The National Anthem

      “. . . and the home of the brave.”  Cheer, clap, stomp.  There I was, standing on the ice behind and to the left of the east goal, well, not really on the ice, but on a nice piece of outdoor carpeting big enough for the four of us and the two mike stands, and extending from the cement runway onto the ice. 

     We are vane enough to believe the fans were actually cheering our performance, though we have to recognize that many times the fans begin cheering somewhere between “free” and “home of the brave” because they are relieved that the long national anthem nightmare is finally over.  This time, there was one short screamy burst as we sang “free.”  That soon died and the cheer didn’t pick up again until we were well into “brave.”  

    As our “brave” got lost in the cheers, I dared to really look up and around to see quite a few occupied seats.  People standing in front of their seats, rather.  My apprehension resolved into elation.  We were finished and we had all sung our parts well.

     Just how did I happen to be standing at the end of hockey rink where the Colorado Eagles were about to take on the Idaho Steelheads?  It was nearly a year ago when Rex mentioned the Eagles.  The singers?  The Philadelphia Eagles?  No, no, the local hockey team.  Oh.

    We had just moved into the area and I knew nothing about local sports other than the CSU Rams.  I had very little to do with hockey.  In my first sixteen years of life, you could count on one hand (excluding thumb and pinkie) the number of winters where we had the right combination of water and cold weather to make ice-skating a possibility.

     When I was in junior high school, one winter the snow melted into great puddles that stayed on the frozen ground and froze during the cold winter nights, probably late February or early March.  We didn’t have skates, but on a couple of Saturday mornings, we were able to invent a suitable puck and find clubs sufficient to hit it with.  We slipped and slid around as we attempted to whack the puck between to frozen mud protrusions that served as the mouth of the goal.  It was fun.

     We had a junior high basketball game on one of those Saturday nights.  I remember limping a bit during the basketball game because I had fallen on the ice that morning during our hockey game and bruised my left knee.

     I would be in high school before we ventured to a neighbor’s pasture where his dam held enough water to form a good-sized pond that froze pretty hard that January.  That experience was fun enough that I parted with $9 of my hard-earned summer wages to buy a pair of ice skates.  I used them all of three or four times before I donated them to the local thrift shop a year ago as we pared down our possessions to move to a new home.  That would turn out to be about once every sixteen winters, I calculate.

     My other hockey experience would be via television.  In those olden times, the Game of the Week played on CBS (I think) with Dizzy Dean, Bud Blattner, and later Pee Wee Reese on  summer Saturdays.  The Game of the Week would be replaced by ABC coverage of a Saturday college football game.  Fall Sundays presented NFL football. 

     One year (1959?) the Cleveland Browns played a series of Thursday night games.  I watched all the football I could.  Football was over New Years’ Day.  Then  Wes Unseld, Bob Cousy, and the Jones boys took center court playing in the NBA.  Wilt Chamberlain was all elbows and knees as he dipped to toss a two-handed scoop shot, trying his best to find a way to sink a free throw.   

     Oh yes, there was an NHL hockey game sometime on Saturday or Sunday.  If the weather was too bad to be outside, I would watch that.  The Avalanche would be vying for the Stanley Cup before I would ever watch another hockey game on television after I left high school.

     So here I was, basking in the cheers of the fans at a real live ECHL hockey game.  Rex had sounded his pitch pipe at precisely 7:05.  We had arrived at 5:15 to do a sound check.  That consisted of singing the anthem into the two microphones with the only audience being Eagles employees working to get ready for the game.  Otherwise, our harmonies echoed throughout an empty arena.

    We had an hour and a half to kill.  We wandered around on the cement pathway beneath the seats.  Here and there was an office or a janitorial closet.  We dodged two mini blimps, one measuring about twenty feet in length, the smaller maybe fifteen feet, both advertising some product I am unfamiliar with, one a phone company maybe.  About 6:45, a young man and a young woman would lead the blimps past us, like some airy Clydesdales, out onto the ice and the blimps would rise.  Using hand held controllers, the pilots would keep the blimps circulating around the arena spreading their commercial message. 

