PIN MONEY

Pin Money

Small things seem so much larger in the hands of a small boy. And sometimes, small things leave big memories. Take pins, for example. My mother was always mending clothing. Often she was “letting out” the cuffs of my shirts and pants as I grew taller. The cuffs had to be adjusted and pinned in place before she would begin to sew. So, it was not unusual for me to find pins on the floor, sometimes on the rugs and often in the cracks between the wooden floorboards. At other times, a pin or two would end up on the sofa bed in the sun parlor where I flopped to read comics. If I was lucky, I found the pin before it found me as I came down on it.

It was not so easy to pick up a pin. There was a science to it. First, you had to press a finger down on the head of the pin. This would lift the point away from the floor. You could then grab the shaft of the pin. At least, that’s the theory. The reality was that the finger holding down the head was not so steady. And because the head was so small, the slightest movement of that finger caused the point of the pin to move about erratically as you reached for the shaft. The result was that the finger reaching for the shaft invariably ran into the point.

There wasn’t much blood. How big a hole could a small pin make in your finger? And actually, while the pin was stuck in your finger you could lift your hand, with the pin impaled and dangling from the finger, and easily grab the shaft of the pin and return it to its proper place.

Then I discovered a better way to rescue wayward pins. I had a small horseshoe magnet.

It was only about an inch or two in length, and it just sucked pins up like a vacuum cleaner. One Sunday, I demonstrated it for my Aunt Sara. Thus began my first paid employment, as a pin rescuer/recycler.

Aunt Sara was my mother’s older sister. She had never married. The family rumor, passed on to me by my romantic girl cousins, was that she had been engaged to a young man who was killed in the First World War. Of course, we never asked our parents about this. We were satisfied with the rumor. No reality could surpass a family rumor.

 Aunt Sara made women’s hats for a living. And not just any hats. She made fancy hats for rich women to wear to their parties and dances, and especially—for her non-Jewish clients—festive hats to march under in the Easter Parade each Spring.

Annually, on Easter Sunday morning, a procession of pedestrians, clowns, and antique automobiles advanced slowly along North Charles Street in Baltimore. The women were dressed in their finest outfits, and this included their fancy Easter hats, many of which were made by my Aunt Sara. As far as I can recall, I only saw one Easter Parade. It must have been around 1940 or ’41. We only went there because my older brother was one of the clowns. I think he came over to us as we stood along the sidewalk watching the passing parade. I was very excited to see my brother marching in the Easter Parade. I thought that he must be a celebrity.

At some point I learned that someone who designs and makes hats was called a milliner. Milliner is not a word you come across much, these days. I checked on it, and the source of the word is believed to come from the town of Milan, Italy, where fancy-clothing artisans worked. Hence, a milliner was someone from Milan who made fine clothing for wealthy people.

Aunt Sara was from Latvia.

In modern terms, Aunt Sara was a highly successful small businesswoman. (She was also a small woman—barely five feet tall.) Her “hat shop” was downtown, on Mulberry Street. On some Saturday mornings my mother and I would take the streetcar to Aunt Sara’s place. Mom would then go off to do some shopping in the department stores, and I would stay and keep Aunt Sara company.

Her shop was tiny—a front room where she met customers and displayed her work, and an even smaller back room in which she designed and made their hats. Her workroom was special for me, because it contained all of her beautiful materials: ribbons, felts in a wide range of colors, and exotic feathers with which she decorated her hats. And the best part of her workroom was the floor, which was littered with small fragments of brightly colored fabrics, snippets of satin ribbons, stray shiny sequins, and small pieces of feathers.

These textures and colors were not a part of my everyday life. I felt that my life was mostly brown and gray. I fooled around in the dirt a lot, digging up ant nests or building miniature roads through forests of weeds. My friends and I played ball on dirt fields. And a lot of our activities were carried out on concrete pavements. For card games we sat on cement steps. Walking into the back room of Aunt Sara’s shop was like the Wizard of Oz movie shifting from black and white to color!

The floor of her workshop was like an art studio. I would pick up the scraps and then glue them to a piece of cardboard to make a colorful collage. Sometimes I would use scissors to cut the larger pieces into small squares, and then arrange them into a kind of mosaic. I transformed the waste material on Aunt Sara’s floor into exotic birds and fish. It was much more fun than drawing with crayons, or painting with watercolors. Unlike flat pictures, my artwork had different textures, and was three-dimensional.

