50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Baseball

 My husband and I, on a whim, watched the greater part of a baseball game today.  It was the Baltimore Orioles at the New York Yankees.  As a lifelong Dodgers fan dating from their time in Brooklyn (yes, I'm that old), I don't like the Yankees, so I had to cheer on the Orioles.  It was a futile endeavor, I fear, as the score when we left the game was 9-0 Yankees.  Sigh.

Yes, I've been fond of baseball since my childhood in the 1950s.  I was a tomboy; the usual girlish pursuits did not attract me.  I collected baseball cards.  I played "flyers & grounders" with a neighbor boy.  I watched baseball games on TV with my grandma, and I was thrilled when my mother kept me out of school one day and took me to the baseball stadium in our home town of Jacksonville, Florida, where we watched the then-Brooklyn Dodgers play an exhibition game.  I almost caught a fouled baseball, but I was carrying soft drinks back to our seats, and didn't want to drop them.  

And just in the early years of this century, the Dodgers played again at our local stadium, and I got Tommy LaSorda's autograph! That was a big thing for me.

My one regret in my affection for baseball has been that my eyes are not aligned due to a childhood operation to correct severe cross-eye.  I have no depth perception within three feet.  I can't hit a baseball worth beans.

 

"It ain't over 'til it's over:" Some Thoughts on the Passing of Yogi Berra

There are a number of amusingly grammatically incorrect, yet somehow profound, quotations associated with the name of Yogi Berra, the celebrated catcher for the New York Yankees, who died this week at the age of 90. 

"We made too many wrong mistakes," he is supposed to have said.  What is a right mistake?  One may ask.  Well, I would suppose a right mistake is one that turns out well in the end, after all.

Baseball was his life and his joy.  I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, in a time when baseball was still the game of summer.  I would go over to the next street, cutting through back yards, to my grandmother's house.  She'd be sitting in the living room, in her easy chair with the matching ottoman.  I'd walk in the back door, calling out our universal greeting and identification, "Yoo-hoo!"  I'd grab a Coca-cola out of the fridge and go into the living room.

My grandma's dog, a large black-and-tan dachshund named Peanuts, would be lying beside the ottoman, and the television would be on.  In the mid 1950s, when we moved to Florida from California after my father died, we had only one television station in Jacksonville.  On a summer afternoon, there was most likely a baseball game on.

We would sit, grandma in her chair and I on the floor, to be closer to the television, and to grandma, so we could talk and cheer for our team.  The doors and windows were all open to let in some air, in those days when people of our economic stratum did not have air conditioning.  We'd watch the game, and when a member of the team we were rooting against that day came up to bat, we would raise our right hands, make a circular clockwise motion with our fingers, and say, "Cat fuzz around that bat."  That was our curse.

Sometimes it worked.  Sometimes it didn't.  But it was still fun.

I never was a Yankees fan.  My team were the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Yes, I started as a Dodgers fan before they left the Big Apple, left Ebbets Field, and moved to Los Angeles and Chavez Ravine.  My affection went with them.

However hostile I may have felt towards the Yankees, everyone admired their star players, who just had so much talent.  Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris.  And Yogi Berra.  Who didn't love Yogi, who loved the game so much.  His name conjures up mid-20th century America, warm summer days, and carefree times in front of the television set with my grandma, watching the national game.

Thanks, Yogi.

The Family History Writing Challenge

I have signed up for the Family History Writing Challenge.  I have not committed to a word count, because I will be writing what I can when I can, as a busy college student with an honors thesis to get finished within the next five weeks!

Today I am going to talk about my grandma.  She was not genealogically or biologically my grandmother, but my great-aunt.  However, my mother was ain intra-family adoption.  Her father, Benjamin Franklin Reed, died in a railroad accident in 1917, not long before my mother's first birthday.  The Reed family ended up pretty much taking my mother and my aunt away from their mother and adopting them into the family.  My aunt went to one great-uncle and his wife, and my mother to another.

But my grandma was my grandma.  I never knew any of my grandparents, as three of them died before I was born, and the last one died when I was just four years old.  My grandma, Mary LeSourd Reed, was a baseball fan.  She loved to watch baseball on television on a lovely spring day or a warm summer day, and I would go over to her house, just around the block from ours, to visit.  I got into the habit of watching baseball with her.

I formed an attachment to the Brooklyn Dodgers, possibly because of the superb pitching of Sandy Koufax and the great catching of Roy Campanella.  The Yankees could have Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris (both of whom I did admire for the superior athletes they were); the Dodgers were my guys.

My grandma had a "curse" that we would chant when the opposing batter came up to bat.  We would make clockwise circles with one haind, fingers extended, and chant, "Cat fuzz around that bat!"  That was great fun, and a bit of "witchery" that we shared with no one else.

When my mom gave my grandma a Dachshund for Christmas one year, the dog, Peanuts, became part of the baseball audience with us.  He would curl up beside the ottoman on which my grandma rested her feet, and remain, ever faithful and vigilant.  He was not bothered by our occasional shouts at the game, or our practice of our "dark art."  Talk of "cat fuzz" disturbed the dog not.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for baseball and the Dodgers, in spite of revelations about the economics of the game that make my blood boil, and other shortcomings which have come to light in recent years.  But there's nothing like a good game on a spring day to cheer me up.
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