Jackie Price
How hard does bunting have to be?
Jackie Price is not a new subject for me. I’ve done a couple of columns on him in the past/ covering his awesome abilities to throw, catch, and hit a baseball from sighted and blindfolded situations from positions that were sometimes alternately awkward, mobile, and multiply demanding upon the central nervous system’s capacity for correctly transmitting all of the execution signals that would be essential to getting the variously purposed plan to work. And, of yes, some of those thing had to be done while Price was riding solo in a open-bodied jeep that he was also driving.
I got to seem him perform as a kid at Buff Stadium. Then I looked forward for a lifetime of seeing him do these rare things again on the ballpark field, but that wasn’t meant to be; As I trust you recall, Jackie Price committed suicide by hanging himself on October 2, 1967 as a result of a long bout with clinical depression that went untreated – for whatever reason, with the biggest reason always being the one that 98% of us got as kids. — We were simply supposed to “get over it.”
Try telling that to the families and friends of people who die blindly from cancer or heart disease and see what happens. “If only we had known, we would have done all we could do to get him or her into treatment. — Yet, had it been depression leading to one hanging themselves, the same people will say something like “wish we had known he was that troubled; he had no good reason to kill himself.”
There are no good reasons to kill oneself beyond enormous pain on top of no hope == and that’s the only brew that clinical depression serves up over time.
All of us have lost great performing figures like Jackie Price or Robyn Williams to depression-generated suicide. And some of us know the sting closer to home and heart. I’d like to think that our enlightenment would have improved by now, but, for me, nearly sixty years after my earliest entry into the mental health field following my graduation from UH in 1960, I am sad to say it seems to have not improved at all, based upon national suicide figures.
Culprit #1, of course, is the human ego. Admitting you are depressed requires the courage to speak up to a deadly false fear that admitting to depression is a sign of weakness. It is not a weakness — but it can kill you — if you try to treat it as a head cold.
First, here’s the link to our earlier column on Jackie Price and depression:
https://bill37mccurdy.com/2014/02/05/jackie-price-fatal-sadness-of-a-baseball-clown/
Then, by all means, please enjoy this video that’s now on YouTube. It pretty much covers that same show I got to see in person at Buff Stadium back in the time-around-1950 era.
Diamond Demon: Jackie Price
The Pecan Park Eagle 
May 11, 2018 at 3:48 am |
His accomplice was talented too.