Aunt Sara pointed out that many of her pins ended up on the floor, most of them trapped within the cracks and spaces between the old and worn floorboards of her workroom. And that’s where my magnet entered the picture. With that amazing device I could extract pins that could not be reached with fingers—that could not even be lifted by a vacuum cleaner. With my gravity-defying instrument, I could return her lost pins to service.

At first, my technique was very simple. I got down on my knees, bent over, and I just dragged the magnet along the lines that separated the floorboards. The magnet could hold five or six pins at a time before it became so cluttered that I could no longer keep it close enough to the floor to attract any more pins. When that happened, I would pull the pins off and drop them into a small paper cup, and continue trolling for precious metal. Sometimes I would latch on to an extraordinary treasure: a large sewing needle, for example, or a fancy hatpin. Aunt Sara was especially happy at their recovery, and when I would come to her with my “catch” after ten or fifteen minutes of work she would give me a big hug. For a small woman, she could give a very big hug. In general, I didn’t much like to be hugged, but Aunt Sara’s hugs were welcome and memorable because they were so warm and genuine. I think she liked having a little boy around while she worked.

After some time I came up with another recovery method. I tied a long thread around the loop end of the magnet. Then, instead of crouching on the floor in an uncomfortable position, I could stand up straight and dangle the magnet from the other end of the thread, which I held with a finger pressed to my cheek, just under one eye. In this way, I could “sight” down the length of the thread and guide the magnet to the hiding places of the pins. But this was not as easy as it sounds.

The magnet would swing like a pendulum every time I moved. So I had to develop a technique that let me swing the magnet in line with the cracks between the floorboards. But the motion of the magnet had to be slow enough that as it passed over a pin, there was time for the pin to be attracted to, and adhere to, the moving magnet. This technique developed into a fantasy that made the work more fun—and more exciting—for me.

It was wartime, the 1940s, and we were winning the war against Germany by bombing the railroads in the great industrial centers of Germany and the Nazi-occupied lands. Each Saturday (when I wasn’t working for Aunt Sara) I went to the movies and there I saw newsfilms of the bombing runs. So I imagined myself as the bombardier on a B17, flying through the barrages of exploding German antiaircraft shells, and maintaining my calm, steely concentration as I directed my payload to the targets far below. It made picking up pins seem more noble. I had a job to do, and I wasn’t afraid.

                                

Of course, I supplied the sound effects appropriate to my mission: the growl of the four big engines of the B17, the whine of the bombs as they fell through the air toward the target below, and the explosions as the bombs landed and destroyed the enemy’s railroad yards and factories. I did not think about it at the time, and Aunt Sara never said anything, but I wonder now if any of her customers in the front room heard the sound effects that accompanied the recovery of fallen pins, as I carried out my missions in winning the war against the Nazis.

I was much older when I learned the irony of my aerial missions. Latvia, the land of Aunt Sara’s birth, had been invaded and occupied by the Nazi’s very early in World War 2.

Because Aunt Sara did so much sewing, on so many different colors of materials, she had hundreds of spools of thread. When a spool was finally so depleted of thread that the bare wood showed, she tossed it into a small box. She saved the empty spools for me because I could use them in “projects.”

A wooden spool that
sewing thread was wrapped around

A “project” was an activity in which a small boy spent an hour making something of very little use. I discovered that if you glued several spools together, end on end, you could make…a bunch of spools glued together.

You could stand them up to make towers. You could paint them. You could glue popsicle sticks to them, but these combinations never looked as good as you had imagined them before the actual gluing.

                                                               

There was another aspect of Aunt Sara’s workroom that fascinated me—the animal heads! Aunt Sara trimmed and decorated some of her creations with fur. Sometimes it was just a strip of fur sewn along a portion of a hat. But sometimes the animal’s head was still attached! Against one wall she had a rack of little fox pieces. These were heads, still connected to the fur from its back. The heads had shiny black glass eyes that seemed to stare at you. That gaze made the fox look very angry. If you were careful, you could pry open the mouth a little, enough to see the tiny sharp teeth. I did not understand why women wanted angry fox heads attached to their hats. But this was just one of many things that I did not understand about the world around me, when I was six or seven years old.

What I did understand was that Aunt Sara was a special person, and that spending an afternoon in her shop was an opportunity to enter a magical world of color and texture.

SPALDINE COLLEGE

Spaldine College

4008 Oakford Avenue

Me at my steps.

