One Saturday in August, a big yellow moving truck rolled up to a house down the street, and Phyllis and Elaine moved away and left my next door neighbor, Nancy, with no one to play with. They were the only other girls on the block, and they were Nancy’s best friends. It was tough on her.

“I miss Phyllis and Elaine,” she said. “Now I don’t have anyone to play dolls with.”

It was tough on me, too. Phyllis and Elaine were both slow, and I could always count on being able to tag one or the other of them in a game of catchers. Nancy, on the other hand, was lean and quick and could outrun any of us over a short distance. Billy could run farther, but no one could run faster.

“I miss them too,” I said. “Remember the time Phyllis let that whole jar of lightning bugs loose in their room because she thought they looked like stars?”

“Her mom was so mad.”

“Yeh.”

“Four-eyes, you want to play some dolls? I’ll let you play with my mother’s china doll.”

“I don’t want to play dolls.”

“Please. I don’t have anyone to play with anymore.”

“Dolls are girl stuff. I’m going to the woods and play some baseball.”

“Can I play?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Billy and Bobby.”

I didn’t know how Billy and Bobby would react to Nancy wanting to play baseball with us in the woods. We played almost every day in the summer when we weren’t playing cowboys and badmen or big game hunting. Nancy played cowboys with us sometimes because she could be Dale Evans, Queen of the West. That made sense. But a girl playing baseball?

Billy and Bobby and I collected baseball cards. I had most of the Reds. Billy was a Cardinals fan. He liked the way they got into bench-clearing brawls.

“The Cards might lose a lot of games,” he said proudly, “but they never lose a fight.”

Bobby, who had five different gloves including a catcher’s mitt and a first baseman’s mitt, as well as eleven bats, a chest protector, a catcher’s mask, and shin guards, was a Yankees fan.

We followed our teams on the sports pages of the local papers. Bobby’s father read the morning Enquirer before he left for work in Cincinnati. Billy’s dad liked the afternoon Post because it had the best information on horse racing. My father took the afternoon Times-Star because he liked the paper’s stand against the gangsters who hung out in Newport.

No matter which paper I read, the news from Crosley Field was sad. The Reds were terrible. I loved them anyway, and at meals, or during enforced rests visited upon me by my mother, who was convinced I was going to run myself ragged, or at night, I would listen to Waite Hoyt broadcasting home games from Crosley Field or reconstructing the road games from a teletype wire in the studio.

We knew the batting averages of all the Reds players, and we even knew who might be brought up from the farm teams for a late season look. We knew baseball, but none of us had ever been to a game. Bobby’s father was always too busy to take him. Billy’s father was either drunk or at the racetrack. My father—well, my father just didn’t seem to me to be the type who went to the ballpark. So I was really shocked at breakfast one Saturday morning when he said, “Son, I want you to get to bed early tonight. I have two tickets to tomorrow’s doubleheader with Boston, and you and I are going to the ballgame.”

I didn’t say anything. I just sat there. I couldn’t believe it.

“Well, son,” my mother said, “what do you have to say?”

“Neat. I mean thank you. Can I be excused? I have to go to the woods and tell Billy and Bobby.”

“Finish drinking your milk first.”

“Yes’m.” I downed my milk in nothing flat.

“James.”

“Yes’m.”

“Wipe that milk moustache off your lip.”

“Yes’m.” I did and said, “Excuse me,” and was out the front door before my father finished saying, “You’re excused.”



Later that night, as I was lying in bed wondering what it would be like to actually step up to the plate against a big league pitcher and have him throw a fastball right across the heart of the plate, I realized that we would have to miss church to get to the game on time. That didn’t really bother me; in fact, that made going to the ballgame even better. I was always trying to figure out ways to miss church. Sunday school was all right. In fact I liked Sunday school. I had a pin for being in Sunday school every Sunday for a whole year.

In Sunday school you got to do stuff. Once I made a little reed boat like the one Moses was found in; it even floated. But in church after the second hymn you just sat back and took it from the minister until after the offering. It was worse than school. At least in school the teacher asked you questions or had you read. In church you just had to sit there, and my legs always went to sleep during the sermon.