     We pressed on, looking for a room where we could sing a few songs without disturbing anyone.  The room where the boys were wont to sing was set up for a dinner for volunteers working with the Good Samaritan Society. So we moved on.

      Beneath the west end seats, a soccer game was in progress in an unbelievably crowded field, marred by seat supports and braces everywhere.  The ball came toward us and Dick fetched it a kick.  “Hey, good shot,” a lad exclaimed.

    “I thought we came to see a hockey game,” Rex said.

     “We have to warm up,” another fellow replied.

     “That’s right,” Rex said.  “You can’t be on the ice now.”

     “Nope.  So we warm up playing soccer.”  So that was the Eagles hockey team, eh?  They sure were young, just out of high school, maybe.

     We came to a curtain drawn across the cement path, extending from the outside wall to the where the seats came down to ground level. We could go no further without going through that curtain.  A man and a woman sat in chairs in front of the curtain.  Can’t go in there.  That is the cheerleaders’ dressing room.  Oh.

     Anywhere we can sing a few to warm up without bothering anybody?  The employees break room right here.  They will all be out of there in a few minutes.    

     We chatted with the folks in the break room as they left to go to their jobs.  The room resembled a locker room, with lockers on two sides, a counter top with a wall mirror along one side, and chairs all around the perimeter.

     When they all left, we practiced a few numbers we plan to sing in upcoming Christmas programs.  At 6:30 we made our way up to the turn styles where the lady attendant shot the barcodes on our complimentary tickets.  Then she shot the turn style and it counted us without our having to go through the line.

     Up we went to find our host, who took us back down and around the arena below the seats, the way we had come.  We stood waiting our time, watching, trying to talk above all the buzz of the pregame. 

     We would take to the wall as the reeled-in blimps passed us on their way  back to their stables and the Zamboni left the ice and crossed the oval track to its garage.  The members of the visiting team were introduced without fanfare.  The Eagles milled around on our end of the arena.  They looked a lot different in their hockey gear then they did playing soccer under the grandstands.

     We watched each player skate to our right and then to center ice as his name and number were announced.  We could barely hear the announcer with all the noise and cheering of the hometown heroes.

      We could see some folks just above us sitting at a bar set up about eight feet above the end zone.  Pretty good seats, but I would want to be sure there was a safety screen between me and the ice.  That puck comes flying, and it doesn’t stay in the rink.        

      The players, having all been introduced, removed to their box on the sideline.  Down went the carpet.  Our man carried the two microphones out onto the edge of the mat.  We followed him and took our positions in front of the mikes.

     “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise and remove your head gear for our National Anthem, performed by “Four the Good Times.”    

     Rex’s cue.  He blew a “G” on  his pitch pipe.  The echo of the “G” died away in the far reaches of the arena.  The mikes had picked it up.

    For a second there was silence.  We glanced at each other in affirmation of the pitch.  We turned to the mikes and breathed in simultaneously.  “Oh-oh-say can you see. . . .”

   How do you describe the feeling when you hear your voice in concert with three other voices amplified and filling the vast hall, the roistering fans silent and listening, waiting for the end of the song to burst into cheers?

     Briefly we stood and accepted the cheers.  As I turned to leave, a voice above me shouted, “Way to go!”  I looked up, waved to a lady in the stands to acknowledge her comment.  Then we were off the ice and back under the seats again as we made our way around to the turn styles once more and up to our seats.

    As we passed employees beneath the seats and fans on the stairways and in the stands, we heard ”Good job, boys,” “Nicely done.”  One guy even told us we did a better job than any of the other performers singing the anthem.  He was in the lounge, where we went after watching the game for a minute or two.

     In the lounge, we imbibed a celebratory beverage and watched the game on a huge television screen.  We went through the cafeteria line where there was roast pork and a very nicely done salmon.  The wait staff treated us like royalty.  We sang a couple more numbers for them and the bar patrons during the intermission.  The Eagles were ahead 2-0 going into the third period when we left.

