September 1 Baseball
Baseball is an old
American game. As early as 1791, the city of
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, passed an ordinance
banning the playing of
the game within eighty yards of the
town meeting house.
During the Civil war,
troops played baseball to pass the time while
waiting for the next battle. After the war,
the game was played in many communities by the
returning soldiers. Gradually, teams were
organized in various towns and cities. Efforts
were made to formalize the rules of the game
and an organization was established to govern
the sport. However, baseball as played by Carl
Sandburg and his friends was of a more
informal nature.
Carl Sandburg was
called “Charlie” or “Cully” by his
baseball-playing buddies. They played in the
street all day long, except for walking home
to eat lunch and supper. Then, they played
some more baseball under the electric street
light at Day and Berrian Streets until nine
o'clock in the evening. The street was unpaved
and dusty, so the boys washed their feet under
the pump in the back yard. They had been
trained with strong words by their mothers to
enter the house with clean feet.
The equipment was
basic: an ax handle for a bat, a round rubber
object bound in string for a ball. The bases
were bricks and boards of varying shapes and
sizes. One boy came to the game with a
real Spaulding baseball that cost a
dollar and a half. They played with it until
the leather cover was completely worn off.
Of course, baseball is
not a game to be played in silence. The boys
cheered if their team was winning. They
shouted that they would win the next game, if
they lost.
Several widows living
on the street would sit on their porches and
watch the boys from time to time. One widow of
a Civil War veteran had a lovely flower
garden. Unfortunately, one of the bases was
within ten feet of her flowers. Once in awhile
a ball would land in the flower bed and the
boy retrieving it wasn't always careful about
where he stepped. The lady of the house would
threaten to call the police over the
trespassing.
The more serious threat
came from men who worked for the railroad and
needed their sleep. One man fired shots into
the air as a warning. Some of the boys ran for
home as fast as they could. Carl and his
brother Mart and several other boys sat on the
wood sidewalk to show they weren't afraid.
They tried to be quiet while playing, but it
was a “strain on them,”as Sandburg later
wrote.
After playing the game
so much, Carl began to believe that he might
play baseball professionally. He and his
friends had watched the games at Knox College
and amateur teams that played in the vicinity.
One day when he was
sixteen, Carl was practicing pop-ups with
another boy on a vacant lot several blocks
north of Lombard College. He stepped into a
hole in the ground while running to catch the
ball. There was a broken
bottle in the hole. Carl could see
right away there was a cut in his shoe and
blood was running out of it. A doctor in the
neighborhood cleaned the wound and stitched it
together.
After that experience,
Charlie decided baseball wasn't for him.
|
http://www.sandburg.org |