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Title 9 showed the world that women are capable of amazing physical feats, superb toughness and incredible endurance as they grew accomplished at doing things the world previously believed they could not do - which led to an acceptance into all workplaces, disciplines and endeavors now taken for granted. Title 9 opened the door.
- Sports Illustrated, March 21st, 2024
- Bangor Daily News May 28th, 2024
9 years later Gwyneth Paltrow played little league baseball in Williamstown, Mass. while Elizabeth Banks played Little League in Pittsfield, 20 miles away.
- Gwyneth Paltrow's Instagram (1993 is the year Sting released 'Fields of Gold').
- FB Thursday, January 11th, 2024
Bobby Boyer was our high school varsity starting catcher, captain and 4th slot power hitter in the spring of 1979, playing with the also really great players Steve Wallach, Jeff Davis and Mitch Degere when I was a sophomore playing on the Mt Greylock J V team in Williamstown, Mass, with Coach Danaher, who had also played with Dad and Billy Hart.
When I was very young, Dad, who was a Williamstown Police Department dispatcher before we had 911 service - took me to see Bobby's older brother Dave play in a special Major League Baseball tryout game at Deming Park in Pittsfield, Mass where pro scouts were going to be watching and grading the players.
Dave just retired after being the head of Williams College Campus Security for 30 years.
It all seemed so epic to a 10 year old small town kid that I had been around that time.
Big league scouts scouting Berkshire County's best high school players in our little neck of the woods with someone from Williamstown getting an actual shot to play professional baseball!
I can still remember seeing Dave, who was also a catcher, throw a rocket that he drove with his legs to second to shut down a prospective base stealer at that game!
'Fez' Whatley from the old 95 WYNF 'Ron & Ron Show hypnotized to believe he is Bobby 'The Brain' Heenan:
This post also pertains to people from Williamstown because of the Hart brothers - no, not the WWF Hart brothers of whom Bobby 'The Brain' Heenan once said on the old WYNF's 'Ron and Ron Show': 'Yeah, they really love the Hart brothers in Texas.' (sarcastic tone inserted) 'Their neighbors put up for sale signs on their (the Hart brothers') lawns.'
Our town's Hart brothers were also real life heroes who were admired by everyone in the town, had started a number of successful construction companies, and had built a summer camp for at-risk youth out on Hancock Road, while our neighborhood's Mr Hart eventually became a national senior league doubles' tennis champion.
Dad had said Billy Hart was the best baseball player he had ever seen play in any league.
Dad had played and managed American Legion and semi pro baseball for 26 years and had thrown 13 no hitters, but only had one eye, which maybe limited his chances at a shot at the majors.
'-so pittsfield will own one of the most historical ball parks in the nation and will be able to lease it out for many popular events and specially televised games in the coming years as interest in real world / rural baseball grows each year while corporate high crime bad traffic big city franchises continue to leak attendance -'
The Hart brothers in our town when they were growing up had constructed a sandlot baseball field on the empty North-Western corner of Ide Road and Water Street.
Dad and Aunt Sally were born near where Blair Road and Stratton Road met below the Stony Ledge on Mt Greylock, and when young, used walk down to play in sandlot games with the Hart brothers at their field.
- Williamstown's Stephen Hannock is Sting's favorite landscape painter !
- Tavistock Institute and The Beatles
He played the principal defending Horace Mann's (who was inspired by J D Salinger) books from being burned:
'Though he was primarily a stage actor, his film credits included a school principal in “Field of Dreams” and in “Men in Black” as Gentle Rosenberg, whose head opens during a pivotal scene to reveal a small alien creature.'
- News Center Maine, December, 25th, 2023
Griffin the Archanian scene in 'Men In Black' Amazing '69 Mets:
Vietnam Vets Tug McGraw, Bud Harrelson and Jerry Koosman were clubhouse musicians and played country music in the dugouts between innings during the 'Miracle Mets' 1969 season. Sort of historically charming like those old news reel shorts of Pepper Martin and the St Louis infield's seemingly magical games of 'pepper':
Sting's 'Fields of Gold' was released in 1993 the year Gwyneth Paltrow and Matthew Perry dated in Williamstown.
Gwenyth and Elizabeth Banks got to play Little League baseball in Berkshire County because of Title 9.
There was a kid named McGraw who lived about 2 house West of the Store at Five Corners who had been on our T-Shirt league team, Williamstown Saving Bank, (Matthew Perry's grandfather was the head the Williamstown Savings Bank) but I don't remember his first name.
Andrew Diodati, whose dad was our coach, might remember his name.
The kid's dad had a construction company.
Tug's son Tim:
Only took $30 with me when I rode Cher's old bike down to try to see Lynne in 1983 and stopped on the way back to see the Mets play the Cardinals at Shea Stadium. Loved reading about the depression era 'Gashouse Gang' Cardinals, but I wanted a Mets hat at the concession for Dad as a souvenire of my trip. He was a Mets and Red Sox fan and his favorite pitcher was Nolan Ryan who helped the Mets win a World Series in 1969. For some reason, the Mets' hats were more expensive than the Cardinals' hats they were selling, so I bought the Cardinals hat, wore it home and later got Dad a Mets hat mailing away for it.