     It took a while for the adrenalin to subside that night.  How much more could I ask for?  To be part of a team, a team that functioned well; to have your effort appreciated; to feel you accomplished something and did it well. 

     There remains only one tiny cloud on the horizon.  The Eagles sometimes send the performers a video of their appearance as a thank you.  Unedited recordings can magnify the warts and blemishes of a performance.  The tape may tell a story different from the memory.  We will see what we see, I guess.

     No matter.  I will always have the memory of the cheers and the compliments.  No, they can’t take that away from me. That memory will outweigh the pre-performance apprehension I seem to always face.        

      Hmmm, I wonder if the Rockies might be interested in a fairly good version of our national anthem?

    

The Packrat and the Snake

     The packrat ran out from under the Pfizer juniper bush, rounded the corner of the house, and disappeared under a smaller bush.  From where I stood, it looked like two rat pups were connected to her butt.  They clung to her and bounced over the rocky terrain.

     Strange, I thought.  Pack rats are nocturnal.  They have to be disturbed to come out in the daylight.

     I was up on a section of scaffold working on the soffit of our Kansas house.  I was trying to get the soffit done under the wrap-around roof so I could eventually put a deck there. 

      It was 2007, the first year of my retirement from teaching.  It was late September and the Rockies were on something like a sixteen game winning streak that would come to an end in October with a four game losing streak in the World Series.  

     I could listen to the games on the radio.  The Rockies’ success made for pleasant afternoons as I worked on the soffit.  Then came the snake.

     Seeing the packrat was unpleasant enough.  It meant that the overgrown juniper probably had a collection of twigs, garbage, and anything else the rat could carry.  It wouldn’t be the first time I had to trim up the bush underskirts and dispose of a nasty collection. 

      Once I found a dozen cabinet hinges in a rat’s nest.  They had been taken from a paint bucket of old nails and other metal pieces waiting for a trip to the landfill’s metal pile.  The thought of cleaning out a rat nest was only a minor smear on the otherwise perfect Fall afternoon.

     Then came the snake.  I stopped to watch him glide out from under the bush.  I was glad I was still on the scaffold.  I watched at least three feet of him pass beneath me in approximately the same path the rat had taken.  I eyed the snake’s tail.  No rattles.  That was a relief.

     He disappeared around the corner of the house and went under the same bush the rat had.  I finished fastening the piece of vinyl soffitting to the plywood strips beneath the rafters.  I took my time measuring for the next piece.

    Then I had to get down.  I gave the bushes a wide margin as I headed for the saw.  I measured, marked, and cut another piece of soffitting.  I was all eyes as I approached and mounted the scaffold.  No sign of any of the beasts.  I could concentrate on the baseball game again.

     I fitted the vinyl piece into its slot and held the electric screwdriver over my head as I fastened the vinyl to the wood strips.  Out of the corner of my eye I caught the movement.  The rat with her trailers came back around the corner and scurried beneath the Pfizer from whence she originally appeared. 

     I put down my screwdriver and watched.  I didn’t have to wait very long.  Around the corner came the snake’s head, then the rest of him smoothly gliding along, apparently not in too much of a hurry.  Again he followed the rat’s path and disappeared underneath the Pfizer bush.

     As my work progressed, I had to move the scaffold.  Each relocation took me farther into the jungle of the Pfizer, which ran about a third of the way along the west end of the house and wrapped around the northwest corner. Needless to say, I kept an eye on the bush and the ground when I moved the scaffold.

     It would take another day or two, but eventually I reached the north end of the overhang and the soffit job was done.  There remained the rat’s nest to be removed. 

       After some careful searching, I found the rat nest in the tangle of branches.  Very carefully I trimmed a hole in the bush’s base.  I remembered seeing the bull snakes climb high in the branches of the cottonwoods in Walks Camp park when I was a kid.  I kept an eye on the branches overhead while I knelt and whacked with loppers. 

