TPM, I like your memories. I got some too but like most people some are good and some are not so good. I think back as a child and remember mostly the bad things. I remember the nine kids in a four room tarpaper house with no plumbing, no closets, coon dogs and fleas, cornbread and white beans, a part time father ---- nothing to look forward to but those four rooms with a coal burning stove in one corner of the living room. We were cold in the winter and hot in the summer. The front porch was our gathering place on summer nights and the stove was the center of our life in the winters. We were VERY poor and in an odd way that made Christmas time extra special. That was the only time of year we would get a toy. Our tree was one we would go to the woods and cut. The tinsel and icicles were removed each year and used over and over. On birthdays we got no presents so the toys at Christmas were very special to us kids.
Baseball/softball was just a game that we played at school although a brother and I did play little league for 2 years. I remember working in the hay fields and hoeing corn for .25 cents an hour --- $2 a day! That was a lot of money to me. I graduated from HS in 1963 and my goal in life was to leave the poverty I had been raised in behind ----- I wanted to leave West Virginia for good as fast as I could. I hitchhiked to Phoenix and worked as a bricklayer’s laborer for a year. I joined the Navy and became an electronic technicians flying as an air crewman and operating Electronic Countermeasures equipment. I was stationed in San Diego CA, Whidbey Island, WA, Corpus Christi TX, Memphis, TN, Sangley Point Philippines and Tan Son Nhut, Viet Nam. I played baseball for the naval air station in Memphis. I married a girl from Memphis while in the Navy and after my four year obligation was over we settled in Memphis and I worked for her father who owned a truck line. He also owned a service station and I managed his service station for a year too. I knew I didn’t want to work on the truck line dock all my life or pump gas and change oil in trucks so I put on a suit and tie and convinced IBM I would make a good customer engineer (technician). I worked a total of 15 years for IBM in Tennessee, Washington State, Arkansas and Mississippi but was forced to quit IBM after a big gun fight at a party in Mississippi where one of my co-workers shot and wounded another man. Unemployed I rejoined my father-in-law’s trucking firm in Memphis and managed the truck maintenance dept. With my marriage on shaky grounds and a divorce imminent, I was forced to again change jobs and ended up driving a tractor trailer from Memphis to Los Angeles. I met and married my current wife, IBM realized I had done no wrong at the shoot out and gave me my job back. I stayed with IBM for a few years and decided to control my own destiny and started my own business competing with IBM in Memphis. I expanded my operation to three offices in three cities and within a few years I moved to Jackson TN. --- I sold my business this past year to a large corporation and today I do whatever -------Baseball??? Let me say that I always liked baseball but along the way I had my youngest son that loved baseball ---- out of necessity I learned to long toss, soft toss, hit fungos and become a fan of the game.
Fungo