Or Be Careful Of The Cesspool In Deep Center Field
3rd In A Series About Baseball
In the 1950’s baseball was king. We all had our favorite players. Growing up in Washington State in the 1950’s meant the nearest major league team was in St. Louis, which was 2000 miles away. Seattle had the AAA Rainiers, which fielded several future major leaguers over the years, but Seattle was still way too far to tackle in just one day and to make that kind of trip just for a ball game was not going to happen.
We listened to games on the radio and by the mid 1950’s, watched games on a new invention, called the television. The screen was only 17 inches (we did upgrade to 24 and a giant 27) and there was so much snow that we could barely see the players, let alone the ball, but we loved actually seeing our favorite players that we, for so long, had just read about in the newspapers or magazines.
Each day we would check our local paper, The Daily Chronicle, to see how our favorite teams and player fared the day before. We talked Dad into getting a subscription to the Portland Oregonian because it printed actual box scores with batting averages, home runs and hits.
We each had a favorite team and player that no one else could have. My brother, Jim had Duke Snider and the Dodgers. Rich had Mickey Mantle and the Yankees, but when he got old enough not to care anymore, gave them to Kenny Branson. Jim told me to pick a new player named Willie Mays. I was only six and knew little about the players. I think Jim did this because Willie was black and we were all white small town kids. All the kids had chosen white players – Mantle, Pee Wee Reese, Eddie Mathews, Stan Musial, or Ted Williams. Jeff Davis even chose Harmon Killibrew. Players like Jackie Robinson or Hank Aaron were not chosen. I don’t think it was an overt racist thing. We just identified with white players. I think Jim thought it would be funny me having the only black player. The joke was on him.
On that day in the early 1950’s, Willie and the New York Giants sounded good to me. I don’t ever remember getting any hassles over having the “Say Hey Kid” as my favorite player and it must have been a good fit. I was an ardent Willie Mays and Giants fan into my 30’s. The only day I ever actually skipped school was the last game of the 62” World Series when my beloved Giants lost a heartbreaker to the hated Yankees . Missing school meant missing football practice. When I showed up the next day, Mr. Taylor, our coach, asked how I was feeling. I had handed in a note at the office signed by Mom saying I was sick. Mom, an ardent baseball fan, had watched the game with me. I told him I was better and would be at practice. He gave me a sympathetic and knowing smile and said, “tough game yesterday, huh?” I gave him a little smile and said “Yes, it was tough.” Mr. Taylor then said, with a smile, “ too bad your Giants didn’t win because then the extra laps you are going to run would have been more worth it.”
So, all of us kids had favorite players and teams, we listened to games and read about them in the papers. We collected and traded baseball cards and argued over who were the greatest of all time or who should be on the all-star team that year. But, what we mostly did was play ball.
Our official Salkum field was by De Gross’s barn in the hayfield. Old Sam De Gross, the owner, loved baseball and allowed us to carve out a small area in the corner of his field for a baseball field. The outfield fence was actually hay growing chest high. Think of the movie “Field of Dreams” minus Kevin Costner, but replaced the ghosts with cows.
We used pieces of asbestos from an old chicken coop that had been torn down for the bases. Second base, at one time when the asbestos was missing, was a pile of dried cow pies. Home plate was a hub cap from an old – probably 47 or 48 – DeSoto. I remember it being one of those big ones that covered the entire wheel. It made a very good home plate. We tried to make a backstop using some old 2×4’s and chicken coop wire, but it kept falling down.
We practiced at this field and used it for games when we played kids from other towns in a very loosely organized league of sorts. This would have been the precursor to when we had a real league with uniforms and such. There were no age restrictions so I played on this Salkum team when I was about seven to nine years old. Most of the other kids were nine to 12 (or 13 even) years old.
This field (the De Gross or Hay Field we called it) was Ok for hard ball and playing little more formal, shall we say, games. However, when we wanted to just get 5 or 6 kids together and play some fun wiffle ball, we used the Haslett Field, which, in a word, was awesome!
The Haslett’s Field, as the Salkum kids called it was popular for many reasons. First, it was close to our swimming hole and our house was pretty much open to anyone. After playing a tough game, kids could take a pop from our frig and then grab some peas or carrots from our garden and walk through Talbot’s cow field, eating a few evergreen blackberries on the way, to be at the swimming hole in five minutes. If we wanted to rest a little and watch some television, Mom always had ours tuned to some show. But the main reason kids love to play pick up wiffle ball at Haslett’s Field was because there was none other like it.
