have me. I just wanted to play baseball. So I said “Sure. Where do you want me?” And the die was cast.
I remember almost nothing else about the game. They probably put me in right field, where you always put your lesser players. And I’m sure I came to bat a couple of times during the early part of the game, and probably made outs.
I remember nothing until the final inning. My new teammates and I were down by a run. We made a couple of outs, but then, as I stood on deck, we got a man on base.
I think I had hoped that the batter in front of me would make the final out. So that I wouldn’t have to. I knew my odds were long ‘cause I could see who was pitching.
Craig Johnson was out there! He was a 7th grader. I had never, in dozens of at-bats against him, ever so much as fouled off a pitch from him. He threw so-o-o hard.
I looked out at him. He pounded the ball into his glove and scratched at the mound. I picked up a handful of dirt, and he motioned roughly for me to get into the batter’s box.
And then he sneered at me. I’d like to say that that strengthened my resolve. Firmed up my backbone. But it did not. I was pretty much dead meat, and nothing I could do was going to change that.
But I gripped my bat, stepped in and began waving it back and forth over the plate. If I had any sort of a secret weapon, that bat was it. It was my wooden, black, 30”, perfectly balanced Louisville Slugger. It was a piece of work. As solid a bat as I ever owned. I knew that I could depend on it to do its job. If I could just time one and make good contact, it would do the rest.
Well, the crux of the story is that Craig threw me his best pitch, and on that day, on that field, I swung as hard as I could and my Louisville Slugger and I somehow sent it screaming out to left field, a high, arching shot that was still rising when it cleared the alley. The ball flew majestically and finally landed in Ida Clements’ vegetable garden, two full yards away. I had never hit a ball that far!
And never having hit a home run before, I did not know the “home run trot”. So I raced around the bases, my jeans flapping and my cap flying off, and slid into home with what I had kind of forgotten was the winning run. It is my recollection that my new teammates picked me up and carried me around on their shoulders. I may be making that part up, but I surely do remember it. So it must indeed have happened.
I couldn’t wait to get home that evening, to tell my mother all that had happened. We were in the kitchen, I remember. I told her about the teams, about not being picked, then being picked, choosing to play, being sure I would fail, but not failing, being a hero, having new friends….and then I couldn’t talk anymore. And I just started crying. I had no idea why. I gushed tears from an unknown source, tears that were full of salt and elation and infield dirt and some kind of 10-year-old pride and triumph. I let my mother put her arms around me, and I cried tears that felt full and fat and friendly and wonderful rolling down my face.
And, you know, I’ve thought a lot about it. In my final moments, when I contemplate the inevitable, when I am on the verge of some new existential/spiritual journey, I would like nothing more than to see that ball jumping off my bat on that beautiful arc, rising and rising. A small white dot with a background of a cloudless sky in the late summer afternoon.
Some memories last a lifetime. Some, we’d like to think, perhaps even beyond that.
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