Around 1985 Dad came back from his daily trek up to the package store on Spring Street and he told me he ran into two girls who had stopped him on and told him they really liked his Mets hat ! He said they really cheered him up and made him feel great 😄
I wondered at the time if one of them was Lynne, but I never asked her.
Lynne was from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and had been a big Mets fan - and in particular she liked Mookie Wilson.
So I believed it was fate when one day I thought I was going to get a foul ball Mookie hit...
When I was living in St Pete (Doc Gooden's hometown - Strawberry was from Tampa) you could stand at the right field corner of Al Lange Stadium and watch the Major League spring training games the Cardinals' played there before the Ray's became a franchise.
Mookie was playing with the Blue Jays then, who train in Dunedin, Florida, where Galactic Ranger Jackie is from.
Harold is Lynne's husband and check out the satisfying book he wrote about playing catch with their son as recovery therapy to whatever happened them all on 9/11:
I felt an emotional charge when he stepped up to the plate like some kind of planned movie plot had turned full circle, though it had been 4 years since I had found closure about the conflicting painful bliss I enjoyed dreaming of her, while the dream got me through the vaguely nightmarish existence so many people have endured called reality.
It was a line shot he hit really hard, 20' toward center field and it would have been a home run.
I did everything correctly !
There were only I, and a bicycle riding mailman - who could possibly get the foul ball, unless someone from the traffic in the road behind us (1st Street South) stopped to grab it.
As we had been taught in high school when I would play in the outfield, I leaped off my $400 mountain bike that would later have one of it's wheels and the seat stolen as I watched a movie at a theater, and ran back in an arc to guage the depth of the hit, and i believed I could get it easily on the first hop, before it got to the road.
Only the mailman, who was black - reached out and grabbed the line shot with his bare hand and palmed it with a wicked 'whap !' that sounded awfully painful !
The mailman did not flinch or let on that it hurt, he just put the ball in his mail bag and recieved the biggest ovation of the game from the full stadium.
I was terribly disappointed, like fate had been cheated - I felt compelled to grudgingly clap my hands too in awkward admiration - it was a stunning catch and must have hurt his hand, but he didn't even grimmace or shake the pain off.
And now he has a Mookie Wilson treasured foul ball to show his children and their children while I only have these fine daguerotype memories glazed into aged and hazy 'buy me popcorn and peanuts and cracker jacks I don't care of I ever get back' twinight vision doubleheaders seemingly watched only by some wandering, spectral and amused turn of the century muse blog posts. ;-/
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Somewhere between 1973 and 1976 when I was still in T Shirt League - Dad built a batting cage out of steel plumbing pipe and chicken wire and mowed a baseball diamond in front of it with the electric lawn mower, which could cut really low.
He probably built it because of the Hart brothers' sandlot field.
- Berkshire Hart Homes Facebook
The screenwriter and producer of the movie 'Field of Dreams', Phillip Alden Robinson, graduated Union College in Schenectady, New York in 1971. Around then the movie 'The Way We Were' was filmed in the fall on 1972 at Union College after filming of the movie during the summer of 1972 was stopped at Williams College because classes were about to start.
The post here mentions how Jeff Young, Jim Guiden and I, who were on the Williamstown Savings Bank T - Shirt League team were related, but in one game Jeff, who was our catcher, accidently hit Chris Gerlach, who was the other team's catcher, in the back of the head with the bat while swinging at a pitch.
These were tough little 7 and 8 year old kids! Chris did not let on that he had been hit as Jeff complained to the umpire that Chris had obstructed Jeff's swing, but the umpire did not believe Jeff until Jeff yelled 'Look at him ! He's crying !'
And it was true, Chris, who had stayed in the crouch position the whole time had a tear track coming down his face from his left eye, but otherwise you would not have known anything was wrong !
Sue Gerlach, who was two grades ahead of our class - and therefore and 'older woman' - reminded me of Neil Diamond's 'Desiree' when I would accidently have fantasies about her !
I mention this for two reasons, the first being Chris's older sister Sue would later become our high school baseball and football star teammate Jeff Grande's steady girlfriend, and secondly because 'Gerlach' was the last name of the real person who inspired the character 'Jay Gatsby' aka 'James Gatz' in 'The Great Gatsby' by F Scott Fitzgerald.
In the Gatsby novel, Gatsby had worked for 'Meyer Wolfsheim' the guy who allegedly rigged the 1919 (?) World Series which caused 'Shoeless Joe' Jackson to be banned from Major League Baseball.
Fitzgerald had said 'Wolfsheim' was based upon Arnold 'The Brain' Rothstein, a real life gambler Fitzgerald knew.
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In high school I had become a pitcher, and the best game I ever had was against Wahconah in 1981 our high school senior year.
