Baseball Was The Only Option

We moved to the east end of Market Street in October of 1954.  Directly across the street was the very beginning of the earthen dike that ran south to Shamokin Creek and then along the north side of the creek west all the way to the river wall along the Susquehanna River.  Fifty yards from Market Street, Pennsy and Reading branch lines pierced the upper 1/3 of the dike on their way out of town to the anthracite coal regions and Mt. Carmel.  I was only seven years old, and along with a small group of similar aged kids, that small section of dike became our first playground.

The dike was covered with grass and had a flat top wide enough for an automobile.  The base of the slope to the west was the used car lot back stop for Zimmerman’s Studebaker Dealership, so it was off limits.  But the slope to the east ran down to a field.  The north boundary was the built-up used car lot for the Smith-Campbell Packard (soon to be Edsel) Dealership, and the south boundary was the fill for the railroads.  The grass and weed field ran east all the way to Shamokin Creek.  That cramped field was the birthplace of East End baseball.  And in those salad days in the aftermath of WW II and the Korean War, we were oblivious to the seriously bad portent of starting out in the shadow Studebaker, Packard, and Edsel car dealers.

It didn’t start out that way.  Our first forays were limited to sitting on top of a cement building at the very end of the dike hard on Market Street, where we watched and tried to name all the cars that drove by.  When that got boring, we sat on top of a similar building at the other end of the short dike segment right next to the Pennsy railroad tracks.  The building was what was called “minimum clearance” from the tracks.  That put the edge as close as humanly possible to the gigantic Decapod steam engines that pulled and pushed endless strings of ore cars up the grade to the end of the Pennsy line.  There were always two in front and two in back, and they were nicknamed “Hippos” for good reason.  They put up so much smoke that nobody along the line, which snaked through the entire town, EVER put up wash before the “Ore Train” had gone by and out of town every weekday morning around 9 AM.  For a third-grader, it was beyond anything I had ever imagined:  deafening noise, heat, smells, a rain of cinders on your head, and incomprehensible churning of gigantic metal rods, pistons, and God knows what else…all repeated four times per train.  After sitting through an entire hundred-car ore train running past about three feet away, Lionel and American Flyer seemed pretty tame.

But after that, what?  Kids hate boredom worse than nature hates a vacuum.  It was my older brother Fred and Ronnie Beaver who came up with the idea of building a “town” in the tall weeds of the field.  There were two gas stations right after the Packard used car lot, and both of them dumped all their trash over the embankment behind them.  And that included rags soaked in gasoline, used oil, and oil filters.  We found out fast that if you tried REALLY hard, you could set the filters on fire.  They all had metal bails, which hooked neatly at the end of heavy sticks.  Voilà, street lights.  They burned with a dull orange flame and spewed out massive volumes of black, greasy smoke.  Pretty cool, huh?  We mashed down the tall grass to make streets and used the endless supply of post-war appliance boxes that were in every trash pile on the planet to make houses.  After we had everything done and street lights lit, we were figuring out what to do with all of it when the gas station guys scrambled down the embankment and over the trash piles and raised holy hell that we were going to burn down the neighborhood.  The funny part was that it was harder than hell to douse the burning oil filters.  Well, nobody laughed when we finally had to carry every stick with a lighted filter all the way to the creek and toss them in.

All of us, me, my older brother Fred, Ronnie Beaver, Roger Witmer, and a couple of other kids, went back to sitting on the building by the railroad tracks and brooding over why old people hated to see kids having fun.  The debate is still raging about who first came up with the idea, but I’m certain it was my older brother:  we should lay out a baseball field using the corner where the dike and the railroad embankment met as home plate.  We’d run first base east along the railroad towards the creek, and the third base line would run along the base of the dike towards Market Street.

After school let out, we set to it using squares of cardboard for bases and home plate and our feet to pound out the baselines.  We had a ragtag collection of three bats of varying sizes and ancient mitts that I’m sure predated Ty Cobb.  And a single, taped baseball.  For that, we owed Keith Klinger, who worked wonders with shiny black electrical tape and destroyed baseballs.  At the beginning, a lot of us didn’t know the rules, not that we needed very many.  And no one gave a thought about all the cars parked in the Packard used car lot in far left field.  In reality, I don’t think any one of us could’ve hit a fly ball that far anyway.  It was my very first attempt at baseball, and I wasn’t alone.  The best that could be said was that I didn’t “throw like a girl,” which apparently was the kiss of death and grounds for permanent banishment to right field.