     I raked the trash that made up the nest out from under the bush and sorted it.  The combustibles went to the burn barrel.  The rocks went back around the house’s foundation.  Everything else went to the landfill.    

     I never saw either of those creatures again.  Upon reflection, I realized that for all my suspicion and loathing of the snake, he had really done me a great favor.  He had ridded me of a great nuisance.  Whether he digested her or she simply departed for safer ground, I don’t know.

     Still, I find myself hard-pressed to love that kind of neighbor, no matter the benefits.

Roofing It (with apologies to Mark Twain)

      Lightning flashed.  Thunder ripped and rolled.  I was scantily clad in the warmth of a late spring night (or was it early morning?)  I tugged at the tarp.  At first, the wind blew not at all.  It was the eerie calm before the storm.  Then the breeze picked up and the folds of the giant tarp grew recalcitrant.

      The Goodwife repeated for the fourth or fifth time, “We’ve got to get off this roof.  It’s crazy to be up here in this weather.”  We were trying to cover the gaps in our roof to protect it from the approaching storm.

     Then it happened.  Down I went!  We weren’t exactly working in the best of light, but the continuous sheets of lightning wouldn’t allow one to say it was pitch dark, either.

     My left foot found the hole left from removing the six-inch chimney pipe that ran from the living room up through the attic and out through the roof very near the peak. Unlike the lightning flash that revealed to David Balfour that he was about to take his last step into nowhere in his miserly uncle’s unfinished castle ruins, the lightning flash came after I had already suffered my fall.

     Instead of seeing a drop-off with rubble and ruins below, I saw a roof stripped of shingles and tarpaper, with gaps where the 1X12’s had been removed to make way for new rafters.  A major rainstorm would be disastrous for my attic and ceilings below.

     I went down nearly to my hip, catching myself on the decking with my left elbow.  In the brief instant I spent caught in the hole, a few things raced through my mind, my thoughts rivaling the speed of the lightning flashes.

      The “I-should-haves” replaced the initial panic and fear.  I should have done what I had toyed with for a few weeks prior to taking on the roof project.

      It was the driest time on the plains of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas since the thirties.  But experience told me that when I got the shingles and some of the sheathing torn off, regardless of the presiding weather pattern, it would rain that night.  Sure enough, it was going to rain in this drought.  My roof was off.

    The idea I had toyed with was going into the rainmaking business.  I would take out a full-page ad in the local paper, offering the local farmers a guaranteed rain.  I would charge them a fee ($50? I don’t remember) with a money-back guarantee.  A “rain” would be anything over, say, a half inch as measured by the local weather observer.

     I figured to use the money I made from the venture to hire someone to remove and replace the soaked insulation and redo the new sheetrock job on the house ceilings if necessary.  If it didn’t rain, I would simply refund everybody’s money and I would only be out the cost of the newspaper ad.

      I didn’t do that.  I should have, I thought.  I should have anticipated the storm and spread the tarps in the evening before calling it a day, but I was tired and didn’t do it.  So here we were, making lightning rods of ourselves.

     Also running through my mind was the many experiences when a roof tear-off had been followed by a late-night deluge.  Two preceding roof jobs on the very roof where I was standing had suffered rain damage when a roof was bared and left overnight.  The most recent was when we had put up the new roof that connected the old house with the new garage.  Working Friday evening through Sunday evening with relatives and friends helping resulted in getting the rafters up and the ½” sheets on the rafters, but no time or energy to cover them with tarpaper.

      Sometime in the early Monday morning hours, the wind blew in soppy drizzly clouds to wet down my new sheeting.  I used a personal leave day from school, which meant an early trip to my classroom to lay out lesson plans and materials for my substitute.  Then, back to the ranch and spend my day diverting rivulets away from the living quarters.  This roof leakage wasn’t as serious as an earlier one because I had no ceiling beneath much of the new roof.  It dried out about 2 p.m. and left me time to clean up and recuperate a little.

