My Writing friend, Stacey, got me thinking about the good ol’ days of baseball. She wrote about her visit to Yankee Stadium. The stadium will be imploded in the near future.
That got me to thinking about the old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, PA. I have lived in a lot of states in my life, but the baseball days of my youth were spent in Altoona, PA. and everyone there was a Pirates fan. In 1960, I was going on 11 years old and facing my last year of Little League.
My buddies and I decried the Yankees as mortal enemies of the Pirates. We all had our individual heroes on the Pirate team; Smokey Burgess, Whitey Ford, Dick Groat, Bill Mazeroski, and Roberto Clemente to name a few.
I remember that we gathered at different houses after school to listen to the games on the radio. None of us had televisions. We didn’t need them. We knew what our heroes looked like from the Newsreels. We immitated their styles of play. We never played ball using our own names.
Our joy became complete that October. Bill Mazeroski smacked a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to clinch the title. We walked tall that day. And even now, I can’t help but smile.
