I REMEMBER DAD

Dad was always a simple unpretentious man who loved people and did what he could to help them. He had dreams of winning big in the lottery, played games for cash where he didn’t bet money because he never had much. His life was work, work and when on vacation, work.

                                                                     My pitching coach

He also had aspirations for me as he did for himself, and those aspirations seemed to work out in a funny way, yet he never realized how well things would get.

I was definitlyminor leagues

When I was about five years of age I became due to his influence a baseball fan and loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was a spring Sunday morning and I believe it was an Easter Sunday at my grandmother’s house where we were waiting for relatives to arrive. Dad was sitting on his hands and decided to take me out to the front of the house on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and make me into a major league pitcher. He stood over me and explained the mechanics of pitching being he had absolutely no qualifications to do so. This episode I am about to explain may have saved me from his teaching me brain surgery too.

My career as a pitcher ended at the age of five years

 He stepped away about maybe twenty feet and crouched down like Roy Campanella and told me to pitch after his verbal lessons. I had a rubber ball, a Spaldeen as it was called and I went into my windup, just like Carl Erskine to let loose my fastball. Peering into my catcher as he braced for a pathetic attempt at a fastball, I readied myself just like I saw on the television. Into my windup I went, I could feel the crowd cheering me on, all 32,000 screaming fans that were cheering me on at the SRO crowd at Ebbets Field!

Suddenly my arm made its downward arc and directed the first pitch to Dad, or was it, Roy Campanella? Leaving my hand it made its way directly to home plate, through the hands of dad (Campy would never have let this happen) and smacked him right into his forehead.

The ball bounced back to me on a bounce or two and dad, well he retreated to the dugout, the club house and from the field of dreams.