I

n the summers we played a lot of “street” games. All this meant was that the games were carried on in the streets, rather than a block away on the fields at the playground at PS 69. Our favorite game was step ball, played with a pink rubber ball called a “spaldine.” I have no memory of ever buying a spaldine. As far as I knew, they just appeared as needed. Like paperclips.

Basically, a spaldine was a hairless tennis ball. We didn’t play tennis. None of us owned a tennis racket. There were no tennis courts at our playground. Tennis was for rich kids who went to private schools. Our “court” was Oakford Avenue or Cold Spring Lane, or the alleys that ran behind them.

The houses on both of those streets were about four feet above street level. Concrete steps led up from the street-level pavement to the walkway to the house. Step ball was played against those front steps, and into the street. Our streets were very narrow. If a car was parked on both sides at some point along the street, there was barely room for two cars to pass each other. For that reason, most of our streets were One-Way so that there was never opposing traffic.

Cold Spring Lane had row houses on both sides, and those houses had garages in the back that were accessed through the alleys. So there were fewer cars parked on that street, and it was easier to find a set of steps that fronted on a section of street that was free of cars.

You could play step ball with just two people. All you needed was a “batter” and a fielder. There was no bat; that’s what the steps were for. The “batter” threw the spaldine against the steps, and (if it hit the steps right) the ball would then rebound back toward the street. If the fielder caught it in the air, that was an “out,” just like in regular baseball. If the ball was not caught, then you got a “hit.” A few lines were drawn in the street at different distances from the steps, to define where a single or double or triple fell. If the ball rebounded from the step far enough to land past the curb on the opposite side of the street, without being caught by the fielder, that was a homer.

There was a science to step ball. And a geometry. A set of steps is just a series of “treads,” the flat part that you step on, and “risers,” the vertical part that goes from one tread to the next. As you go up the steps, where the riser meets the tread, that’s the edge or point of each riser/tread pair. And that’s where you want to throw your pitch. That’s called “hitting a pointer.” If the spaldine hits the point just right, the ball flies far over the head of the fielder and up onto the lawn of the house on the other side of the street. No chance for the fielder to get to it in the air—a home run!

It was not easy to hit a pointer, but if you practiced, and played enough, you could sometimes hit a couple of pointers in a game. But you couldn’t count on that!

              

So that’s where geometry came in. The strategy for getting a pointer involved getting real close to the steps and throwing the ball down at the point. But if you missed a little, and hit on the tread just past the point, the rebound went backward over the steps and against the front of the house that the steps led to.

 In the summer, the front door was behind a screen door. The ball might dent the screen a little, but not break it. At the end of the game we could push the screen back so that it was nearly flat, and no one would notice.

                                 

But in the winter, the screen door was replaced by a storm door. A glass door! And glass does not bend. But glass is pretty strong. So unless the ball was thrown really hard—like toward the end of the game when you really needed a pointer—it would just bounce harmlessly off of the glass. But even then, if someone’s mother heard the smash of spaldine on glass, it could be the end of the game. “Get away from there!” she would shout. “Play on somebody else’s steps!”

To avoid disruption of the game, we would usually employ a conservative strategy. 

This meant throwing the ball at the steps at a lower angle. The ball would bounce off the tread and hit the riser and then rebound toward the “field.” But it was much harder to get enough height in the rebound that the ball would go over the head of the fielder. So this kind of strategy usually saved the windows but lost the game.

Years later, when we took classes in Physics in high school or college, we already understood things like angle of incidence and angle of reflection. That was the best thing we learned from step ball. We were alumni of Spaldine College.

Throwing Up in My Cleats

Throwing Up in My Cleats

Most of us played baseball in the same shoes we wore to play football, or basketball, or volleyball.

Gym shoes.

They were the shoes we wore in gym class, of course, and they were the shoes we played ball in. They were canvas-topped shoes with thick hard rubber soles. They squeaked on the gym floor. If they were new, we got pretty good traction outdoors on the grass and dirt. But our shoes did not stay new for long, and our parents did not buy us new shoes as long as the old ones fit.

I wanted “cleats.” Baseball shoes. Shoes you wore only on the baseball field. The uppers were made of black leather. A set of metal tabs was riveted to the soles. Each tab or cleat protruded a little more than a quarter inch out from the bottom of the sole, enough to “dig in”—to get traction while running.

