Baseball on the freeway

In these days you rarely see pickup baseball games. When I was a kid we played pickup baseball all the time. So did me Pops. In fact, he and his friends played a very rare type of pickup ball. They played it on the Lodge Freeway.

Not once it was open for traffic, of course. But when the Lodge was being built in the early 1950s it ran right alongside of the house he grew up in. When the roadway had been graded but not yet paved, he and his friends would go down on Sundays, set up bases, and play baseball on the Lodge.

A nearby bridge, the Warren Avenue bridge in fact, had already been completed. It overlooked their makeshift diamond. Pops said that every time the guys went down to play, a crowd would eventually form on the bridge (and also along the service drives in place) and watch the games, cheering the young men on as they pitched, hit, and took the field.

They were only able to do it for a few weeks one summer, until the freeway construction had progressed to where play was not possible. But boy, I bet that was a sight to see. It was exactly the sort of thing which happened when neighborhoods were neighborly.

Pops makes the lineup

Me Pops had some minor adventures in his life. Why, once he was actually in a police lineup as an older teen. Really.
Pops was lanky and redheaded when he was younger, though his hair turned black as he aged. Still, many of his longtime friends called him Red, and I remember when the name on his work shirts was Red rather than Bill. Anyway, it was his slight build and red hair which got him into the lineup.
The custom among his friends in the early 1950s was to go to a park and play baseball on summer Sunday afternoons. Well, one such Sunday unbeknownst to them a robbery had occurred nearby. The suspect was a lanky older redheaded teen, and the police were able to nab him. Yet with his Constitutional rights and all, the DPD needed for the victim to identify the guy.
Yet you couldn't have a fair lineup consisting of one person, could you? As it was, a patrol car spotted Pops and his buddies playing ball. And besides Pops, 5 or 6 of the other guys roughly met the suspect's description. So the nice officers (they were very nice about it, Pops said) asked if they wouldn't mind coming to the local station to stand in the lineup along with the actual suspect. So they did. It was almost seventy years ago; you cooperated with the cops as a matter of course. The boys were promised they'd be let go without a word if one of them did get pegged, especially as they had one another as alibis and even the police saw them playing baseball.
Needless to say none of them were identified by the victim. A fellow none of Pops or his friends knew was pointed out as the delinquent and they knew nothing more about it. Still, that group of red haired friends teased each other for years about whether they'd vouch for any of them had they been accused of being the culprits.

Shagging flies with Father Smith

I have a bad habit when curling. I tend to jog down the ice when it's my turn to throw a stone, and that's something you should never do: run on ice. I've injured myself quite spectacularly more than once doing that. So even as I tell new curlers not to run on the ice, I turn around and do it myself. With abandon.

Last Friday as I curled I religiously followed that old habit. And I had a lot of change in my pocket. It jingled heartily as I jogged down the sheet. Shing, shing, shing was the sound I made as I ran toward the far hack to deliver my curling rock. And halfway down sheet six last night, as I jogged to throw my shots in the second end, I found myself reminded of a Sunday afternoon quite a few years ago.

When I was young, my dad would often take my brother and I to a field right across the street from our Church and we would all take turns hitting and fielding a baseball. One such day our Pastor, Fr. Smith, saw us as we pretended at baseball and asked if he might play along. And as we had extra gloves and only needed one bat, and as he was our pastor (and good friend of Pops), we said sure.

Fr. Smith took a glove and we all tossed the old pill around to warm up. Then Father hit a few, then grabbed a glove and went out into the field. And I learned very quickly that he was a serious ballplayer.

He tracked down every fly ball anywhere near him. His keys gave away his determination. As pastor of our parish, he had all kinds of keys, and seemed to have them all in his pockets that far ago Sunday afternoon. He stalked every fly ball with almost reckless abandon, running down whatever ones dared enter his territory. And his keys made this emphatic sound, shing, shing, shing, as he tracked down the baseballs which challenged him.

He was a great guy, Fr. Smith. And of all things, I found myself remembering him and that day fondly, on Friday while on the curling ice. Funny, eh?