Growing Up at the Old Ballparks

My nephew John Morrow at the site of Ebbets
Field in Brooklyn. John was about 12 at the
time. Now he's about to start college.

John Morrow, our nephew in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, is trying to decide where he's going to college. Which isn't possible because it was only a few years ago that he was a rambunctious four-year-old who was delighted to be picked up and turned upside-down by his uncle. And I think it was about a year ago when he was ten years old and I knocked his socks off when I hit a jump-shot from the three-point-line at the basketball goal in his grandmother's driveway in Wilmington at Thanksgiving.

So they tell me he's trying to decide among colleges in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, but I'm not sure I believe it. But he sent me something a couple days ago that convinced me that he's grown into a thoughtful, articulate young man who will do well wherever he goes to college.

He wrote an essay that he will submit with his application. For his topic, John wrote about a holiday tradition that somehow developed over the years during the annual holiday trek my wife Jane, her mom and I make to Glen Ridge.

During one of those trips we visited our niece, Alice Gougan, who was living in Brooklyn at the time. John and his dad Bob are baseball fans, so while the nieces, aunts, mothers and grandmothers shopped and visited museums, I suggested the guys try to find what is regarded by many as baseball holy ground -- the former site of Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played until the team was moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.




It took some doing, but we finally found the spot in Flatbush where the Boys of Summer played when New York was the capital of the baseball world. There wasn't much of a reminder -- a concrete, tombstone-like plaque nearly hidden by a bush, surrounded by a gigantic public housing complex.

And so began the tradition. In the holiday trips that followed over the years, we found the sites of other old baseball parks. We stood at the spot where home plate had been at the Polo Grounds, where Bobby Thomson launched "the shot heard 'round the world" in 1951. We found the site of Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City where Jackie Robinson played his first minor league game as a member of a previously all-white team. We discovered Hinchliffe Stadium, a wonderful old ruin of an Art Deco ballpark in Paterson where Negro League teams had played in the days before Robinson broke Major League baseball's color barrier.

I took a photo of John and wrote an essay about each visit. My old friend Jeff Houck in Tampa posted the Ebbets Field essay on his lively blog, Sidesalad. I posted essays and photos of the other ballpark pilgrimmages on Drye Goods.

And yes, over the years, I realized that the kid was growing up.

John remembered all that, and his college application essay explained how those trips had taught him more than just baseball history. He summed up his experience in this beautiful paragraph: "When we went looking for old baseball locations we found urban history, learned about the benefits of redevelopment and preservation and we encountered people I would never have met anywhere else. Uncle Willie embraces learning that way and I hope to do the same for the rest of my life."

So, wow, what can I say. Thanks, John. You've made me very proud. I think we can find a few more old ballparks in the Greater NY/NJ metro area in the coming years, and if we run out of ballparks to track down maybe we can start looking for old lighthouses. There are some great stories associated with them, too.

(Here are links to the essays about our visits to the old ballparks: Ebbets Field, Polo Grounds, Roosevelt Stadium, Hinchliffe Stadium. )

Young Love Cut Short by America's Fiercest Hurricane






Bascom Grooms and his sister, Rosalind

(NOTE: This story was first posted on Drye Goods for the Labor Day weekend of 2007)

On this date 77 years ago, Rosalind Grooms Palmer sat down at her typewriter in Key West, Florida and banged out a teasing, affectionate note to her 12-year-old kid brother, Bascom Grooms, who was visiting friends up the islands in the village of Tavernier.

She apologized for the brevity of the note and, perhaps to ease the guilt she felt at not writing more, enclosed 50 cents so Bascom could buy an ice cream sundae for himself and a young friend named Elizabeth. She told her brother that she’d like to be with him on Key Largo “enjoying the ‘squitoes and other varmints such as sand fleas,” but added that she wouldn’t be taking any trips for a while.

That wasn’t entirely true, but her travel plans weren’t exactly the kind she wanted to reveal to her little brother or to the family he was visiting. She would be joining her boyfriend, 19-year-old George Pepper, at the Matecumbe Hotel in Islamorada for the upcoming Labor Day weekend.

That note from Rosalind was the last communication Bascom would ever have from his sister. Five days later, she and George were killed when the most powerful hurricane in U.S. history came ashore in the Upper Keys.

Rosalind's note to her brother a few days before her death

I interviewed Bascom at his home in Key West in December 2002, when he allowed me to copy photos of him, his sister and George Pepper. The old sepia-toned photos tell a tragic story of young love that was cut short by the fiercest hurricane to ever make landfall in the U.S.

