The Pecan Park Eagle

The Pecan Park Eagle
Celebrates its 3,000th Column Today
April 5, 2018

We began writing and publishing at WordPress on July 21, 2009 with a mundane greeting column we called “Goodbye Chron.Com! Hello WordPress.Com!” After a short first try at Chron.com doing the same thing, we had moved over to WordPress because of our frustration with the graphics and lack of support at the first site. We had heard good things about WordPress and, wow, did they turn out to be right. Here we are, on April 5, 2018, still in place and afloat, writing the 3,000th column on baseball, Houston history, humor, or other musings.

We write 98% of what we publish. The rest is provided by wonderful contributing writers, researchers, and photographers  like Bill Gilbert, Maxwell Kates, David Skelton, Bob Dorrill, Darrell Pittman, and Mike McCroskey. Thanks, guys, for all you do to make The Pecan Park Eagle a living, breathing, communicating thing. Please forgive me if I lamely overlook any more names. We are all givers at this little stop on the road and that includes credit where credit is due. Few of us arrive prepared for moments of honest full gratitude – and sometimes gratitude expressed is delayed by the vagary presence of human memory. Try to know its there with me. Always. And genuinely. Even if it is not immediately expressed. It’s here. Burrowed deeply into my soul.

This just in. – Thanks go out to my unofficial editor, Tom Hunter. Without researcher Darrell Pittman throwing ideas at me like manna from heaven – and editor Tom Hunter retrieving wild pitches to the plate, I don’t know where I’d be at this date, but it probably would not be at 3,000 in the confidence in quality stage it is today. Thanks, fellows.

“In The Big Inning….”

From the start.

At first, we did a lot of pieces on the sandlot baseball adventures of The Pecan Park Eagles sandlot baseball club, historic Houston restaurants and amusement spots, local car dealership theme songs, teenage hangouts in the 1950s, the Jimmy Menutis night club culture, early Houston television shows, definable Houston neighborhoods, a light look at the history of our minor league Houston Buffs, the Houston Oilers and college sports, and fun attempts at the compilation of lists for the worst baseball movies and baseball-playing actors – and worst movie villains of all time.

The Menutis columns resulted in a connection with Jimmy and Ruth Menutis at their retirement home town of Lafayette, Louisiana and a couple of large parties that resulted there attended by hundreds from Houston. What a wonderful world this is!

Over time, we have been more and more been drawn to the subject we harbor most in our heart and soul – and that subject for us, of course, is the game of baseball. Our Astros World Series success in 2017 has simply made it easier to hit the baseball highway with our keyboard as our decisive “road most traveled”.

All 3,000 columns are still timely and available. Depending on your own interests, some are home runs, some are swinging bunt singles, some are straight down the middles bashes, and others are down the line chalk-chippers. But none are errors. Everyone was directive, intentional, and seeded in passion.

TPPE, BY COMPARISON, NOT INCLUSION

At the Pecan Park Eagle, we write from the heart. To us it isn’t work. It’s where we go to breathe the best air of life.

It must be. Twice during this nine-year period of our existence, I have been privileged to co-write two baseball books on subjects of great baseball love for me. In 2010, Jimmy Wynn and I co-wrote his “Toy Cannon” memoirs. Then, in 2014, I recruited the help I’ve needed for years on this job and together, several of us wrote “Houston Baseball: The Early Years, 1861-1961”. Thanks extend eternally to Mike Vance, Mickey Herskowitz, Bob Dorrill, Marsha Franty, Joe Thompson, and Steve Bertone for the fine research and writing – and special thanks to Mike Vance for his service as our Editor-in Chief.

I shall always believe that it was my wiring to write that derives from The Pecan Park Eagle that fed into my participation in both of those important Houston baseball book projects. Writing is a connection wire to other things we need to do – but will not do until it becomes our passion to do them. Together we reach levels of passionate accomplishment that we cannot approach on our own – or from a state of loneliness. (See the 2017 Houston Astros for an example.)

For me, maybe it’s simply another variation on what I offered yesterday:

“Thank God for baseball. I’d have hated going through life alone.”

At any rate, thank you for your most doggedly patient readership support.

See the ball. Hit the Ball. Write.

Bill McCurdy / Publisher, Editor, and Principal Writer

The Pecan Park Eagle

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Tags: Column 3000 @ The Pecan Park Eagle

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