Making Baseballs in Euclid

I spent most waking hours of my summers as a kid at Mudville, known to the uninitiated as Willow Playground (between E. 272nd St. and Willow Drive in Euclid, Ohio). My most precious possession was my baseball glove, a Rawlings, "Finest in the Field!" I often thought as a kid what I would save if we ever had a fire at our house. I liked Mom and Dad, Denny, Mary Ellen, Kev, and Jim just fine. But my first priority would be to save Rawlings--save my baseball mitt. Baseball was very important to me--it was a deep connection to my Dad (who himself was a fine player and a tremendous left-handed hitter); and to my Grampa Connie, minor league player (for Rockford, Illinois,in the "Three-I" League) and a terrific Cleveland sandlot and semi-pro ballplayer. So I'm sure it was part of my love for them that I played baseball so intensely, practiced so hard, played so much.

Our family had very little money and Dad was periodically laid off, especially early in his career as an electrician for Fisher Body. So there was not a lot of money for toys or for sports equipment. Sometimes I was just on my own to get together bats, balls, and mitts. Often I didn't even own a decent bat. Sometimes I had to find a discarded broken bat at Mudville, do a little surgery on it, and voila! a workable bat. It often took some tiny nails and lots of electricians' tape (we had plenty of that around the house). If I could scrape together 3 to 4 dollars, I would go to Koenig's (Euclid Avenue near E. 260th) or Sears at Shoregate and buy a Louisville Slugger. That was good luck indeed when I could buy a new bat.

When it came to baseballs I often found discarded balls without covers, and old thrown-away leather covers--and then I would sew them back together and make a ball almost as good as new. I bought huge curved sewing needles and learned to sew baseballs using heavy-duty thread and these 2 carpet needles. You could not tell the difference between a baseball I sewed together and a new baseball (except the covers of my baseballs were pretty scuffed up).

So we made do, with very little money. And we were able to play ball from morning until night--even if we had to sew together the baseballs and nail together the bats.