Some baseball shoes had spikes instead of cleats. They were like short nails coming out of the bottom of the shoe. Compared to cleats, these were considerably more dangerous to the opposing players when you slid into a base to beat a throw from the field. The fear that the runner might slash your calf with his spikes (which would, we were told, lead to gangrene and foot amputation) was sufficient to make most fielders shy away from a tag on the runner, at least enough to give the runner the slight advantage he needed to get a foot on the base before he was tagged.

Our parents did not approve of spikes. So if we had anything, we had cleats.

I don’t remember when Dad bought cleats for me. That lack of memory surprises me now. It was something I coveted, and did not really expect. All I remember is that one day I showed up for a game with my cleats slung over my shoulder, and I sat down and replaced my gym shoes with real baseball shoes. And I remember being disappointed, because none of my teammates noticed.

I had been warned with regard to the care of my cleats. “Don’t walk on the cement pavement with them,” Dad said. (Actually, what he said was, “Don’t walk on the see-ment payment with them.” In Baltimore, the sidewalks (payments) were made from see-ment. (Later, in Junior High School Hygiene class, I could not understand how my sperm would get to my wife’s egg if it were attached to little bits of see-ment.)

Dad told me that walking on the payment would wear the cleats down. So I knew I was expected to take good care of them. But I also knew how good they sounded when I walked on cement. I could hear the click-clack of metal on the pavement. I knew I had my cleats on, and I felt special—a real ballplayer. Never mind about my batting average—I had cleats!

“Click-clack!”

Another part of caring for your cleats was keeping them clean. Dirt would cake up around the base of each cleat, where it attached to the sole of the shoe, and as a result the cleat did not go so far into the ground, and was less effective. So periodically you cleaned the dirt away, usually with a strong twig or a nail as a scraper/digger. And, of course, each time you stepped up to the plate you banged the bat against the side of the shoe to knock the dirt out of the cleats. It was not really very effective, other than to announce, “I’m wearing cleats. I’m a real baseball player!”

So, I was proud of my cleats, and I took good care of them.

Until the Baltimore Playground League Baseball Championship of 1949, when I found another use for my cleats.

We made the City Finals! We were the champions of our local school playground league, in the 12 to 14 year-old division. (We beat the All Saints Church Blue Rockets to get there.) And we were terrified!

The finals were played at Patterson Park. This was on the other side of Baltimore. The Southeast Side. Where the “other” Polish People lived.

Or, as our parents called them, “the Po-locks!”

Po-locks were not popular in Jewish homes in Baltimore in 1949. Lots of us were Polish or Russian Jews whose grandparents remembered the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and especially of 19^th Century Poland. And if we had the temerity to ask our parents why they still hated Po-locks, we were told that most of the Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s had been built on Polish soil.

“You’re playing where?” my mother screamed. “Why do you have to go to the other side of the city to play a ball game? You got a playground down the street.” She called for my father.

All I could say was, “It’s for the champeenship, Mom.”

“Champeen, shmampeen. You’re all nuts!” She turned to my father. “Tell him they’re nuts!”

Of course, our fathers sided with us, and there was no question that we would show up and defend our neighborhood honor. The team we were to play against in the championship (oops, champeenship) game was the Red Shield Boys’ Club.

The Red Shield! We weren’t sure what that was, but it sounded like something from the Crusades! That did not make my mother feel better.

I guess my mother’s fear was contagious. The morning of the big game, I woke up with a nervous stomach. By the time I had finished breakfast I had moved on to nausea. I grabbed my glove and my cap and my cleats and headed down the street to meet my teammates at our home field. Our ride to the game was to be provided by our playground supervisor, Miss Houston. Miss Houston was a student at a local teachers’ college, where she majored in Phys Ed. Her summer job was to organize activities for the kids who met at the playground at PS 69, our neighborhood elementary school. Our team was one of those activities.

The entire team did not fit into her car. But she did get seven of us in. Two in front with her. Four across the back seat. And the smallest one—me—on the floor.

It was about 8:30 in the morning by the time we got started on the drive to the game. Patterson Park was in Highlandtown—another name that brings up fear, like Treblinka. Highlandtown was simply the name of a Baltimore neighborhood, this one on the northeast edge of the Baltimore Harbor. The temperature was already in the 80s and climbing. We had a nine mile ride ahead of us. Seven of us—and Miss Houston.

Me on the floor.

Nauseous.

