MEACHAM LANE MEMOIRS/Baseball

Baseball

Nothing else occupied our thoughts, bodies, and play time as much as baseball in our early years.  Ken and I lived to play it, to listen to it on the radio and when we finally got the little T.V. with the round screen, to watch the black and white game of the week.

But probably nothing captured our imaginations more than sitting in the evenings outside the door of our tiny kitchen on the concrete slab covering our cistern water supply and listening to the voice of the St. Louis Cardinals, Harry Caray on the radio calling the game.  “Holy cow” and “it might be, it could be, IT IS a home run” gave us a tingle right down to the toes protruding from our well worn socks.  His vivid and colorful call of the games gave us thrills beyond description.  Stan the Man Musial and Red Schoendienst were my early favorites, and in ensuing years Wally Moon, Ken Boyer, Little Don Blasingame, Wilmer Vinegar Bend Mizell, and Harvey Haddix.  I can still hear Harry, the thunder of the crowd roaring to a clutch hit, and the solid “thwack” of a ball well struck echoing through the stillness of the broom sedge fields behind our house when my thoughts turn to those days and evenings beside the radio.

The small lot in our side yard was a gathering place for the neighborhood gang to meet almost everyday  in spring and summer.  The group of small sandlot athletes usually consisted of but was not exclusive to Sonny Vaughn, Gary Vaughn, Randy Paris, Donnie Wyatt, Steve Mason, Ronnie and Tommy Conner, David Hurt, Ken, and myself.  Our teams were almost always supplemented with friends from nearby neighborhoods.

The ball we played with was often water soaked from dew and the previous day’s rain showers, and heavy as a sack full of marbles.  When a new ball was introduced we used it until it gave all it had to give, cover hard and brittle, red seams undone and a shard of leather protruding.  When the ball in this condition was struck, it gave off a low hum like a tiny helicopter as it sailed past an ear, into a glove, or into the nether regions of the  weed patch in foul territory beyond first base next to Mrs. Collie’s house.

It became a waiting game to see who would be the hitter that finally released the tightly wound ball from its sheath.  There seemed to be some measure of pride for the small “sultan of swat” that struck the fatal blow.  

You would think that would be the end of the ball game for the kids on our little ball field on Meacham Lane.  Not at all. Balls were not easy to come by.  No one had the money in the mid  1950’s and early 1960’s in our Farley neighborhood to run to a sporting goods store to purchase a new one, much less the means to get to Uncle Lee’s on the “belt line” or downtown to Campbell’s Sporting Goods Store or to Sears.

Cover-less balls were carefully wound with the plastic or cloth electrical tape from Dad’s tools box resulting in a black spheroid to be feared, with no “give” whatsoever.

Bats were even more treasured and nurtured to point of no repair. Broken bats were nailed and tacked as often as necessary, and wound tightly with the same electrical tape.

But, the days inevitably came when bats or baseballs in any condition were not serviceable.  But it did not stop our games.  Not for even one day.  My mother surely must have wondered what happened to all of her brooms and mops.  A broom or mop handle was a 1950’s baseball factory.  First a length was cut for the bat, and the resulting portion was sectioned into “balls”.  Some wicked curves and sinkers could be thrown with the wood cylinders but a line drive with one would cause you to duck as often as extend a hand to catch it.  As daunting as it could be at times, it didn’t matter. We were playing ball.  When we ran out of the broom handle balls, we supplemented with bottle caps. We were unstoppable with our passion to play the game.

The games didn’t stop for Ken and I when we retired to our rooms for the evening.  No indeed.  We rolled up a magazine for a bat, formed tin foil into a ball, and played the game on our knees.  We supplemented every swat of the scrunched up tin with our best imitation of Harry Caray, “it might be, it could be, IT IS a home run!”  We wore our little knees out rounding the bases.

T.V. was rare in our neighborhood in the mid 1950’s, and the programming limited to 3 stations; NBC in Paducah, CBS in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and ABC in Harrisburg, Illinois. If you had a T.V.  There were, of course, no video games.  Ours was the last generation of kids to work our way through our pre-teen and early teen years without electronic media as the center of our lives, at least the center to our entertainment and leisure time.  

Every single time I reflect back on growing up on Meacham Lane and the gang of offspring from blue collar fathers and housewife mothers, I am thankful for that.  I am better for that.  I doubt one single kid from the generations that were to follow us can recall fondly, if at all, their times in front of a T.V. or Nintendo, Wii, or Sega game.  But I have the wonderful gang of Meacham Lane comrades, baseball in any of its forms and derivations, my brother Ken….and of course, Harry.

I have outlived most of the gang that was such a huge part of life during those times.  I think of them often.  In the cache of memory reserved for that period of my life I recall them all from time to time, t-shirted and blue-jeaned, caps resting on eyebrows, smiling from ear to ear, contemplating how far they would drive the next offering on that little ball field in the West Kentucky sun.

L_R Ken, Dad, and I ready to play baseball.  Circa 1955