      A few years earlier, we had started a reroof on the north slope of our roof.  We tore it off on a Sunday, thinking I could get the felt down on Monday after school and shingle every afternoon as I could.  The tarpaper left after removing the shingles was in pretty good shape, being less than ten years since we had shingled before.  I thought it would protect the roof and attic.  It would have, too, but the wind came up in the night and rolled the paper off in great sheets.

     That time, I went to school and left the Goodwife to try to catch the leaks in the attic.  She had done her best, allowing only a little water in on the dusty old insulation in the attic.  None of the moisture reached the ceiling.  That afternoon after school, it was windy and cold, but the drizzle had ceased.  Uncle Mel arrived with a bundle of old interior trim pieces, base shoe and quarter-round.

      The girls, Uncle Mel and I all on the roof, we managed to roll out and staple down the new felt and tack down the overlap seams using the trim pieces.  By cold sundown, the roof was moisture-proof again in its secure (we hoped) tar paper covering.

       The worst case of rain on the raw roof happened way back in 1976.  It was May.  We had taken on a reroof for a fellow teacher who was suffering from cancer.  This time I wasn’t in charge.  Burke was. 

    It was really several roofs to redo, as the “house” was really two old houses that had been moved in and joined together with several smaller roofs adjoining the two main roofs.  In May we had lots of daylight after school let out for the day.  With several roofs, it was possible to tear off one and get it covered in a couple of days.

      It came to pass that we tore off part of one of the main roofs on a Thursday.  There were several layers of shingles where roofers simply shingled over the existing shingles instead of tearing off and re-papering.  I left school Friday afternoon and headed for Hays.  The other two finished tearing off old shingles on the main roof.  I would be formally awarded my Master’s Degree, which I had finished in December of ’75.

     We went to Hays, went through the ceremony, renewed old acquaintances with former fellow students, and drove home in the rain.  It was still raining when the phone rang at 6 a.m. Saturday morning.  It was Burke.  Win, the cancer victim, had been in his attic all night, catching drips, handing down full kettles to his wife, taking up and placing the empties under drips.  He called Burke and Burke called me.

      Out into the rainy morning we went.  Win’s stepson had gathered a bunch of tarps and met us there.  Over the roof we clambered, spreading tarps and nailing them down.  We were soaked when the job was done, but Win was able to crawl down from the attic and report that the dripping had stopped.  It rained nearly three inches from Friday night to Sunday morning.   

     Those experiences were in mind when I arose from my bed, pulled on shoes and shorts and mounted to the roof in the intermittent dark.  They didn’t have to replay themselves when I found myself hip deep in the gap in the roof.  I took stock of my situation.

     Shock was quickly replaced by relief.  Only a small stinging on my shin meant a small abrasion.  I would be able to extricate myself without pain or suffering from sprain or broken bone.  Perhaps another thought at that moment was the Goodwife was right.  Get off the roof.   

     It was that 1976 fiasco I had in my mind as I finished pulling myself out of the chimney access and made a few more attempts to secure the tarp.  The wind came up and we crawled down.  For a while I paced around looking out of windows to judge the storm’s path and ferocity.  Raindrops hit the windows and the bare roof.  Some even managed to fall on the tarps we had successfully placed and secured.  Finally, I decided there was nothing I could do, so I returned to bed to try to regain my strength for the day ahead.  In such severe dry times, it was sacrilegious to hope or pray that it would not rain.

      The next morning revealed less than a quarter of an inch of moisture in our rain gauge.  Not too far north of us were reports of one to three inches of rain.  I breathed a sigh of relief as I heard the rainfall reports.  I could only imagine what the attic and ceiling would look like if we had received three inches.  As it was, there was hardly enough moisture to settle the dust in the old insulation in the attic, let alone soak down to the plasterboard and sheetrock.

      I had hired two high school boys.  We would go on to get the new rafters in and the sheeting on the day following the rain.  Getting the metal roof on was a challenge for two days following the storm?  The wind came up, and one of the boys decided he had enough, I guess, as he reported not feeling well and went home.  Two of us finished installing the metal in the nasty wind. 