Our field, behind the woodshed, was just the right size for 6 -8 kids wanting to play wiffle ball. It was a rectangle about 35 feet wide by 80 feet long. Looking at the field as you would a football field on television today, home plate was at the far left. Behind home plate was a split rail cedar fence, dividing our property from that of the Huber’s. We placed some old plywood pieces against the rails to create a backstop of sorts. A foul ball going into Huber’s yard was not a problem unless it went into the Black Hole. The Black Hole was a giant – 10 feet in diameter and 10 feet high – cedar stump covered with three foot thick ivy. Balls going into the ivy stayed there as stories of mice, rats, porcupines, snakes, skunks and squirrels, living in there made it scary enough that we usually did not bother to look. I heard years later that a new owner removed all the ivy from the stump and found dozens of wiffle balls, yarn balls, baseballs, a few footballs, a couple of mitts and assorted toys and clothing.
From home plate, usually a chunk of asbestos from the old mill site, things became very interesting going down the right field line. About 30 feet from home plate was a huge lumber pile. Being safe at first was achieved by running past and touching a 2×4 sticking out from the pile before a kid fielded your hit ball and threw it to the pitcher who had to be on the mound. The lumber pile, by the way, was pretty large. It had several hundred boards of varying length and girth, piled six feet high and 30 feet long in a tangled mess. When we moved to Salkum in about 1948, Dad had traded some welding for the lumber with plans to add on to our small house. The pile was still there when we moved in 1960.
Just past the lumber pile in foul territory was the remains of and old 49 Hudson that Dad was going to fix up and drive to work. At this point (around 1955) small vine maples were growing up through the floorboards and all the windows were broken. We decided that hitting the car was an out.
Hitting a ball on top of the lumber pile was a ground rule double, unless the hitter immediately yelled “going for three,” which meant he had to make it to third before a fielder jumped on the lumber pile, making sure not to step on a protruding nail or tripping on a jagged piece of wood, find the ball and then throwing to the pitcher on the mound.
Just on the other side of the lumber pile was our outhouse. Hitting a ball on the roof of the outhouse was an out, but if a kid could clear the outhouse and make the garden it was a home run. Mom did not want kids to tramp in her garden trying to prevent a triple, but she did appreciate a good hit.
Straight center was really tricky. Yankee Stadium had monuments. Kansas City had a waterfall. The Mariners now days, have a train. We had a cesspool. The grey water from our house drained into a large hole Dad had dug in the farthest corner of our yard, up against Talbot’s barbed wire fence in far center field. It took a pretty good hit to make the cesspool, which was not what anyone wanted to do because it was two outs and the hitter had the retrieve the ball. Cesspools must be full of some pretty strong nutrients because the area, about 20 feet in diameter, was full of huge weeds, ferns, briars, thistles and some very large bull frogs. We had put several 2×6’s across the hole, which was only about 4 feet deep, so we weren’t worried about drowning. However, no one wanted to put even a finger in the putrid grey gunk, let alone a whole hand or arm, to retrieve a ball. Wiffle balls float so we usually retrieved them. A few kids did fall off the boards. Those few, even on cold, rainy days headed straight to the swimming hole for a quick cleansing. What did we do for those who hit a ball over the cess pool and into Talbot’s field? We had to have some kind of risk/reward factor. We decided that such a colossal home run would be worth three runs. Now and then, when a team was behind in the last inning, a kid would try for an “over the pool” home run. Most of those kids took a trip to the 2×6’s.
The sweet spot for hitters was left center field. If you hit the ball over the fence to the right of the 5th fence post from the backstop (we had a red bandana on it), it was a home run and the pitcher had to retrieve the ball. If you hit a ball over the fence to the right of the 3rd fence post, you got a double, but had to retrieve the ball yourself because this was an easy hit. However, you could call yourself out and make the pitcher get the ball. Any ball pulled into straight left to the left of the 3rd fence post was an out and the batter had to get the ball himself.
Why all the rules about going into Talbot’s field? First, going over, under or through the barbed wire fence was a kind of pain and some kids, me for one, did not like doing it any more than we had to. Second, Talbot’s cows sometimes did not take kindly to kids wandering through their dining room. Actually, few balls were hit over the fence. The wiffle ball was hard to hit and we were happy to just get into play in the infield, which was much more fun anyway.
We spend many hours playing games in Haslett’s Field. Playing on that field were dozens of kids who had nice high school careers, four who played college ball and three who signed professional baseball contracts. It certainly was our Field Of Dreams.