Nostalgia
Home – Work and Play

After supper Mom and Dad would retire to the living room and listen to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “FIRESIDE CHATS”. The Chats were designed to ease anxiety, and to inspire confidence in his leadership. His first national radio broadcast was on Sunday, March 12, 1933. The “Fireside Chats” reached an astonishing number of homes in America including ours.

My brother and I were given jobs to work in the kitchen after supper and when “the dishes” were done we could go outdoors and play. My brother’s job was to wash the dishes. Hence, he would always finish first and run outdoors. We often argued about how unfair this was to me because I was left to finish drying the dishes, put them away, and sweep the floor. One time I shouted to my brother as he raced toward the door, “I want to play baseball, too!” He turned his head and yelled, “girls can’t play” and continued on his way to the ball field. However, girls were taught to play baseball at the “neighborhood playground”. Nevertheless, a few days later, and despite our differences he returned home a short time later. He said, “we need more players” and asked me if I wanted to play. Without hesitation, I said, “yes”. It was “a first” and kind of victory for the girls even before the game started.

But I had to finish drying the dishes first and then run out the door and over to our next door neighbor’s farm which was no longer used for farming due to the development of “agricultural mechanization”. A small portion of his farmland was now being used for the neighborhood baseball games. Home plate was an old crumbled up newspaper page folded up to look like a square or diamond. First base was a tree, second base was a medium size rock directly in line behind the pitcher’s mound, third base was the corner of the barn, and if you didn’t touch all three bases plus home plate you were “out”. Games and home runs were lost because of this failure.

When I arrived at the field the boys were in the process of making a decision to appoint two captains. The next step was to choose players who would be on their team. This was decided by the “odds and even hand game”. The winner gets to “pick first” among the eight or nine boys and girls present. Girls were always picked last and judged according to their ability to “hit the bat” and “score runs”.

The final step in this process before the game can start is to settle the question, “whose team gets to bat first? The winner of the “hand over hand up the bat game” determines the answer. The game begins and ends when the sun goes down. The team with the highest score wins. And everybody returns to their home happy because they had so much fun playing the game of baseball.