     Sure enough, it didn’t rain again or even threaten to for weeks.  It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.  I only wish She didn’t get such a kick out of fooling with me.    

Baking Powder

     “You knew!” Anger flashing from Tshirt’s eyes nailed me to my chair.  Still I laughed.

      Part of the package deal for our Cancun trip was breakfast in the hotel’s café.  It wasn’t your ordinary motel free breakfast with cereal dispensers, canisters of rolls, doughnuts, and bagels, bowls of various kinds of fruit, maybe a make-your-own waffle machine.

     There was a cafeteria buffet with pans of scrambled eggs, bacon, ham, sausages.  There was also a chef ready and willing to fix an omelet to your specifications, if you were willing to wait.  There was nearly always a queue of folks waiting to get their omelet.  I didn’t care enough for an omelet to wait, so I went through the buffet every morning.

     One of the attractions in the buffet was a stack of very lovely looking, just-the-right-shade-of-brown pancakes.  They were rather small by our standards, about the size of a saucer.  Of course I took two or three, that first morning.

     I was ahead of everybody else in our party for some reason.  I put on a little butter, a little syrup, cut a small wedge and took a bite.  That was enough. 

     Back through the line I went. It would have to be toast with my sausage and eggs this morning.   When I got back to our table, the rest of the party was there, all except Tshirt.  I saw her coming.  I saw pancakes on her plate.  “Watch this,” I whispered to the Goodwife.

      “Watch what?”

     “Tshirt.  Be quiet and just watch,” I whispered.

     Tshirt took her time getting settled.  She failed to notice the scrutiny she was under.  On went the butter.  On went the syrup.  Plunge went the fork.  Slice went the knife.  To the mouth went the bite. 

     Down went fork and knife.  Up came the head, and I was nailed by the eyes.  “You knew!” she said.

      “Knew what?” asked the Goodwife.

     Ugh!  Baking powder!  Probably a tablespoon or two per cup of batter!  It was strong.  No eating those beauties.  At least not for Tshirt or me.  Bitter, bitter, bitter!

     The ability to taste baking powder came from Dad’s side of the family.  Mom always pooh-poohed us when we said we could taste baking powder.  Nevertheless, she made sure to use Dr. Price’s baking powder in any recipe calling for baking powder.

     Apparently, other baking powders use some kind of sulfate, sodium or aluminum or both along with baking soda and cornstarch in the baking powder recipe.  Some substitute alum for the sulfates.  I’m not sure what tastes bitter.  I just know I can taste it.

    I seem to remember that the worst-tasting baking powder was Clabber Girl.  The most tolerable but still bitter was Calumet.

      The Goodwife got educated in baking powders early in our married life.  We could still get Dr. Price’s product in those days and we used it.  Then came the day when Dr. Price’s was no longer available.  It was long before you could find anything and everything on the internet, but somehow the Goodwife found a recipe for making not-bitter baking powder.  We have used that recipe ever since.

     The recipe:  2 tablespoons of cream of tartar (expensive, which is probably why baking powder makers don’t use it)

1 tablespoon corn starch      

             1 tablespoon baking soda

     That’s it.  Pretty simple.

     The recipe will keep your biscuits and pancakes light and fluffy without interfering with the taste.

     As for me and my cruelty in not sparing my daughter the bitter mouthful, I once again proved that the ability to taste bitter baking powder, an ability some skeptics apparently don’t have, is not all in my head.  I can taste it, by gosh.

World Series

     Yogi jumps up from behind the plate and runs toward the mound. He leaps onto Don Larsen and wraps both arms and legs around Don.  They are celebrating the first (and only, so far) perfect game in World Series history.

       I don’t remember whether I watched that game in real time or if I have seen the scene replayed so many times that it is imprinted in my mind.  Don Larsen was notable to Coloradans because he had pitched for the Denver Bears during the 1955 season.  I remember many a summer night playing pool in the basement and listening to the Denver Bears on the radio, but I don’t remember any of the players.