I sort of wanted to go to Sunday school because if I could get through another year without missing, I would get a bar to hang from my attendance pin that would say “Two Years.”

My father had a little blue and gold “20” under his Kiwanis pin, which meant that he had attended a Kiwanis meeting once every week for twenty years. He worked hard at that. Sometimes when we were on vacations, mother and I would wind up eating lunch in a diner in some town we’d never seen before while my father went off to have lunch with a bunch of Kiwanians he had never seen before and would never see again. That way he didn’t miss his meeting. Twenty years—and I was just working on my second one.

The next day I kept my string alive. We all went to Sunday School, and then my father and I drove across the Suspension Bridge to Cincinnati. My mother attended church, went home up Madison Avenue on the #6 Rosedale street car, and listened to Waite Hoyt broadcast the ballgame on the radio.



We paid $2.00 to park our big green four-door Hudson in a vacant lot several blocks from the ball park in a neighborhood that, even at 11:30 a.m. on a bright and sunny morning, made me glad my father was walking right beside me.

“Watch your car for fifty cents,” a young black man said to my father as we walked out of the lot.

My father ignored him.

“Why did he say that?” I asked. “Why did he say he would watch our car for fifty cents?”

“Because he’s practicing to be a criminal,” said my father. “He’s trying to extort money from me. They’re absolutely everywhere. The Times-Star is right. The criminal element is taking over society. We must stand up to them. We must never give an inch.”

I was sorry I’d asked the question. Whenever my father got started on criminals or gamblers, he could go on for hours.

“They even tried to take over baseball once, son. Only time the Reds ever won the World Series was when the gamblers had bought the other team, the Chicago White Sox. But Judge Landis took care of them.”

I didn’t know the Reds had ever won the World Series. I didn’t know they’d ever finished in the first division. I thought they’d always been trying to fight their way out of, or trying to avoid falling into, the National League cellar. But that didn’t matter.

We covered maybe three blocks, crossed a wide street, and finally stood on the sidewalk crowded with vendors outside the big green walls of Crosley Field.

There were men selling everything: peanuts, pennants, popcorn, soft drinks. The newsmen were crying the disasters of the day. It was September 18, 1949, and things were happening all over the world.



207 People Lose Their Lives

As Cruise Ship Noronic Burns



North Atlantic Treaty Council

Outlines Mutual Defense Plans



Jewish Leader: Israel/

Jerusalem Indissoluble



French Send More Troops

To Stabilize Viet Nam



We passed all the vendors, handed our tickets to an usher who tore then in two and gave my father the rain checks, pushed through the turnstile, bought a scorecard, and headed for our seats.

Our seats were back of first base and the home team dugout, far enough up in the lower deck to be under the shade of the upper deck. The sun was bright on the manicured grass of the infield. Sitting there in my blue Sunday suit, looking straight out over the leftfield wall toward the laundry across the street which sported the placard “Hit this sign and win a free suit,” I was glad for the shade and glad for the breeze that seemed to blow from behind us straight out toward centerfield, where the flag on the scoreboard rode like a wind sock directing flyballs to homerville.

On September 18, 1949, my world was a bright green ball field stretched out in front of me and a double header between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Braves.

The Reds at 57 and 84 were in seventh place, 33 games behind the league leading the St. Louis Cardinals. Boston was stuck in fourth place, 21 back, but only a game and a half in front of the fifth place New York Giants. The real battle in the National League was between St. Louis and the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were only 2 games back. The sound of that battle was far away from the din in Crosley Field.

The noise in Crosley Field was mostly caused by the vendors.

“Beer here. Get your ice cold Hudepohl Beer.”

“Red Hots. Get your Red Hots.”

“Do you want a hot dog, son?”

“No, sir.”

“Lemonade. Ice cold lemonade.”

“Peanuts. Peanuts. Peanuts.”

“How about some peanuts and lemonade? Would you like them?”

