Growing Up with Clemente by Peterson Richard;

Author:Peterson, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

6

Chapter

Making South High’s baseball team in my junior year was my happiest moment in high school, but, as it turned out, it was also the worst thing that could have happened to me. Short, skinny and, at sixteen, the youngest player on the team, I didn’t get into many games that spring, and, when I did, it was mostly as a pinch runner or for late-inning defense in the outfield. My only moment of glory came when I made a lunging catch of a line drive in short right field and excitedly threw to first base to double up the runner. Fortunately, our first baseman, Willie Strothers, was also the center on the basketball team because he had to make a leaping catch of my adrenaline-laced throw.

It wasn’t much of a debut, but it was more than enough to convince me, despite my crooked elbow, that playing baseball was what I’d be doing for the rest of my life. When I left South High in 1955 for summer vacation, my guidance counselor, Mr. Moore, warned me to start thinking harder about hitting the books and earning a scholarship to college, but my own plans were for hitting baseballs and signing with the Pirates. I spent the summer going out to Forbes Field and watching rookie Roberto Clemente and his teammates bungle their way into last place. Encouraged by their incompetence, I spent long hours practicing on the South Side’s ball fields. In those pre-steroid days, I also stuffed myself with banana splits and drank milk shakes to put on weight and prayed at night for a miraculous growth spurt.

I’d been preparing myself to play for the Pirates as far back as I could remember. At the start, when I was probably eight or nine years old, I’d thrown a black-taped baseball that resembled a lump of coal back and forth with my father or my uncle Tony. When I couldn’t find anyone interested in playing catch, I threw a rubber ball against the low wall across from my grandparents’ house and, in my best imitation of Rosey Rowswell and his colorful baseball language, broadcast imaginary Pirates games, which the Pirates always won. Everyday my poor grandmother, who had enough trouble understanding English, heard me shout, “there goes a doozey-marooney” or “that’s the old dipsy-doodle” and worried that I was losing my mind. When she heard a loud thud against the front of the house, followed by her grandson yelling out Rowswell’s joyful celebration of a Pirates home run—“get upstairs and raise the window Aunt Minnie, here she comes”—she wondered who this poor, mysterious Aunt Minnie was and why “she never made it.”

When my grandmother heard too many thuds against the house and feared she was about to suffer Aunt Minnie’s fate of a broken window, she begged me to “go play ball” somewhere else. I loved my grandmother almost as much as the Pirates, so I’d take an old pick-ax handle from one of my grandfather’s junk piles, sling it

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.