Jon Reisman
The recent Red Sox resurgence from last place to playoff contention set me off on a baseball reverie. The Sox spent April, May, and most of June as one of the worst teams in baseball, but July and August have seen them transformed into a scrappy and entertaining bunch with great pitching and emerging young talent. Summer evenings following the Sox have returned.
Sixty years ago, I listened to the Phillies on a transistor radio in my third-floor bedroom on hot and humid Philadelphia nights. I remember attending a two-night doubleheader at Connie Mack Stadium in the early sixties and coming down with a high fever in between games. My love of the game is undoubtedly a legacy of my maternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln (A.L.) Plaut.
Grandpa Abe was born in 1898 in Brooklyn, NY. He was the son of a kosher butcher. He was a minor league catcher, a Florida gas station entrepreneur till the Depression, a successful high school baseball coach and English teacher in Brooklyn, owner/director of Camp Greylock, a boys’ summer camp in Massachusetts, and the author of several books, including The Way to Better Baseball in 1951 with Yankee Tommy Henrich. I still have the copy he gave to his new son-in-law in 1953. I didn’t inherit Grandpa Abe’s baseball skills (I had a good arm and some power, but was not fleet of foot or blessed with the eye/hand coordination and pain tolerance needed in a catcher). I do share his love of the game and maybe some of his literary abilities.
In the seventies I followed the Sox on dormitory TVs at Colby and Brown. I remember a group of econ graduate students convincing our professor to let us watch an afternoon playoff game instead of analyzing the Carter administration’s economic incoherence.
Forty years ago, I much preferred listening to the Sox on the radio to the grainy aerial-required UHF TV reception. Setting that aerial up on the roof in May 1985 was a wonderful reintroduction to black flies and blood donation. It probably contributed to my coining the phrase “Black Flies Matter” in response to the manufactured George Floyd riots/protests.
Satellite TV brought crystal-clear reception and aerial removal. I still prefer the radio broadcast on a starry August evening. It connects me to my grandfather, my youth, and my memories.
Jon Reisman is an economist and policy analyst who retired from the University of Maine at Machias after 38 years. He resides on Cathance Lake in Cooper, where he is a Statler and Waldorf intern. Mr. Reisman’s views are his own, and he welcomes comments as letters to the editor here or to him directly via email at jreisman@maine.edu.