“Yes, sir.”

My father signaled the vendors, and we passed a five-dollar bill down the row of spectators to the aisle. The vendors sent a bag of peanuts, a lemonade, and the correct change back up the aisle and went on.

“Peanuts. Peanuts. Peanuts.”

“Lemonade. Ice cold lemonade.”

The peanuts and lemonade were good, and the Reds scored four runs in the bottom of the first behind the pitching of Johnny Vander Meer. The Braves scored one in the third and one in the fifth before a four-run outburst in the top of the seventh. Ewell Blackwell relieved Vander Meer and shut the Braves down for two innings while the Reds clawed their way back to a tie with a run in the seventh and another one in the eighth. Fox relieved Blackwell in the ninth and got the win when Virgil Stallcup singled scoring Ted Kluszewski from second base.

The second game was a pitcher’s duel between Cincinnati rookie Harry Perkowski and the Braves journeyman Johnny Sain. It ended in a 1-1 tie after 9 innings and was played off the next day, an open date for both clubs. The Braves won 6-2.

That Monday, while the Braves were beating the Reds, I was busy losing my best friends over a baseball.

In the bottom of the sixth inning of the first game the Cincinnati centerfielder Lloyd Merriman fouled a pitch a mile high back of first base.

“If someone doesn’t catch that, it will bounce,” my father said.

No one caught it, and it did bounce off the metal superstructure of the first base box seats in a high arc to my father’s hand. Without getting up, my father, in his three-piece suit with his hat on, reached up and snagged the sphere from the air. He handed it to me, and I put it in my pocket and watched the game.

“It’s his first game,” I heard my father say.

“What luck,” someone near us said. “I’ve been coming all my life and I’ve never caught a ball.”



When we got home I wanted to trick my mother. I hid the ball in my coat so it rolled off the table when she picked my coat up to put it away.

“Look!” I shouted. “Daddy caught a foul ball.”

“I thought maybe he had,” my mother said. “Waite Hoyt said on the radio that a man in a suit, wearing a hat, grabbed a foul with one hand without even getting up and handed it to a boy in a suit next to him.”

“And with 5,926 fans in Crosley Field, you knew from that description that I had caught a foul ball?” said my father.

My mother ignored him for a moment, straightened her apron, and then said, “How many folks did you see at the ballgame wearing three-piece suits and hats?”





“How was the ballgame?” Billy asked the next day as soon as I got to the woods with my ball glove.

“It was really neat. My father caught a foul ball.”

“He didn’t,” said Billy.

“I don’t believe it,” said Bobby.

“He did,” said Nancy, “I saw it on the mantel in Four-eyes living room.”

“Show me,” said Billy.

“Let’s play ball with it,” said Bobby.

“No,” I said. “I’m not allowed.”

“Whose ball is it? Didn’t your father give it to you?”

“Yeh, he gave it to me, but I’m not allowed to play with it. It’s a souvenir. Anyway, we’ve got lots of balls. How many balls do we need to play a game here in the woods?”

“We don’t have any real, honest to God, genuine big league balls,” said Billy.

“Yeh, Four-eyes. That’s a real-life major league ball,” said Bobby. “We could play with it.”

“No,” I said.

“Four-eyes, I’ll let you have my second best jack knife if you let us play with that ball.”

“No, Billy.”

“I’ll let you have my first baseman’s glove.”

“To keep?”

“Yes, to keep.”

“It’s a right-handed, Bobby. What would I do with a right-handed glove?”

“If you let us play with your ball, I’ll give you a kiss,” said Nancy.

“A kiss?” said Billy.

“A kiss?” said Bobby.

“A kiss,” I said. “That’s stupid, Nancy. Big league ball players are like cowboys. They don’t have time for girls and that kind of mushy stuff.”

“Come on,” said Billy. “I know what we can do. We can go put pennies on the car tracks.”

“What will happen?” Bobby said.

“It mashes ‘em flat.”

“Can I go too?” asked Nancy.

“No!” the three of us said in unison.

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