Rosalind was only 21 in August 1935, but she had already been through a brief, unhappy marriage to George Palmer, a U.S. Navy officer she’d met when Palmer’s ship docked in Key West. Rosalind – young, impulsive, fun-loving and beautiful – had fallen for the Navy officer, and they were married in Key West in 1933. They moved to San Diego, where Palmer’s ship, the destroyer USS Perry, was based.

But less than two years later, Rosalind suddenly appeared in Key West and said her marriage was over. Bascom recalled that she didn’t say much about her reasons for leaving her husband and filing for divorce.

Rosalind got her old job back as a court clerk. She was considered one of Key West’s most beautiful young women, and as soon as word got out that she was no longer married, lots of eager young men sought her attention.

Rosalind didn’t take her looks too seriously, however. She thought her legs were too skinny for her to be really attractive. She loved to dress well, and white high-heel pumps became a trademark of her wardrobe.

In early 1935, she met George Pepper, and soon she was again in love. Her new boyfriend was the nephew of Claude Pepper, who was just beginning his legendary career in Florida politics.

George had gotten a job as a mess hall steward at one of the work camps that housed World War I veterans working on a New Deal construction project in the Keys. The vets were building a highway from Miami to Key West.

Rosalind and George were gaa-gaa over each other. In July 1935 they went to a photographer’s studio in Miami and posed with various props for charmingly cheesy photos.

Rosalind Grooms Palmer and George Pepper, 1935

A day or so after Rosalind wrote the note to her brother she went up to Islamorada to meet George. They shot more pictures of each other on a pier, Rosalind in a knit dress and her ubiquitous white high-heel pumps, George in a white shirt and tie and summer slacks.

Rosalind Grooms Palmer and her white
high-heel pumps

But while George and Rosalind were enjoying each other's company on that long-ago Labor Day weekend of 1935, a tropical storm crossed the Bahamas into the Florida Straits. As it crawled slowly across the bathtub-warm water of the Straits, it began rapidly intensifying. By September 2 – Labor Day Monday – it had mushroomed into a seagoing monster with sustained winds of about 185 mph and gusts that may have exceeded 200 mph. By late Monday afternoon, the worst of the storm’s winds were starting to claw at the Upper Keys.

At a veterans’ labor camp at the foot of Lower Matecumbe Key, George Pepper was instructed to use his boss’s car – a big, heavy 1934 Dodge – to take some of the veterans’ wives to safety in Miami. Sometime around 5 p.m., George and Rosalind climbed into the big automobile and set out for the short drive to the Matecumbe Hotel to pick up the women.

They never reached the hotel. For weeks, survivors and rescue workers wondered what had become of them.

They finally got a clue to the grim fates of Rosalind and George on September 18, when rescue workers found the 1934 Dodge submerged in Florida Bay, about 100 feet from shore. The storm's rising winds may have literally blown the car off the causeway. After the storm, another man who'd been driving the same road at the same time as George said a gust of wind had shoved his car into a ditch.

That same powerful gust may have pushed the Dodge into the bay.

A diver found a pair of white high-heel pumps in the submerged car, but no other sign of the young couple.On September 19, rescue workers found Rosalind's body. The storm had hurled her onto Raccoon Key, one of the small, soggy islands that dot Florida Bay.

George’s body was found several weeks later. The storm’s ferocious winds had carried him across Florida Bay to Cape Sable at the tip of the Florida peninsula. The body was about 30 miles away from the car he'd been driving.

Isaac is Approaching the Keys

Tropical Storm Isaac is approaching the Florida Keys. The center of the storm is expected to pass over or near Key West later today.

This video was shot by Jeff Pinkus at the old Seven Mile Bridge just south of Marathon. The storm is expected to gradually strengthen in the Gulf of Mexico during the next few days as it moves to an eventual landfall somewhere on the Gulf Coast later this week. Stay tuned for more video.

Friends in Florida Sending Video, Photos of Isaac

 

This video was shot by Jeff Pinkus, a friend of mine in Marathon, Florida. Residents in the Florida Keys are preparing for Tropical Storm Isaac, which is expected to cross the Keys late Sunday night or early Monday morning, move into the Gulf of Mexico, and head for an eventual landfall somewhere on the Gulf Coast later next week.

 

Jeff was standing on the old Seven Mile Bridge just outside Marathon when he shot this. His video shows the rising wind and northbound traffic on the new bridge leaving the Keys ahead of the storm.

 

I have friends in the Keys and Tampa who will be sending photos and video as Isaac approaches their area. Jeff Houck, an old friend who writes for the Tampa Tribune, is going to send photos and perhaps some video as Isaac passes Tampa in a few days, and I'll also be writing about Isaac for National Geographic News.

 

Check back at Drye Goods during the next few days for more Isaac pix.