There was no Beltway, then, that years later ringed the city so that you could get from one side of Baltimore to another in fifteen minutes of continuous, smooth, driving. Worse, there was no smooth driving. Miss Houston’s car, like just about all cars in 1949, had a stick shift. She had not mastered the art of the stick shift.

So it was ride a few blocks. Shift, jerk, speed up. Brake, down-shift, stop. Constant jerking back and forth, at the feet of my teammates.

So it wasn’t my fault when I threw up.

And I was on the floor, so I couldn’t get my head out the window.

Miss Houston’s car was not equipped with vomit bags. I used my shoe, instead. The baseball shoe. With the cleats.

The boys in the back were groaning and shouting—fighting to get their heads out the window for some fresh air. The boys in the front were laughing hysterically. Miss Houston pulled over so that I could get out and empty my shoe, and wipe my mouth on my arm. I got back in the car—took my place on the floor—and we continued to Patterson Park in a mood that was more amusement than hostility. My own mood was embarrassment. I spent the rest of the trip staring at my one dry shoe.

When we got to the park everyone spilled out of the car as fast as they could. Miss Houston asked if I was all right, and I said I was. I walked over to a nearby drinking fountain and washed my shoe as well as I could.

 

Me at the Water Fountain at PS 69

Yes—in the drinking fountain. Kids held their dogs up to the drinking fountains in the parks. No big deal!

I dried the inside of my shoe as best I could, and pulled it—still damp—over my sock. I laced it up and put on the other shoe. When I walked I could hear, just above “click-clack,” another sound: “squeak-squeak.”

I played right field that day, and I no longer remember much of the game. My feet stayed in my shoes. The remainder of breakfast stayed in my stomach.

And we won the game!

“CLICK-CLACK!”

Looking for Tige

I thought his name was “Tide.” A dog named “Tide” didn’t make any sense to me, but I was only nine years old and I didn’t know any other word that sounded like “Tide.”

I’d never heard a name like “Tige.” So “Tide” it was.

And what was he doing in the shoe?

Every Saturday morning at 11:30 I turned on the radio in the sun parlor, lay down on the bed that served as the sofa, and listened to "Smilin' Ed's Buster Brown Gang."

The show opened with a short dog bark: “Arf,” and then a small boy’s excited voice: “Hey, kids. It’s the Buster Brown Show!”

For me, the program was memorable because of the “characters” that Smilin’ Ed McConnell featured each week. My favorite was Froggy the Gremlin who, true to his name, spoke with a croaky voice. There was a cat named Midnight who meowed in response to Smilin’ Ed’s questions. And there was Ed himself, who bubbled with enthusiasm and had an infectious laugh that set off hysterical laughter and screaming among the kids in his studio audience.

Froggy was invisible—apparently that was a characteristic of Gremlins—but Ed could get him to “appear” by instructing Froggy to “Pluck your magic twanger.” I did not know what a “twanger” was, but the sound effect that followed Froggy’s action in response to Ed’s request convinced me that a twanger must be a huge, tightly stretched rubber band. Imagination was a big factor in “seeing” what was happening in a radio show.

Smilin’ Ed read an adventure story each program, usually set in the jungles of India. I no longer remember any of these stories. What does remain though, I suppose because it was repeated throughout the show, and then week after week, was the commercial for the sponsor: Buster Brown Shoes. Whatever the commercial message was, it was always introduced in the same way, in the voice of a young boy.

“That’s my dog, Tige; He lives  in a shoe.

I’m Buster Brown. Look for me in there too.”

Buster Brown did not appear as a character in the radio show. By the 1940s he was just a name on a shoe, and a cartoon-like caricature in some of the display ads in the stores. Tige was usually next to him.

                

         

Buster Brown began as a character in a newspaper comic strip in 1902. Later, the rights to his name were bought by a shoe company, and the shoes were named for him. Even later, but still long before Smilin’ Ed’s show, Buster Brown appeared in short movies in the Twenties. So there was a real Tige. He was “played” by an American Pit Bull Terrier, the same dog that appeared in later films as “Petey” or “Pete the Pup” in the Our Gang comedies— the dog with the ring around one eye.

As I said, I converted Tige to the only word I knew that sounded the same: Tide.

I didn’t think a lot about why a dog would have a name like Tide (much less Tige). What interested me, what aroused my curiosity, was what was a dog doing in somebody’s shoe? I had Buster Brown shoes. I couldn’t see any dog in them. Was he invisible, like Froggy?

