Let Freedom Ring

 

"I just felt the spirit of the game in me.  At that moment I felt the love of baseball."
 

 

 "It all came together, the sunshine and the music and I said to myself,  'Man, how fortunate you are to be playing this beautiful game in this beautiful country!'"

 

 

 

 

"I just looked at the whole picture of my life and thought about all the people around the world and  other planets and how I'm just a little dot on this earth but I got to play baseball."

 

 

"I truly, truly love baseball."

                                                                                      - Ernie Banks                                                                                                                          

 

 

 

Land of the free

 

 

 

 and home of the brave.
 

 

 

God bless America, my home sweet home.

 

 

 

 

 

Ernie Banks citation courtesy of Seth Swirsky, Something to Write Home About: Great Baseball Memories (Crown Publishers, 2003)

Comments

[don]

Happy 4th, Jude. I just started a long email about your posts, and lost it somehow. At least I think I lost it. You brought back memories of my father and me sitting on a screened-in-porch, watching the mets on channel 9 on an old black and white TV. The kind that blinked and went to a white line and the a dot that faded into nothing when you turned it off, but still I stared at that dot until it dissapeared, so many times, and for reasons I will never be able to explain. It is too late to go into more now, but just let me say thanks for this. Those evenings on the porch were really good times for me. Maybe the best times. More when I have the time!
d

[watching the game]

hey d - I'd do the very same thing every night after watching "Lassie" (age 7, had a crush on Timmy). Whenever the show ended, I'd wave to Lassie, then literally kiss the screen goodbye as the plaintive music came to an end. Then I'd watch that tiny dot fade into nothing, feeling a little bereft, but happy too. Also - here's to the Mets on WOR-TV once upon a time!

[Carlisle]

My dear Judy. For some reason I thought of you this morning, and when I looked for you online, I found your baseball passion and blog--something I never knew about you. I'm not on Facebook, so I'm contacting you in this roundabout way.

an affectionate voice from the past.

c