Sooner or later, my mind always returns to the sandlot in Pecan Park, the one we called Eagle Field, the one that is today celebrated at the East End Houston corner where Japonica and Myrtle streets “Y” together as “Japonica Park.”. The site was dedicated as a small city park in 1942, even though it only takes up the space that developers could have used to squeeze in four to six more little box houses like the ones we all lived in. They just didn’t, thank God, they just didn’t.
Joy in the moment never got any better than it once did in that time and space around the year 1950. I was 12 years old and playing at the apex of my sandlot glory that summer, as were several of my Pecan Park Eagle buddies. We simply had no way of knowing, as kids in a relatively trouble-free world, that this moment, for many of us, was as good as it would ever get for the every summer day availability of joy.
Hit and run. Catch and throw. Laugh and shout. Sweat and slide. Bare feet and callouses. Tee shirts and no shirts. Cornflower blue skies and billowing cotton candy white clouds. Skinned up knees and strawberry rump stains. All these and more were both the actions and the theater of our life upon the sandlot. But all were part of our daily deal with what we knew as life back in the day.
The older I get, and the longer I consider the question, “what makes life good or bad,” the more I come to appreciate that it all seems to turn on whether or not we once had a period of joy in our childhood or not – and here’s where life can seem to deal a very unfair hand to some people.
A small decanter of magic dirt from the 1950 home plate area of Eagle Field, collected in May 2010.
In working with people over the years, I met a lot of folks who seemed to know little more than abuse or neglect as kids. They had no golden sandlot memories. Only emotional pain and deprivation of love and protection filled their childhoods. These folks have a hard time seeing life’s normal adult setbacks as anything more than more of the same pain that’s always been there. They can’t buy into “it’ll get better” because it never was good. First base on the road to hope for these people is finding some time of joy in the past, even if it were simply a solitary thing or a single day.
New joy feeds best on the memory of a previous experience. Failing that, new joy feeds on the hunger for it. It’s where we live in the moment at peace, or in full body and soul engagement, with life.
Some of us were lucky enough to have grown up with two loving parents. Others of us were even luckier to have also grown up also with the love and joy that flowed from sandlot baseball as it was widely played through the early 1950s.
The sandlot soul never dies.
Tags: Baseball, culture, philosophy
The Pecan Park Eagle 
August 16, 2010 at 3:54 pm |
Hi Bill, thanks for the great sandlot memories. Wish I had your command of the language to tell about my sandlot days on that vacant lot at West Park and Yale (where the good old City Limits streetcar went by). That was a little earlier, circa 1937-42. BK
August 16, 2010 at 4:54 pm |
While you were enjoying your small piece of a sandlot; my brother, sister and I were enjoying EASTWOOD PARK, at the corner of Dumble and Harrisburg. My brother played some of his baseball games there. Eastwood Park was a place where the 3 of us spent a great deal of our time during the summers as there were always great activities going on and the park was a cool place to be due to the large trees.
The club house was always buzzing with chatter or laughter due to the many kids that hung out playing ping pong, banging on the piano, tumbling on the mats or playing board games. The park director always had something going on for the entire family too. On summer evenings there were movies and cartoons shown on a large movie screen and everyone sat on blankets outside. There was always a person selling peanuts, snow cones and sometimes tamales. Square dancing was a big thing for the adults in the evening and from time to time there were talent shows for the kids to participate in. I won the contest once due to a dance number and I was to compete with the other winners from other neghborhood parks at a finale held at Mason Park. Since we did not have a car it was difficult for my family and me to get to Mason Park.
What childhood memories……I sincerely hope that my grandchildren will have fond memories to draw on when they become senior citizens.
August 25, 2010 at 10:02 pm |
I was fortunate enough to have played sandlot baseball in the early to mid 1960s in one of the new subdivisions way out Westheimer in ranch country (Gessner area). The sandlot was two adjacent vacant lots and it lasted until they got developed. For three or four years, it was great to walk down the street and get a ballgame going with the other guys that showed up or join one in progress. I haven’t seen a sandlot game since the ’60s, I don’t think. Is there still such a thing? Has to be somewhere (I ssay hopefully). Thank you for a wonderful article. It captured the essence of the carefree pleasures of sandlot ball at a time when life was virtually carefree. Well done!