     Things have changed since Don Larsen's 1956 feat.  For one thing, the season is nearly a month longer now than it was in 1956.  Larsen’s perfect game was on October 8, the fifth game of the World Series.  This year’s World Series will end during the first week of November.

     For another thing, the games were all during the afternoon until 1971.  For the few games that fell on weekends, that was great.  The weekday games were a problem.  School was in session.  Many of the games took place in the Eastern time zone.  For us Mountain zoners, the game was probably over by the 3:15 or 3:30 class dismissal time.

      Occasionally, a sympathetic teacher would let us turn on a radio and listen, say for the last five or ten minutes of the class period if we had behaved ourselves earlier in the hour.  Then there were the hard-hearts who would have none of it.  Baseball was a game and had no place in the classroom.

     Somewhere about my junior high years, the first transistor radio appeared on the scene.  It came via a classmate whose brother was in the navy, had been to Japan where such things not only existed but were cheap.  It had a little earphone.  Could you hide the cord and the earpiece so the teacher couldn’t see it?  I’m sure we tried.  There was a hazard.  If the teacher saw the contraband radio, she could confiscate it.

      The afternoon games during school days added a whiff of forbidden fruit to the greatest spectacle American sport had to offer.  The World Series was all-consuming when it came to our interest.  I’m speaking for the boys now.  I don’t recall the girls entering into our discussions of who was the best team, the best player, etc. 

     I recall getting onto the bus with an armload of stuff, books, yes, but the important thing was to have a baseball glove, maybe a set of tennis shoes to be worn every recess.  (During class time, the shoes hung by the strings from the corner of your desk chair.) 

      You had to have a cap or hat representing your favorite team.  Very rare were the caps with a team logo.  Instead, we created our own with what we had.  In my case, it was an old felt hat with the front brim turned up Texas John Slaughter style.  (Don’t remember Texas John Slaughter?  He was a good guy with a gun, who “made ‘em do what they ‘oughter’, Cause if they didn’t they died.”)  On the turned up brim, I had painted a crude “N” imposed over an equally crude “Y”.  It wasn’t a real world Series unless the Yankees were in it.  They usually were.     

     Basically, there were two camps, the Yankee fans and everybody else, including a great many Dodger fans, a few Giant fans, even a Pittsburgh fan or two.  Three major teams were in New York in those days, the Dodgers and Giants not having moved west yet.  There was a good reason to take a day off between games two and three and again between games five and six.  It was a travel day at a time when most of the travel was done by train or bus.  Getting to St. Louis from New York might take a day.   

     At recess, during the World Series, if we had enough to field two teams, we would choose up sides and play a game with rocks for bases and pitcher’s mound.  We weren’t allowed to cross the street to the real field, which would be in football mode anyway.  At World Series time, the two teams would form themselves around fans of a particular team.  The Yankee fans would form one team, the Dodger fans, the other, for example.  If we didn’t have enough players to field two teams, we might play workup.

     In workup, you had three or four on offense, batting or waiting to bat.  Everybody else took to the field.  When a batter made an out, he grabbed his glove (borrowed one if he didn’t have one, not all that rare) and headed for right field.  Every time a batter made an out, the fielders all moved up one notch, the right fielder replaced the center fielder, center moved to left, the left fielder went to third base, the third baseman went to short stop, short stop moved to second, the second baseman took over at first base, the first baseman became the pitcher, and the pitcher went on offense and got in line to take a turn at bat.  A batter waiting for his turn usually performed catching duties.

      The object of workup was to avoid making an out, to score a run on another batter’s hit, and to stay on offense.  If we didn’t have enough players for workup, we played 500.

     In 500, the batter hit flies to the “outfield”.  The fielders vied with one another to catch the fly balls.  A good batter could scatter the fly balls and keep the fielders from grouping together.  The first guy to earn five hundred points went up to bat.