- Wahconah Regional High School
It was in Wahconah's field in Dalton, Mass (not the Jim Bouton hallowed Wahconah Park in Pittsfield) where I had pitched a shut out and gotten a few singles while batting around .400 for the season.
The scouts were there to scout Jeff.
I first remember seeing Jeff Grande play in Little League, and he looked just like a MLB player even back then ! I think he was batting around .600 when we played the high school game I pitched in, and he had hit 3 home runs in the game.
On the bus ride home, Coach Craig Randall had sat next to me and told me there had been two pro scouts in the stands.
I asked Coach Randall if Jeff had known the scouts were there and Coach said that he did not.
When I got home and told dad, I think both he and I were finally satisfied about the same feelings that the 'Field of Dreams' character Ray Kinsalla and his dad - and also the character of author Terrence Mann - and the real life character 'Doc' aka 'Moonlight' Graham, had - about the dream to play in the big leagues American and Canadian I guess now Taiwanese, Cuban and Chinese dads somehow manage to place upon their children, or that children just kind of grow up into having, as I had, from being around their dads.
'It would kill some men to get so close to their dream and not see it through'.
That haunting feeling was cured for us just because I had played in front of two pro scouts and had a good game, which is more than Dad or I ever imagined could happened in our little division 3 high school burg (Wacohnah was a division 2 high school)
It did not occur to me to bring spikes (I had brought the glove Cher had gotten me after I didn't make my first little League tryout cut) to Arizona State when I went there the next year, as I believed my only slim chance at any kind of success in life would be through football - but in the spring of my freshman year, I discovered that the qualification for being allowed to try out for the Arizona State baseball team were the names of two professional scouts who had seen you play.
Louis Sockalexis said in an interview that when he was playing for Holy Cross, he was signed as possibly the first native American MLB player in Williamstown'.
In Maine, where Louis Sockalexis is from, Columbus Day is Now Indiginous People's day and the Cleaveland Indians, whose name was inspired because of 'Socks', are now called 'The Guardians'.
Socks might have been signed at Weston Field.
The summer after we graduated high school I ran into Jeff in front of the college's Weston Field on Latham Street.
Jeff told me that he had been signed to a minor league team in Florida and I tried reading the Sporting News, Sports Daily, The local papers and all I could find about Jeff's career back then but I never learned how it turned out until a few years ago on Google, and the info is still very, very spotty.
Because of one photo, it appears that Jeff made it in some capacity all the way to the majors, apparently playing with, training or coaching in the St Louis Cardinals' Major League organization, and had played professionally somewhere in Europe.
I asked Jeff on Twitter about his career, but he did not reply - possibly because of the political danger to professional careers - and also physical well being - association with my social media pages seems to envince.
About the same time as dad built our little baseball field in our back yard of what had once been mom's family farm, John Weedon had taken over as our neighborhood's paper boy from Chris Van Luling (Todd Van Luling's dad) for delivering 'The North Adams Transcript', after Chris - who was an excellent basketball player - had graduated high school.
John was about 11 or 12 when he had fashioned his own bat from his late dad's lathe that he had kept in their barn / garage.
They lived next door to Uncle Floyd's house and farm which had once been the southern end of the Hall Farm, from our house to Floyd's.
Dad told me John's dad had been a master stone mason, and had built the old and beautiful stone college building next to the old Williamstown Savings Bank, - oh, now it is a Mountain One Bank - before he had grievously injured his back. (Find the building and Google street view)
Chris Van Luling's dad had been a master brick mason, who had built his own beautiful house next to the Beverlys' house (and across from the Harts' house), out of brick.
Mr Beverly was the college's master electrician.
Dad and Gramps (Gramps had been a master carpenter and master electrician) had put the slate roof on the Beverly's barn / garage. The Beverly's house had once been an inn, the barn had been part of the inn, where they had kept egg laying chickens for the breakfasts.
Mr Hart co-owned and ran Hart's Construction Company and had once stopped me as I was walking up Water Street and asked me about dad's field and how I was doing playing baseball etc...
I mentioned to him how dad had told me about their old sandlot field, and he seemed really pleased.
Judy Gamborino's dad owned Gamborino's Construction Company and had the house next to (North of) the Hart's.
Lou Reed's wife Laurie Anderson has a permanent exhibit at MassMoca in North Adams:
Aunt Hazel grew up in our house on the Hall Farm and her son is James Hall Maxymillan, but I think her grandson runs Jimmy's J H Maxymillan Construction now.
Jimmy's dad 'Maxy' had put the foundation in mom and dad's house (which had been the old Hall Farm farm house), as a wedding present.
It was only a few years ago that I found out Mr Hart had himself played in the Chicago Cubs organization, making it all the way up to Triple A as one of the first 3 black players to play for any of the Chicago Cubs' affiliates - before - as it had been reported in The Berkshire Eagle - the constant discrimination black players faced back then drove him to leave baseball and begin his own business back in town.
