Every Spring is a new beginning, a new hope, a new chance to win the pennant.
When the baseball season starts fresh each year, it renews me, makes feel like I have another chance to make things happen and conquer the world again. It makes me feel alive again… even now when I am old and retired and in constant pain.
People say to me, “Baseball is boring and slow and not as great a game as…” and then they try to tell me stuff about football and soccer and NBA basketball. I’m not buying it, even when it is my eldest son selling it.
Baseball became my sport when I was a child in the 1960’s. Great Grandpa Raymond was a frail and ancient man then, too elderly to share much of anything with me as I was young and full of energy. But on Sunday afternoons in Spring and Summer, we listened to the Minnesota Twins play baseball on the radio. I heard Harmon Killebrew hit homers and Tony Oliva make game-winning hits. I learned that the game was about numbers and strategy… a team game, yet filled with moments of man versus man, star of one team facing off against the star of another, skill versus skill, willpower versus willpower. I learned that baseball was a fundamental metaphor for how we live our lives.
I remember when Bob Gibson was the greatest pitcher in baseball, and he played an entire career with my favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals. I remember Lou Brock setting the record for stealing bases in a single season, a monumental accomplishment. I actually saw Lou Brock steal a base in a game against the Houston Astros, though not in the record-setting year. I was there in person. I listened to Bob Gibson’s no hitter of the Pittsburgh Pirates on the radio, listening in a campground in St. Louis while the Cardinals actually played in Pittsburgh. I didn’t get to see Stan Musial play ball. He retired before I first became aware of the game. But he was on TV quite a lot on game day, and I hung on every word.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Baseball has gotten me through some very rough times in my life. I used to play ball, baseball and softball. I was a center fielder for our 4-H team and made some game-saving catches in the field, hit a home run once, and once saved a game for our side when I threw out a runner at home plate from center field. And I have religiously followed the Cardinals year after year. In 2011, when health problems and family problems and depression threatened to destroy me… the Cardinals won the World Series in seven hard-fought games. When you reach a moment of crisis, with the game on the line, you can reach deep inside for that old baseball player magic… tell yourself, “I will not lose this day!” and find the power within you to make that throw, get that hit, catch that long fly ball…
Baseball is a connection to family and friends… teammates… everyone who has ever shared the love of the game. If you don’t win it all this time… there’s always next Spring. God, I love baseball.
Catch a Falling Star 
Reflections from 1964
In 1964 I was 7 years old until November. I became a baseball fan that year. I had listened to baseball games on the radio with Great Grandpa Raymond before that year, but that had always been Twins’ games in the American League. But that was the year I discovered the St. Louis Cardinals. I followed them in the newspaper, the Mason City Globe Gazette. They had lost the greatest hitter in their history to that point, Stan Musial having retired when the 1963 season ended. But he was replaced in left field by Lou Brock, the hit-making base-stealing boy wonder of 1964. They went from near the bottom of the National League to edging out the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds by one game each (they were tied for second) at the very end of the season.
The World Series pitted the Cardinals against the mighty New York Yankees. Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were the stars of that team and had won five World Series in a row a decade before. It was a fantastic battle that the Cardinals finally won 7 to 5 in the seventh and final game in St. Louis. Bob Gibson was a deciding factor and won Series MVP. I would become a life-long Cardinals fan.
And I lost my Grandpa Beyer. He went to work one day, driving a road grader and his heart simply stopped working. It was the first time I lost a major somebody in my life.
In 1962 I had spotted the bright pinprick in the sky that was John Glenn orbiting the earth in the Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft. My mother and father helped me spot it from our back yard in Rowan, Iowa.
In 1964, therefore, I began to take a serious interest in outer space as the Mercury program transformed into the Gemini program that was testing procedures in space for eventual Apollo moon missions.
I was in the Second Grade in 1964. Miss Madison was my teacher. She was as old as my Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich. She got mad at me at least three times that I can remember. I mean, I know that there were more than that, but there were three times I made her so mad with a joke that she memorably made me feel the wrath that teachers reserve for classroom clowns.
The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan in February. My Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich told me that the Beatles must’ve been confused about whether they were boys or girls to have haircuts like that. And those were the bowl-cuts they had before the wild-hair days of the later Sixties. All the boys in my class had either a butch cut or a flat-top. Hair styles for boys back then meant not really having any hair.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was president. He had been since the Kennedy assassination in 1963.
In July LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, abolishing segregation.
In August, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (since revealed to be a proven false-flag operation) leads to the Vietnam War.
The “Daisy” campaign ad for LBJ, showing a little girl picking flowers and then being blown up by an atom bomb, convinces my dad that Barry Goldwater is a dangerous radical, and he votes for LBJ even though he is not a conservative or a Republican.
LBJ is elected President of the United States in 1964.
Later that November, I turned eight years old.
1964 was a notable year for me. Even if it wasn’t for Barry Goldwater.
In the picture that starts this post, I am 8. Nancy is 6, holding on to little brother David at 2. Mary is 4. We are all in our Sunday best on Easter Sunday morning.
Why am I writing about 1964 today?
My mother is in hospice at 87 years old. She is dying of heart failure. And today, I and my two younger children got to talk to her by phone. The light and hope we have today is colored by the hope and light we had in the past. Such is the nature of having a family over time.
5 Comments
Filed under autobiography, baseball, commentary, humor, nostalgia