      Points were earned for catching a fly ball (100 points), a one bouncer (75 points), a two bouncer (50 points), or a grounder (25 points).  When a player earned 500 points, he replaced the batter and everybody else wiped their slates clean and started over.  We practiced a little math at that game.  We also figured out who was honest and who was not, since each player kept his own tally.  I remember many an argument over how many points a player really had.  I don’t remember such an argument coming to blows. 

      While we were playing our grade school games, I remember the high school football team dividing along baseball lines.  The year I remember best was 1960 and the football team divided into Yankee fans and Giant fans.  It was October 13 and the game, and the Series, was over by the time football practice rolled around.  It ended when Bill Mazeroski, dreaded Pirate, hit his famous ninth inning walk off home run.

      Even though it was over (even Yogi had to admit that), the football team divided and scrimmaged along Giant—Yankee lines.  I rode the bus home (I was in the eighth grade in 1960) and didn’t take in any of that football session, only knew that the Yankee fans on the team were disgruntled, as was I, and intended to make a grudge match out of it.  By Friday baseball was off the stove and the football team coalesced to face another eight-man foe.

     For my classmates and me, after that game, the baseball paraphernalia went into storage until spring and football became the game of the day.  (We were supposed to only play touch or flag football, but we played tackle until the playground-supervising teacher stopped us.)  Actually, we had been playing football since the beginning of the school year, but baseball returned for a week during World Series time.           

     One other World Series I remember, I was younger.  Dad was in the process of doubling the back porch to make a place for the “automatic” washer and dryer that had replaced the old wringer machine.  He had the kitchen radio sitting in the east dining room window near his carpentry project.  He had sawhorses and tools on the lawn.  The game was still on when we got home.  I think we flipped on the television to watch the end of the game.  Dad asked us to turn the tv volume down (the tv stood beneath the same dining room window) so he could hear his radio.  He continued sawing, hammering, as the game went on.  I have no idea who was playing.  Probably not the Yankees, or I would remember, maybe.

     My interest in professional baseball waned a bit during my college years.  It wouldn’t pick up until 1970 when the only thing on evening radio in Western Kansas was country-western music, or the newly-minted (1969 their birth year)Kansas City Royals with Bud Blattner and Denny Matthews.  I became a fan and suffered through the agony of defeat again and again as the Royals almost made the big time but would lose out near the end to the hated Yankees or the dominating Oakland A’s of the 1970’s.

     Finally, in 1985, George Brett and the boys would win the big one.  It was a bit of a hollow victory.  The ’85 series should have ended in the sixth game, but for an umpire’s blown call at first.  The KC runner should have been out, the game over, and St. Louis would have won another trophy.   (That call would have been overturned with today’s rule allowing for reviews of controversial decisions.)  Instead, the runner was called safe, the Royals went on to win game six and had a fairly easy time winning game seven.

      Following the ’85 season, the Royals slid under the rock of mediocrity, the Rockies would come to Denver and I was forced to face a lot of distasteful things in order to be a Rockies fan.  When I became a Royals fan, I had to face the horrible truth that I had once upon a time actually rooted for the hated New York Yankees.  Switching my allegiance to the Rockies required additional crow-swallowing.

      I had to question my long-held belief that the American League was superior to the National League.  Right along with that flip-flop, I had to question the validity of the designated hitter rule.  Only in rare moments of candor do I confront my fickleness. 

     Otherwise, The Rockies’ exciting run up to the playoffs and winning the pennant in 2007 helped me to forget past allegiances.  The Rockies slide into less-than mediocrity was lowlighted by this summer’s trade of all-star shortstop Troy Tulowitski under the guise of improving the team.  It leads one to question the owners’ true motive.

     With the Royals’ second appearance in the World Series in two years, old allegiances reappeared.  While I haven’t totally abandoned the Rockies (they haven’t traded Nolan Aranado or Cargo, yet), I am certainly watching this world Series and rooting for the Royals.

     Being a fan of a National League team, I have come to the conclusion that the designated hitter has no more place in professional baseball than does an aluminum bat.  You have to have some principles, you know.