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May 15, 2007
More baseball
One of the reasons I love baseball is that the game is so full of personality. There was really no greater and likeable personality than Buck O'Neil, who died recently at age 94. If you ever saw the Ken Burns miniseries Baseball, then you definitely know about Buck. Here's a transcript of pretty much all of the interview from the series. My favorite part so far:
What made you decide to try to make a living in baseball?
When I was twelve years old, I worked in the celery fields, and I was a box boy. I would put the boxes out so they could pack the celery in the boxes to ship it. I was sitting behind the boxes one day in the fall of the year, and it was hot in Florida, and I was sweating and itching in that muck. My father was the foreman on this job and he was on [one] side of the boxes, and I was on the other side. And I said, "Damn. There's got to be something better than this." So when we got off the truck that night my daddy said, "I heard what you said behind the boxes." I thought he was going to reprimand me for saying "damn." Because he had never heard me say "damn." I doubt if I had ever said "damn," to tell you the truth. But he said, "I heard what you said about there being something better than this. There is something better, but you can't get it here, you're gonna have to go someplace else."
I had an uncle who was a railroader, and he came to Sarasota to visit us and took my father and me down to West Palm Beach to see the great Rube Foster at the Royal Poinciana Hotel. The ballplayers worked as the bellmen porters at the hotels there, and they played twice a week on — Thursdays when the maids and the chauffeurs were off and could come to the games, and on Sundays when they had half a day off.
I had seen major league baseball, but this is a quicker. It's fast, it's quick. You know how the dull moments in baseball can be. In this type of baseball, never a dull moment. When I got back, now I'm telling everybody about these ballplayers. So, my father then started getting the Amsterdam News, which was the black weekly, sent to me. And we got the Pittsburgh Courier from Pittsburg and the Chicago Defender. So now I'm also reading about these great black baseball players.
It meant everything to me, because I hadn't thought in terms of black and white, you know. All the professional baseball players I'd seen, they were white, you know. Now, I was going to see the professionals that were black. And this meant so much to me. It meant getting me out of that celery field; it meant improving my life. I said, I'm going to be a baseball player.
entry no. 851
Posted by oz115 at May 15, 2007 01:56 PM