It’s VERY early spring in 1955.  In a staged shot taken from the virtual pitcher’s mound of the original ball field, Roger Witmer is heading for second base as Ronnie Beaver and I vainly search for a phony line drive lost in the weeds.  In the background are the rear of a Gulf gas station and the Route 61 bridge over Shamokin (Coal) Creek. The area where Ronnie and I are searching is where we built the “city” with oil filter “street” lights before we dreamed up creating a ball field. 

(Photo by Fred Lytle)

My problem was that I really wasn’t all that interested.  The kids I knew came in two types.  The snooty, effete crowd were all Yankees fans.  The blue-collar kids were Phillies fans.  I didn’t know much about either team except that the Yankees won a lot and the Phillies lost a lot.  I mean a WHOLE lot.  Even with one of the best all-time pitchers in baseball, Robin Roberts, they were perpetual door mats.  I read years later that Byrum “By” Saam, the “Voice of the Phillies,” announced for over 4,000 losing games.  Life was hard enough without attaching yourself to the worst team in the National League.

I have to admit that the sound of a big league baseball game on the radio was mesmerizing, comforting in the certain repetition like a mantra:  ‘Here’s right fielder Dick Schmo, batting 0.102…grounded out in the third and hit into a double play in the sixth, had an error in the fifth when a low line drive hit him on the ankle and careened into the corner…”  There would always be an organ, but thankfully it was long before that inane bugle charge thing that every stadium organ player started beating to death ad nauseum at every game until you wanted to throw up.  And there was this really dumb thing called “the seventh inning stretch” where the organist played “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” at every game, day and night, spring training to the series, week after week, month after month, year after year.  And the jerks in the stands would sing along like retards.  I couldn’t take it:  there was simply too much to do in kid-dom to sit inside and listen to crowd noise, a dip-shit organ, and totally lame play-by-play, day after day after day.  Pity.  You have to live quite a few years before you get sentimental.

But I was stuck.  There had to be enough players to field two semi-teams, so there was no way I was going to be able sit this one out.  If I did, I’d never be able to go outside the house.  And being shunned at eight years old was a life sentence in solitary confinement.  There was no help for it.  I was put on the roster, in right field of course, out there in the weeds.  Permanently.

               

This is the short dike that ran from East Market Street to the PRR & Reading tracks that ran up into the coal regions.  In the left pix, you’re looking north towards Market St and our house (we lived in the left half).  In the right pix, you’re now looking south from the same spot.  My wife is standing on the abutment that was as close as you could get to the Pennsy tracks.  The building to the right stored all the pieces to close the gap in case of a flood.  The old ball field was down the slope to the left, and the new field was across the tracks on the right.  That huge tree is growing out of home plate.  The powerline cut that we climbed to start the Great Kirschner’s Hill Apple Raid  is visible off in the far right distance on Kirschner’s Hill.  Both pix taken in 1980.

 

Plan B Was Not Well Received 

Even at grade school age, your imagination can only carry you so far.  As more kids showed up and wanted to play, one by one we admitted that our sad baseball field really sucked.  The baselines were too short.  We lost balls in the weed patch serving as right field.  A couple of the older guys hit fly balls into the used car lot.  It didn’t take long, and Mr. Smith himself came out and yelled at the edge of the lot at the end of left field that he was calling the cops.  Everybody melted away as kids do when faced with certain doom.

A couple of days later, four or five of us were holding court on and around the upholstered chairs at the front center of the Studebaker showroom.  Why Gene Zimmerman let us congregate there is still a mystery.  There was a nickel Coke machine back in the depths of the showroom.  Almost daily in the summer when nothing was going on, there’d always be a small group of kids loitering around, swigging Cokes out of eight-ounce bottles and staring at the cars speeding around the curve of Market Street heading out of town.  John Zimmerman, who didn’t want kids hanging around anywhere, mercifully stayed downstairs where they did all the mechanics’ work.  There were only two employees upstairs besides Gene:  Dick Brouse, who kept the books, sold parts, pumped Atlantic gas for the few cars that pulled in for a fill-up, and generally ran the tiny office; and Yeager “Yeag” Runyon, a thin, frail guy who was severely wounded in the war and who occasionally showed up to help Gene sell used cars.  Both of them actually enjoyed having us hanging around, I think mostly to remove the oppressing boredom of the place.  Because Studebakers weren’t hot commodities in the late 1950s, we pretty much had the showroom to ourselves.

