The Pecan Park Eagle

The building that once housed Haenel’s corner grocery store in Pecan Park still stands.

They can take down the buildings, but that still doesn’t erase the memories of what life was like in Houston during the Post World War II years. Sometimes they accidentally leave the buildings intact, only helping the memory and nostalgia process features of the human mind.

Such has been the case with Haenel’s, one of two little corner grocery stores located across the street from each other on Redwood at the Myrtle Street intersection in Pecan Park. Haenel’s actually faced Myrtle, while Graves’, the other little mom and pop place situated more clearly on Redwood, the street that separated the two stores. Graves’ no longer remains in physical form.

Haenel’s was special to many of us kids at the north end of Pecan Park for one major reason. – A lot us got our introduction to baseball cards at Haenel’s, first through the Bowman Company series in 1949-50 and then through the Topps collection from 1951 forward through whatever future year we each variably changed or stopped our collection habits. I always preferred Bowman because they were each like little close up works of art that really showed what the players looked like. The Topps series was more action oriented and, given the small size of each picture, they did not always help you get a clear idea of what each player looked like on his own.

It didn’t matter that much. The price was right.

For a nickel, you got five new cards and a flat stick of gum. The game among us came down to being the first to buy into newly arrived shipments of new cards we had not previously seen. Sometimes new shipments were no more than repeats of cards we already had seen in gazillion numbers. I got tired of all the O’Brien twin shortstop cards that I acquired, but they made good bicycle spoke noise makers with the help of a clothes pin.

The Stan Musial, Ted Williams, and Ralph Kiner cards were the Holy Grail before Mickey Mantle came along, and I now still wonder what really happened to my copies of each? Did Dad really throw them out, as he always said he “thought” he did? Or did he stick them up in the attic of our former home on Japonica Street? And are they still there?

My lone surviving baseball card from my Pecan Park sandlot days.

I ended up with one card from my original collection. It was one that ended up in a box of mementos that I had put away for about a millennium until our last house move nearly 28 years ago. I just opened it up and there he was among old report cards, scout badges, and the like, but he wasn’t Mickey Mantle. It was Clyde Vollmer.

Why Clyde Vollmer was my only surviving baseball card, I’ll never be sure. Perhaps, he was on his way to the bicycle spoke spot and simply never got there.