There was a way to find out. The shoe store on Liberty Heights Avenue, Wyman’s—the one that carried Buster Brown shoes—had a fluoroscope machine. It was, in fact, an X-ray machine. Its purpose was to permit the shoe salesman to demonstrate how well the shoe fit.

 

The Fluoroscope

Here’s how it worked. After selecting a pair of shoes, your mother and you accompanied the salesman to the machine. You stepped up onto a low platform and slid your feet into a slot cut out of the bottom of the machine. At eye level (for a child) there was an opening that you could look into. The salesman pushed a button, and suddenly you saw the outline of the shoes, within which were the bones of your feet. You knew it was your feet because you could wiggle your toes, and the bones would wiggle back at you. And it was all in a foggy green glow. The machine was designed in such a way that the X-ray beam turned off after about ten or twenty seconds. If your mother was skeptical about the fit, the salesman would give you another shot of X-rays. I don’t recall that anyone thought this might be dangerous. That’s why we figured it would be OK to check out other things in the fluoroscope.

Fortunately, you could not get your head through the slot. Of course, you could not see your own head, since you had to be looking through the viewer at the top. But you could see a friend’s head—if it fit into the slot, and if he were really stupid! I’m pretty sure some of my friends were dumb enough to stick their heads in; happily their heads were too large.

You could get a hand in the slot. Again, not your own if you wanted to see it. But you could get a friend to stick his hand in when a salesman was not keeping an eye on the machine. Hand bones were not very interesting, so you only did this once.

If you go back today and read the old Buster Brown comic strips from a hundred years ago, you quickly learn that Buster was a mischievous boy. He had very bad judgment. Tige tried to exercise some control over him, to be a good influence, but how much could a dog (even a Pit Bull) do? I guess that’s why we got mischievous ideas in the Buster Brown shoe store.

A few doors down from Wyman’s Shoes was McCrory’s Five and Dime store. You could buy a turtle, about the size of a small hamburger, for about ten cents. We had the idea that we could place a turtle through the foot slot and turn on the machine and watch it crawl around. We developed an elaborate plan.

If one of the girls in our class were there with her Mom, trying on shoes, we would wait for an opportune moment. When it appeared that they were ready to step up onto the fluoroscope, one of us would insert a turtle through the slot. As the trio looked through the viewers to admire the “fit,” and as the turtle began to crawl about her feet, the girl would begin screaming. The salesman would jerk his head up and look toward the front door, but all he would see would be our backs as we raced out onto Liberty Heights Avenue and dashed down to the corner of Garrison Boulevard, where we would catch the streetcar that would take us safely home.

We thought about that idea through most of the summer, mostly arguing about who would place the turtle in the slot. When summer finally came to an end, so did our plan. We never carried it out. I guess Tige was a better influence over us than we imagined he could be.

Mathematics Lesson

Decimal Equivalents of Fractions

1/16 = 0.0625

I’m guessing that I learned about the decimal equivalents of fractions in the fifth or sixth grade. I know that I knew some of the simple decimal equivalents by then. I’m sure we started with the easy ones: the fraction ½ is equivalent to the decimal 0.5, and ¼ is equal to 0.25. We then passed on to more complex ideas. For example, 1/3 does not have a simple decimal equivalent. It is equal to 0.33333… and the threes go on forever.

There is one decimal equivalent burned into my memory in the summer of 1949 and carried in there to this day:

1/16 = 0.0625.

I was good at numbers. That’s how I got to be the “scorer” on our baseball team. This was summer vacation in Baltimore. The local schools had teams in leagues at the various playgrounds, and our neighborhood had a team in the 12-14 division, that being the age range of the players. The scorer was responsible for keeping the detailed record of each game, the results of each player’s “at-bats,” and the accumulated statistics for the season—primarily our batting averages and homeruns.

I was a better scorer than a player. At the end of each game I would sit in the dirt with my notebook and pencil, lean against the chain-link backstop behind home plate, and bring the “stats” up to date. Each week a new column would reflect my teammates’ progress.  In our second game of the season Jimmy Crossman got two hits in three at-bats, so he went from 3 for 5 (3/5=0.600) after our first game to 5 for 8 (0.625). The following week: just 1 for 4 and down his averaged plunged to 6 for 12 or 0.500. Still—a respectable batting average.