You can’t get a picture more rare than this:  Dick Brouse leaning against a brand- new Studebaker Lark convertible in front of Zimmerman’s Garage on Market Street.  Photo taken in the fall of 1960.

And there we sat, bored out of our gourds.  Even when Keith Klinger discovered that his Coke bottle was stamped “Boise ID” on the bottom, an extremely rare catch, nobody cared.  Slim Broscious wanted to walk down to the Sunbury Textiles parking lot and play one-man-run-a-base.  Nobody budged.  Bobby Troutman wanted to see if anybody could break Bill Kistner’s record of walking on one rail on the Pennsy tracks from the dike all the way to Market Street and back without falling off.  We all agreed that was a really stupid idea.  A walk along the dike was the only thing left.  We walked down the slope in front of all the used Studebakers, two Kaiser-Frazers, and a badly beaten up Nash Metropolitan, then up onto and across the Pennsy and Reading railroad tracks and onto the top of the main section of the dike.

We only walked about fifty feet when my brother Fred stopped and announced, “There it is.”

“There’s what?” somebody said.

“Our new ballfield!”  He was looking due west down onto a huge square tract of mowed grass.  In the center was a low, one room cabin.  Between it and the embankment for the Reading tracks and where right field would be were two rows of weed-infested roses and a very large garden.  “Home plate would be right where the dike and the railroad embankment meet, just like the other field.  And there’s no stupid used car lot in left field.”

“Yeah.  Just a stupid shack in center field.  What are we supposed to do with that?  And a garden in right field with two rows of roses between it and the second base line.  Roses have thorns, for Christ’s sake.”

“Use your imagination.  We can do this.”  No one was convinced.  It was decided we had to poll everybody, so we scattered and called in the faithful.  The next day, there were ten of us sitting on the dike staring down at the most ludicrous, sorry-ass candidate for a ball field that ever existed.  After a lot of muttering and head shaking, Bill Kistner raised his voice:  “We could make a line drive into the shack and a fly ball on the roof ground rule doubles.  Nobody but the runts hit into right field, so who cares?  They’ll never be able to hit a ball long enough to carry into the garden.”

Silence.  Bill looked around.  “We’ll all agree to chip in if somebody knocks out a window.  We could pretend it’s the press box.  Look, we can do this.”

Silence. “Anybody have a better idea?”  No one did.

And in a classic example of the willing suspension of disbelief, that’s how big time East End baseball was born.

 Unfortunately, I have no picture of the “new” ball field contemporary with this story.  Here’s a picture taken around 2005 of what it looked like, fifteen years ago.  You’re looking north from the top of the dike towards the railroad tracks.  Home plate was at the base of the far tree hard against the dike.  The first base dugout was at the base of the tree to its immediate left.  The tree on the far left is in shallow right field.  The third baseline would’ve come toward you along the base of the dike.  The long-gone shack that sat in mid center field was at the far left of the picture.  The roof of our house on Market Street is peeking just over the top of the middle tree, with the old Smith Campbell Packard dealer showing to the right of the far right tree.

 

We Clean The Augean Stables 

The guy who “owned” the shack, tended the garden, and occasionally mowed the grass was an uncle of Slim Broscious, the oldest in the group.  For whatever reason, he didn’t care what we did with the land between the shack and the dike.  I remember he grew a lot of onions but was rarely around.  This time, we carefully walked-off the baselines using a book of baseball stats from the library.  Plates were pieces of plywood painted white, and home plate was exactly to specs.  We hauled in wheelbarrows of what somebody decided was clay and made a pitcher’s mound.  And in a moment of sheer extravagance, somebody went to Baum’s Sporting Goods on the Square and bought two baseballs and a small metal thing with plastic wheels that you held in your hand and that was used to keep track of balls, strikes, and outs.  We scrounged around W.T. Grant’s, Newberry’s, and Woolworth’s and managed to come up with twenty or so cloth letter E’s, black with red trim.  Everybody’s moms sewed them onto whatever ball caps of whatever color we owned.  We somehow chose two teams and were actually quite careful to divvy up the good players and scrubs so neither team had an advantage.

