I enjoyed reading the recent poignant baseball article a few weeks ago by Dr. Larry Moses (No One Asked Me But…: Progress, Feb. 14, 2024) and the more recent one on life growing up in the late 1940’s and 1950’s (No One Asked Me But…: Progress, Mar. 5, 2024).
Of course, you’re much older than I am now (I’m only 83 to your 84), so you got to enjoy another year of an extraordinary time to grow up.
Playing baseball, touch football and basketball was part of the fabric of our daily lives. A bunch of us kids would always head to the local asphalt school playground to play after school or during the summertime.
As you said, a couple of the better players would choose up sides one at a time. Then it was ‘game on’…… calling your own balls, strikes and outs ’til time to go home for dinner and homework.
Imagine a bunch of kids doing all this without an adult in sight! This exercise not only led to pretty good evenly matched teams but, was also great in developing leadership skills.
Mom couldn’t call you on your cell phone at the school playground either ‘cuz there was no such thing. The only telephone service was a single rotary four party land line located in your home somewhere.
Due to the fact that television was in its infancy, there were no baseball games or for that matter NFL or NBA games on TV. The NFL was just getting started back then.
Some games seemed to always be on the radio though. Nothing like listening to a Russ Hodges baseball broadcast for the San Francisco Giants.
There were also only 3 TV stations broadcasting then too, so not a lot of good stuff on the screen, much like today!
I guess all these musings over the last few weeks only goes to show things weren’t better than they are today….only different!
In all likelihood, a few generations down the road, there’ll be another Dr Larry telling everyone how wonderful life was in the long past 2020s
Thanks Dr. Larry for the reminiscences and especially for sharing your son’s essay entitled “Iowa Dreaming”! That was good!
Mike Vance
Mesquite