Of course we didn’t report or speak of our averages as decimals. Jimmy was “batting 500,” not “zero point five oh oh.” That same summer, real ballplayers had much lower averages. We would read The Sporting News each week to find that Jackie Robinson was batting 340. Not as good as Jimmy, but we figured Jackie faced tougher pitchers (Harry Brecheen of the St. Louis Cardinals) than Jimmy did (Ed Scoglin of the All Saints Blue Rockets.)

My stats were easier to figure, but harder to brag about. Or even mention. As the season progressed I went from 0 for 3 (0.000) the first game to 0 for 6 (0.000) after two games to 0 for 10 (still 0.000) after the third. I sat out a few games in July. I wasn’t officially “benched” since we had no bench—we just kneeled in the dirt on our side of the field, waiting for our turns at bat and calling encouragement to each teammate as he came to the plate. And I kept score.

So there I was, in the middle of August, coming to bat in the eighth inning with a continuous string of zeroes after fifteen at bats. Not that I hadn’t gotten on base. In the five games that I had played to that point, I had walked five times. As the shortest player on the field, I had a pretty small strike zone. If I just left my bat on my shoulder I could draw a walk. Our coach begged me not to swing, but what was the point of standing at the plate if you didn’t take a shot at it? (ANSWER: It was the only way I would get on base.)

I walked up to the “plate.”

There was no plate, actually. We just scratched an outline of home plate in the dirt. In view of my lack of success to that point in the season, I was not anxious to face this pitcher, or any other, so I stalled for time. I knocked the dirt out of my cleats. There wasn’t much dirt there. The dirt was between the bases. I rarely had occasion to run the bases.

The “ump,” somebody’s older brother, said “Batter up!”

I took a practice swing and stepped up to the plate. The pitcher was smirking. The first pitch was high. I swung at it anyway. I always had hopes that the pitcher would hit my bat, and I knew that would not happen if I did not swing frequently.

“Strike One!”

I stepped back and adjusted my cap. It was late afternoon, toward the end of summer, and the sun was low enough to be in my face. I squinted, looked down the line toward the third base “coach,” who was just one of my teammates prepared for the unlikely event that I would get on base and need his advice.

I blinked, and saw my father standing on the sideline. This was the first time he had come to see me play. He must have gotten away from work early. I was not happy that he was there. It was bad enough that I embarrassed myself in front of my teammates; actually I was used to it, and the other players regarded me as a good sport. The embarrassment was in my head, not in theirs.

But now my father would see how poor a player I was.

The ump muttered, “Batter up.”

The next pitch hit the dirt about three feet in front of the plate. I swung anyway.

“Strike two!”

My teammates were shouting encouragement.

  

 

Our team, in the Summer of ’49.  I’m in the back row, third from the left.

In the gap between Bobby Jacobs and Ward Dawson.

I think I’m kneeling.

“Good swing!” someone hollered.

It was a good swing. The ball just wasn’t anywhere near my bat. (We were beating the other team by 6 to 2. Encouragement came easily under those conditions.)

I never saw the next pitch. My eyes were closed. I just swung the bat as hard as I could. There was a loud—surprising—“Thwack.”

I opened my eyes and saw the third basemen leap to his right, toward the base, his glove hand extended, as the ball shot past him and landed just inches inside of the foul line. The umpire shouted, “Fair ball!”

That woke me up, and I started running. I rounded first base and I looked out toward left field. The ball was still rolling, well past the left fielder, who had been playing me short, not expecting me to get the ball into the outfield at all. I rounded second base as the fielder retrieved the ball. He turned and threw toward third base. I got to third, panting, just ahead of the throw.

My first hit of the season—a triple!

My teammates were shouting and laughing. I looked over at my father. He had a big grin on his face. He was hollering something, but I didn’t hear it. I didn’t need to.

A triple!

That’s how my season ended. One in sixteen.

0.0625

I rounded it up to 0.063.

My summer of ’49.

I batted “63.”

But it was a triple!

The End of June (and the World)

The End of June (and the World)

June 30, 1946

In honor of the 100^th birthday

of Dr. Abraham Kremen›

born 17 June, 1905

W

hen you are nine years old, new words enter your vocabulary with unexpected power. One such word was “atoll.”  I’m not sure when I first heard the word. Perhaps in school, or possibly in the Movietone News of the Week that played in the theaters each Saturday, separating The Durango Kid from a Three Stooges Comedy. In any event there is no question that the word arose in the context of the exotic geography of the Pacific—the battleground in our war against Japan. For the whole of my eighth year our playground “skirmishes” were marked with cries of “banzai” and “kamikaze” as we imagined ourselves battling for Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

But in my ninth year, in the summer of 1946, the war with Japan was finished—had been for nearly a year—and peace had returned to our lives in Baltimore. For me, the most welcome measure of that peace was the increased frequency with which we could go to Patapsco State Park, nearly an hour by car from our home. On the afternoon of this memory—the last day of June—on the long and hot ride home, I was not at all calm. My mind was not on the forested area that bordered the Patapsco River. It was far away, conjuring as best I could a vision of the Bikini Atoll.