The first base line went west along the base of the Reading Railroad embankment, and the third base line came into home along the bottom of the dike.  The backstop was the intersection of the dike and railroad embankment, so foul tips were easy to retrieve.  Necessity drove us to develop ground rules.  First, whichever team was up had to provide a catcher.  Second, the batting team had to put somebody on top of the dike to retrieve foul balls that carried over the dike and into the tall weeds on the other side.  Third, play was suspended whenever a Reading coal drag went by.  When Ronnie Beaver popped up into a coal car early in our very first game, our brand-new ball ended up in Mt Carmel, and we were collectively out 79¢.  That was too much for the treasury, and we were stuck from then on waiting until every one of the hundred or so cars went by.  And finally, the batting team had to supply the ump, who stood behind the pitcher.  Because the ump changed every half-inning, grossly biased calls were kept to a minimum.  We quickly learned that retaliatory escalation rapidly got out of control and wrecked the game.

Because we all came from blue collar families, we had to share mitts, and everybody had to use a bat from the motley collection of relics kids had pulled out of cellars and attics.  Keith Klinger was put to work on the torn, worn out, tattered balls left over from the first field on the other side of the railroad tracks.  He was a true artist in electrical tape, saving baseballs for another day that had long, long passed the point of no return.  He would bring them to every game in a small bucket in case catastrophe would strike and we’d lose both good baseballs.  But even his masterwork couldn’t survive Bill Kistner’s monster hit in the bottom of the ninth of a crucial, late-season game.  With a swing worthy of The Mick, Keith’s masterpiece was blown apart with a sound that could only be described as the detonation of a very soggy M-80 firecracker.  The tape sailed over the pitcher’s head and curved left right into the short stop’s mitt.  With two men on base, he thought he had just made the winning out and came roaring home holding his mitt high in the air.  The core had been blown into tiny pieces that started raining down on the stunned pitcher and ump.  The ump reflexively called Bill out just as the short stop got to home plate and discovered that his game-winning ball was just a wad of tape. Pandemonium erupted with all the histrionics of the big leagues:  dirt kicking, throwing hats onto the ground, chest bumping, yelling at nose-contact distances, threats to take bats, balls, whatever and go home and never come back.  The phrases “Oh, Yeah?” and “Your mother wears Army boots!” are probably still echoing off Kirshner’s Hill on the other side of Coal Creek.  Finally, my older brother got everybody quiet and insisted that there was never a ball in play.  In fact, there was no ball at all.  Without a ball, there couldn’t be a call.  Without a call, the game had to pick up where it was before the fateful pitch.  The ump had the ball-strike counter, so the count could pick up just where it was left off.  It was a perfect compromise:  everybody hated it.  But nobody could come up with anything better.  We didn’t stop using Keith’s electrical tape backup balls after that, but somehow their sanctity had been diminished.  I know he tried mightily to develop an indestructible taped ball, but there was never again a hit like that one, from Bill Kistner or anybody else.  Maybe he finally made one.

 

A Deal with the Reading Railroad 

During the winter, my older brother and two other kids whose families had typewriters, created a pile of awards:  highest batting average, most triples, most home runs, most strikeouts, MVP, most improved, golden glove, and in a sop to the grunts, most likely to someday get on base.  School was almost over when a huge Reading work train appeared.  There was a long line of bizarre-looking machinery on wheels, and on one of them was my Uncle Rolly, who had worked on the Reading forever.  Day after day after school, we sat on the dike abutment and watched the work.  They were replacing ties and putting them in piles along the right of way about thirty yards apart.  I asked my uncle what they were going to do with them.  He answered that once the ballast train came through, they’d be set on fire.  My older brother asked if we could have some.  Uncle Rolly went and talked to some officious-looking guy with a clipboard and came back and told us we could have as many as we wanted.  “Wear gloves,” he said.  “They’re saturated with creosote.”

Every wheelbarrow in the east side of town was mobilized.  We carted dozens of ties down onto the field.  First, we stacked a bunch behind home plate for a real backstop.  Then we dug a long pit for a dugout and made a long bench with a backrest.  There were still uncounted ties up along the tracks.  Slim Broscious got the idea of making a wall at the end of left field.  He was fascinated with the idea of playing a ball off the wall. “You’d have to stack them six or eight high,” said Barry Badman.

