It was the Summer of 1946. The world was recovering from the War. The Nuremberg trials were well underway. The United States joined the United Nations earlier that year. Americans were escaping their hot houses and apartments to gather at the ballpark and again enjoy our favorite pastime - baseball. You might have heard of some of the Yankee players playing then - Joe DiMaggio, Joe Page, Yogi Berra...
Babe Ruth had retired from baseball more than ten years before. He last played in Yankee Stadium when he pinch hit in a charity game in 1943. He drew a walk. The Yankees would retire his number - 3 - just two years later, not long after he died.
Only seven years earlier, Lou Gehrig retired from baseball due to ALS. He gave his "Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth" speech on July 4, 1939, "Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day" at Yankee Stadium. Go here to see a reprint of that speech. The Yankees also retired Gehrig's number - 4. His was the first number any team in the Major Leagues had ever retired.
The Yankees had been successfully playing at Yankee Stadium for over 23 years. In their first game there, on April 18, 1923, they beat the Boston Red Sox 4-1. It was the "House that Ruth Built" and it looked something like this:
Which is how we saw it in May 2008. Sure they'd renovated the stadium about 30 years earlier and it wasn't exactly the same, but it was darn close. And it was a dream come true. I've wanted to go to Yankee Stadium for a very long time (though Mark was not excited) and it lived up to every image I had. I could feel the history. Walking the halls I could hear the clicking of cleats from days gone past, smell the leather and sweat, hear the cracking of the bat. It was so cool!
And as the Summer wanes into Fall and children everywhere get wistful about their soon-to-be elusive freedom, I can't help but sympathize. I remember those days. The glory days of Summer where the possibilities were endless. Where there was always tomorrow and spending all day playing baseball meant it was a great day. Where we didn't know what the future would hold and we really didn't care. Where, like America pre-War, we had an enviable innocence about us that we thought would last forever. And we knew that despite hardships, anything was possible. But, as the saying goes, time marches on. In many ways innocence and freedom are lost. We cling to our past and to the "glory days." And then, if even for only a minute, we're able to get even the briefest taste of those days and that thrill and innocence of youth comes back to us with just the crack of the bat. And today becomes one of those "glory days."
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