The road out of the park was dusty—clouds of fine brown dirt chased after us as we headed home. We called the car, and all cars, “the machine,” as in “Get in the machine. We’re going to the park.” This machine was Uncle Abe’s big black Oldsmobile. Uncle Abe was special in our extended family. He was married to my father’s sister—my Aunt Leona. My father was one of nine children, and most of my aunts and uncles lived in Baltimore. Family get-togethers were big and boisterous. Everyone was a storyteller, and the tellings were animated with laughter. My cousins and I would sit on the edge of the crowd and pretend we were not listening. Periodically, one of the wives of my father’s brothers would notice us and caution the speaker of the moment: “Not in front of the children.” And of course that got our attention.

But, back to Uncle Abe and the machine. He was special because he was so quiet. More than that, he was educated. HE WAS A DOCTOR! My father was a salesman. Uncle Nathan drove a taxi. Uncle Alec played the horses at Pimlico, although it was rumored that he worked in the clothing business as a cutter. I never did know what Uncle Albert did. Uncle David was an engineer, but no one really knew what that was, so he got no special attention for that. But Uncle Abe was an eye surgeon, and we all held him in special respect.

There was something else about Uncle Abe that was truly singular. He had served with the Army as a surgeon on the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. If the war had not ended the previous summer, he would have gone in with the troops in the invasion of Japan. But he got to come home instead. That was especially important to me that day, because I needed to ask him a question. I knew he would have the answer, because he had been on the island of Tinian, and we all knew that the Enola Gay took off from Tinian bound for Hiroshima.

With one last glance through the rear window at the road receding into the brown dust I turned and called over the tall seatback in front of me.

 “Uncle Abe?”

He looked into the rear view mirror but said nothing.

I asked, “Where’s Bikini Atoll?”

“In the Pacific. North of the Marianas,” came the reply.

“How far away is that?”

Abe answered, “It’s thousands of miles.”

I twisted around, got up on my knees and peered through the dusty rear window again. Abe pursued my silence. “You’re worried about the A-Bomb?”

It was more of a statement than a question. There had been newspaper articles all week. The fourth atomic bomb will be detonated at Bikini Atoll. It was a test, to measure its “effects.” It was not clear to me what effects were going to be measured. But the Baltimore Sun, and the neighborhood kids, were full of speculation. A scientist from Johns Hopkins said it would crack the earth open and all the molten lava would come up. Another predicted that the blast would set the earth’s atmosphere on fire.

Uncle Abe said, “I’ll put the radio on. Maybe they’ll have something about the test.”

As if on cue, an announcer was saying that the detonation of the bomb was just minutes away. No one else in the car seemed much concerned about the prospect of our instant incineration. My cousin Paula sat on one side of me, quietly reading a book. Her brother David was doing the same on my other side. Finally the announcer began a countdown, and at “Zero” we heard…nothing.

“What happened?” I asked.

Abe answered right away. “The bomb site is a few miles from the radio announcer. It takes time for the sound to get that far. And sure enough, there was the sudden crack of an explosion, followed by static for what seemed like a long time.

Again I asked, “What’s happening now?”

Abe simply said, “I don’t know. Maybe the station went off the air.”

Off the air?  Like incinerated?

The car started to feel hot inside. It looked like the dirt was blowing faster—chasing us. I remembered that when you see lightning, you count until you hear the thunder, and from that you could tell how far away the lightning is. I started to count, and I watched as the road receded from the back of the car. The ground hadn’t cracked yet, but I thought the air was beginning to glow red.

The car lurched as we pulled out of the dirt park road and turned onto the highway. Uncle Abe drove faster and the terror diminished slowly as we headed home.

I can still recall the feelings of the over-imaginative little boy. What remains, even stronger, though, is the feeling of safety in the big black Oldsmobile as Uncle Abe took us home.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Abe. Thanks for the ride.

The Enola Gay on Tinian, 1945