I have often said that at my birth my dad put a ball and glove in the crib with me and told me to hate the New York Yankees. Actually, my first recollection of baseball came when I was five growing up in Cleveland. Children soon fell in line with the rest of the fans who claimed that the Cleveland Indians were nothing but a Yankee farm team. Year after year, we watched our best players vanish, while our Indians struggled with mediocre players.
In the 1950s, kids lacking computers, videogames, and many without an interest in television programming, played sports with meager equipment. Besides a bicycle for outdoor play, all we had was a ball and bat used sometimes by dozens of kids and if we were lucky a glove. If tragedy struck and someone broke the only bat, that person had the responsibility to screw the pieces together and apply enough friction tape to hide the screws. New bats required passing the hat and often with limited funds, we robbed piggy banks, or at last resort, implemented our Chores-for-Dollars program. When the weather forced us indoors, a deck of cards, a Monopoly game, and a checkerboard, kept us occupied until the clouds parted.
When enough kids crawled out of bed early in the morning, we chose sides and played in the nearest field or parking lot for quadruple-headers during the summer. If there weren't enough for a 'major league' game, we played derivative games, like step ball, stickball, or just catch in the middle of the street with a runner trying to run safely between two cardboard bases. |
