The Pecan Park Eagle

Buffalo Stadium
Houston, Texas
Its Pre-WWII Night Game Look

As Rogers Hornsby once famously proclaimed, he spent the winter months staring out window, waiting for spring and the return of baseball, Of course, he did, and he certainly wasn’t alone. A lot of us had our meditative ways of envisioning ourselves forward into a new season, attaining a few blissful moments of accelerate-the-clock time travel into the warmth of spring and all the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of baseball, the game we spent all of our time loving and too much of our off-season months missing.

I remember coming home to Pecan Park from downtown on the Lawndale 7400 bus once in December of 1952. It was my way home from St. Thomas High School everyday until I learned to drive. We were headed east on Leeland, coming up on the corner intersection with Cullen when I suddenly just rang the “getting off” buzzer line to also exit at Cullen, not something I’d ever done before or after, coming from downtown. I’d done it uncountable times coming the other way. Leland@ Cullen was the exit stop we took for 3-mile bus trip games from our neighborhood to Buff Stadium.

Buff Stadium lay a long a long block away from that corner, heading south, on the right hand side of the street. As I slowly walked south on the right side of Cullen, it was possible very quickly to be in view of the high and deep center field wall of the ball park, the tall light towers that made night ball possible, and the grand roof and front window image of the press box area that now rested in the winter darkness as the hiking approach drew me closer to the grand old dame structure of all my baseball dreams for every hopeful moment of what was then only my five years old affair (age 9-14, 1947-52) with baseball.

Suddenly, I stopped. Maybe because I had been induced to hold my ground by the abrupt strong aroma from the smell of freshly baking bread behind me across the street from the “Fair Maid” Bread Company.  It was the same sweet smell that wafted into Buff Stadium each summer, one that made even the ball park hot dogs taste better, regardless of their own bun freshness. And the giant neon-outlined “Fair Maid” bread loaf was even more impressive a sight from the closer vantage I now had of it, over my left shoulder and high above the bakery. On charcoal grey and late-in-the-day December afternoon in Houston, the now again glittering light above Fair Maid was both a direct character from our enjoyment of baseball this past summer as it was also siren call for the new season to get here as fast as possible.

As I turned to stare again at the mild winter silence of Buff Stadium, my mind simply rested in some kind of meditative state in the moment – and those were all words and concepts I had no speaking capacity for describing things back in 1952.

It was akin to what I now think Rogers Hornsby may have been trying to explain when he talked about “staring out the window (in winter) and waiting for spring. It just happens, sometimes.

The Fair Maid Bakery Sign
~beyond deep center, across Cullen Blvd, atop the Fair Maid Bakery on Leeland@Cullen.

In my meditation that day, the afternoon grayness sort of transitioned into a movie-like twilight and night darkness, with the big arcs of light launching on by some invisible hand, followed by the sounds of organist Lou Mahan playing into the mood of the now filing in fans and the “bounce-and-bust” of baseballs flying all over the place in pre-game reps, play, and practice.

For something like a couple of nanoseconds in December 1952, I had traveled by meditative wishfulness to the 1953 baseball season back. Glad it all happened before those sudden gusts of late-in-the-day norther breath hit me on Cullen. There was no going forth to the spring of 1953 after those cold winter bad boy winds got here. It was time to lope back to Leeland and catch the next Lawndale 7400 bus home.

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