“So?”  Nobody could think of a reason not to, and the huge amount of work didn’t enter into anybody’s heads.  The wheelbarrow brigade was put back into action, and by the end of the weekend all the ties were heaved in place and then stacked into a wall that went perpendicular from the dike and then curved around behind the left half of center field.  And it did look really cool.  Wobbly, but cool.

Slim insisted that we name the field after another Slim who had worked as a mechanic at the Studebaker garage ages ago and who had been killed in the Korean War.  It was too much, too soon, and nobody knew who the other Slim was.  There was grumbling on every hand.  Slim dug in his heels and started sounding like he was ready for a fight.  We defused the threat by claiming we should put it to a vote by the whole group at the end of the next week after school was out for the year.  Monday, part of the gang was in the Studebaker showroom grumbling about who and the hell this other Slim was.  We walked over onto the dike and froze.  The wall had been plastered with huge green letters with yellow borders: SLIM’S MEMORIALS BALL FIELD.  We’d been outflanked!  With a huge misspelled word to boot!  No way was that going to fly.  Everybody went home angry.  By Saturday, the paint was dry, and nobody was happy.  Slim confessed that he didn’t know how to spell “memorial,” so he ran up and down the dike copying one letter at a time from the sign over Sunbury Memorials, a grave marker business right next to our house on Market Street.  He got so into it, he didn’t stop.  A couple of the kids felt kind of sorry for him.  Somehow, the sympathy vote carried the day, and from then on the East End Eagles played in Slim’s Memorials Ball Field.

With the new railroad tie fence, it was like playing in the big leagues.  Shorty’s outhouse sports his sign to discourage kids with 22s from taking pot shots at it while he was taking a constitutional.

We played most Saturdays through June, July, and August.  We umped the games, kept stats, and learned quite a few lessons.  We learned to shun bullies, who always needed an audience and were not prepared to be ignored.  We learned we had to play by the rules and play fair, otherwise we really weren’t playing a game, just hitting balls to no purpose.  We learned how to settle arguments without somebody stomping off and taking their very necessary equipment with them.  We learned that bad umping was everybody’s weakness, and you just had to put up with it.  Over nine innings, it all evened out anyway.  We learned that everybody had a part to play, and instead of deriding the grunts it was better to encourage them, especially when your team was down a run in the bottom of the ninth with two out and your bottom of the lineup grunt was up. And in an ongoing miracle of nature, we learned that kids  grow up fast, and today’s hopeless scrub might turn out to be tomorrow’s hero with an out-of-the-clear-blue-sky double that saves the game.

The competition was fierce.  There were no participation trophies, no accolades for just showing up.  Doing your best was NOT good enough.  If you did your best but still sucked, you were relegated to right field and the very bottom of the batting order.  Getting on base, getting RBIs, and not committing errors were what counted.  We got hit by pitches, got nailed in the head when a fly ball went right past our mitt, collided with one another, and every other calamity that kids are heir to.  There may have been tears, but nobody cried.  We patched ourselves up and went back onto the field.  There weren’t enough of us for anybody to sit out an inning.  You toughened up in spite of yourself.

And in spite of all of that, we had fun.  True fun.  The kind that can happen only when there are no grown-ups around to tell you what to do and how to do it or, God-forbid, take over.  We figured all of that out for ourselves and were better for it.  We had a small awards ceremony right before school started in the fall.  I got the “most improved” award, based solely on a single hit on a chest-high fastball that I knocked  over everybody’s head into far left field and that hit the wall.  Slim made the play and tossed the ball so hard to the short stop, I had to hold at second.  There was a moment of stunned silence from both teams.  There I was, all fifty pounds, standing on second with two RBIs.  I had actually  won the game.  It was my moment in the sun, and I’ve never forgotten the pride and satisfaction of just standing there, shaking in disbelief and totally winded.  What possibly more could you want out of life?

We tried to keep it going the third summer, but too many of the older kids had graduated from high school or they had moved away because another factory had closed or they were old enough to get summer jobs.  We played a little one man run-a-base or had home run derbies.  Then the wall blew over during a particularly nasty thunderstorm.  Sadly, the East End Eagles faded into a memory.  After sixty years, one thing’s for certain:  I’d give almost anything to still have my black baseball cap with the “E E” patches sewn on the front.