Over time, I will be posting a nostalgic series of vignettes exploring my youthful days in the Osceola Park neighborhood of Pittsfield, Massachusetts during the 1950s and early 1960s. Such tales will describe my adventures when I was seven to twelve years old.
Our Osceola Park baseball field was close to a home owned by a nasty neighbor who wished Abner Doubleday never invented the game of baseball. Can you believe she didn’t even like the Boston Red Sox or the NY Yankees? This was nearly un-American in our eyes.
This noxious neighbor’s name was Harriet Nerrick and she was unfailingly our daily nemesis.
Our wire baseball backstop wasn’t very high or wide and, whenever we played a ball game, one could count on several foul balls careening over or around this backstop into Harriet’s’ nearby yard or onto her house. How could we avoid hitting foul balls, it’s just part of baseball after all? Harriet thought otherwise.
She complained about these errant baseballs smashing her windows and putting dents in her aluminum siding. Even Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle hit foul balls, but they could have afforded to compensate Harriet for any damages they may have caused. We were not so fortunate.
We were too young to repair her damaged property, not that Harriet would have accepted our help. She devolved from being merely annoyed to being angry to finally becoming revengeful. She just plain didn’t like us kids being around.
Harriet’s simple solution to the bothersome baseballs was to gather them and throw them far away into a nearby hayfield. She had a pretty strong arm as I remember it, too.
Sometimes we used up our supply of baseballs and had to scour this hayfield for the now hidden balls. This got expensive for us and for the Park’s baseball budget, so we decided to think “outside the box.” Considering we were mostly eight- to twelve-year-old kids, we were quite creative.
One weekend, when the Park was officially closed, we got some yard tools and dug up and moved not only the four bases, the home plate, and the pitcher’s mound, but the backstop itself. We created a whole new ball field at the opposite end of the Park.
Of course, we didn’t ask for permission from the City Park Department or the park supervisors to do this, in case they would have said no…
Now there were no more lost baseballs and our baseball expenses stayed under control. Harriet Nerrick was quite happy with our cross-park move, of course. (More on Harriet later — justice had not yet been served.)
However, we were now situated quite a distance from the Park water fountain. This was a problem on hot summer days and nights, since we played baseball hard for many consecutive hours.
We broke up the games reluctantly to get some needed drinks at home or when our parents called us home for meals. These actions ruined the flow of the ball game, causing us to usually forget what the score of the game was, who was on what base, or how many outs there were when we resumed play (we couldn’t afford a scoreboard.)
As you know, necessity is the mother of invention, so my smart sister Tricia, who was about six years old, came to the rescue with an effective plan.
Not only did she made fresh lemonade for us, but she also baked chocolate chip cookies at home and brought these items to the ball field.
Our house abutted the field, thus enabling Tricia to easily transport her wares from our house to the field via her red Radio Flyer wagon. She then set up a tax-free, cash-only lemonade stand on the third base line. Business was brisk and, sometimes, we even tipped her.
She turned a problem into an opportunity. Because she “hit a home run,” Tricia was unanimously made the only lifelong honorary member of the Osceola Park Hall of Fame. No other Osceolian ever received this honor.
