Land's sake, times have changed...

Autographed postcards of major league stars for the asking

I was not aware that people collected and valued autographed postcards. My cousin Margaret had an 8x10 picture of Charlton Heston hanging on her wall. She was taken with him since the 1952 movie we had seen (several times for her) The Greatest Show on Earth at the Maywood. I thought that was amazing to have an actual photograph of a movie star. What really intrigued me was that she sent off and asked for it.

The notion that I could do something like that seemed incredible in my small world, not that I actually thought of myself as living in a small world. It was more of how everything beyond the city limits was part of the great and vast unknown. My actually doing it happened a few years later on. It was not my intention to collect autographed postcards, but it worked out that way.

After looking at a page in a baseball magazine that showed a small picture of the major league ballparks with their addresses, it came to me like a bolt out of the blue. I'll write a letter to certain players using the ballpark address and ask for a picture. It worked like a charm. I wrote to Frank Robinson, C/O Cincinnati Redlegs, Cincinnati, Ohio. To Ted Kluszewski, Gus Bell, Harvey Kuenn, Dusty Rhodes, Jackie Robinson, Red Schoendienst, Bob Lemon, Ted Williams, Ed Bailey, Enos Slaughter, Richie Ashburn, Stan Musial, and a few others.

In the past, Grandma Martin had explained the meaning for using C/O (for "in care of") on letters and I was proud of myself for not only remembering it but finding a use for it on my own.

Some ballplayers even took the time in a note to thank me for writing. Nearly all were postcards, not the bigger photographs I had anticipated. I liked the postcard style better. They had a certain charm. Ashburn's was in glossy color and Musial did send an 8x10. A few never responded and for those that did nearly all placed their signature.

It was a wintertime pleasure each day wondering what the mail would bring. I wondered, since it was the off-season, if someone with the team -- since I had sent it to the team's address -- read the letters and addressed and mailed the postcards for the players. Nope. To find out I knew I had only to look at a postmark or two. I had one in particular in mind. Where Ed Bailey was born was a town name that stuck with me. How did I know where he was born? I knew all about all of them from my baseball cards. I turned the postcard over and there it was: "Strawberry Plains, Tenn."

Unfortunately for me the story has an unhappy ending. I stacked the postcards and bound them with a rubber band. They remained stored in a trunk for years. The trunk was in a shed and when I opened it a little more than twenty years later, some dampness had crept in and the sticky emulsion caused them to all stick together like honey between newspaper pages. Trying to salvage what I could, I was able to tear off a corner containing Jackie Robinson's autograph. Not bad at that.

Never can tell when you might need that pinch poke

Grandma's small, black change purse she called "a pinch poke." It stayed in her full size purse. A poke was a bag or a sack. A poke sack, while seemingly redundant in term, was a common item. Buying a pig in a poke meant you didn't know what you were getting. Her pinch poke in addition to some coins also contained a few buttons and safety pins, things you might need in a pinch.

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