It would have been in the 1950's, about '55-'56-'57. My Mom and Dad had built their first house, and we moved into it the summer I turned 6. It had three bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, living room, a one-car garage, and a den.
The den was an oblong room. It and the kitchen formed an "L" shape, with the den being the longer leg. The living room was on the inside of the "L" and the garage on the opposite side. It had knotty pine paneling. Like the kitchen, it had those old foot-square, "asphalt" tiles on the floors, off white with dark green dribbles. The dinette set (table and four matching chairs) was on the living room side on the end near the kitchen, followed by a doorway into the living room that had a set of "bar-room" swinging doors and then my dad's recliner. On the garage side of the room was the door to the garage, a 1950's answer to a futon couch, and a built-in bookcase with two cabinets beneath it. The television (we just had one) was at the end of the room, up against the windows that looked out on the back yard. It was a Motorola TV, black and white.
My dad loved sports, and it was right about that time that they started broadcasting sports games on TV and in the summer time, they would broadcast baseball games played by all those great old teams: The Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Yankees, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Socks and the Braves, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Chicago White Sox and the Cubs, the Baltimore Orioles, the Cincinnati Reds, The Cleveland Indians.
Television wasn't all that much older than I was then, and it hadn't been all that long ago when the only way you could "see the game" was to go down to the statium, buy a ticket, and watch it from the stands. Your only other option was to listen to the announcers describe it to you on the radio. In fact, the games that were being broadcast on TV were using the same audio feed that went out over the radio, only with two or three strategically placed TV cameras up in the stands to show you what was happening on the field.
Football is a fast-paced, busy game. It has time limits; things have to happen within a certain period of time, and you can be penalized for taking too long to do something. There's a countdown clock on the scoreboard, and when that clock gets to zero, the game's over and everybody goes home. Baseball, however, is a open-ended game. Sure, the game starts at a certain time, but after that, it takes as long as it takes. It's played at a different pace. If you went to the ballpark to watch a game, you planned on being gone all afternoon and probably not getting home until dark. And in those early days of TV, that's the way they broadcast it. No cutting to commercial. No fancy onscreen graphics. None of this frenetic flick-flick-flick back and forth from image to image, no slo-mo instant replays. In those early days of television, the announcers were all important.
While one team was taking the field, and the other was going back to the dugout, it was up to the announcers to take up the slack just like they did on radio. -- They might mention one of the sponsors and give a product plug, or recap the inning up to that point. While the batter was fixing his hat, and digging his cleats in, and hitching at his uniform shirt, and rubbing dirt into his hands, the announcers would keep your attention by giving you some of his stats, or mentioning some colorful little biographical tidbit about him or one of the other players. While the pitcher and the catcher were deciding what to pitch or the pitcher was going through his little song and dance on the mound before he would actually wind up and throw, the announcers would be commenting, filling the time with useful, interesting or intertaining information. And the announcers always worked in pairs so they could play off each other. One would be the stats man and have reams of baseball stats ready to hand, and the other would provide the "color" -- the little anecdotes, and bits of personal trivia.
My dad loved sports, especially baseball, and he would always watch the "Game of the Week" on Saturday afternoons. The announcers were Dizzy Dean and some other guy whose name I don't ever think I knew. Not surprisingly, Dizzy Dean was the "color" man. He had a bazillion anecdotes from his days in baseball, and he had nearly as good a command of the English language as the inimitable Yogi Berra. The home plate umpire would decide to interrupt the game, walk halfway out to the mound and ask to see the baseball, and right on cue, Dizzy would launch into some anecdote about the fielding team's third baseman who missed three games last season because he got cleated in the ankle when the runner "slud" in to third base on a "dribbler" that got past their shortstop.
I wasn't all that into baseball in particular or sports in general, but the sounds that came out of that old Motorola TV were a part of my world. I guess that's why Dizzy Dean caught my ear. Even at that early age, I was aware that the "TV people" talked differently from the people in my childhood world way out in the flatlands of the Texas Panhandle. Nobody on the TV (unless it was a locally produced commercial for some local business) pronounced the words the same way, or used them in the same way. The sounds were different, the rhythms were different. Except for Dizzy Dean. He sounded like the people in my world. Hearing him and that other guy announcing the games was like a dialog between my world and the world of the TV people.
I can see that den so clearly. Looking down it from the end of the kitchen, backlit from the glare of the windows behind the TV. We had screen doors on both the front and back doors, and in the summertime, the back door would be open, there'd be a baseball game on TV and my younger brother would be crouched on the floor in front of the TV.
My brother was a spindly, knobby-kneed kid, three years my junior, with bad allergies and asthma and, as a result, he couldn't play outside a lot. He liked sports. We had baseball gloves, a bat and ball, and he had a baseball cap. He had baseball cards. But through circumstances beyond his control, for him there was no little league, no games with the neighborhood kids, only the occasional game of catch with my dad. Still, he found his own way to play baseball, on his terms, indoors, all by himself.
The 1950's equivalent of Play-Doh was modeling clay. It was oily, stiff, wouldn't dry out, and came in four colors: Red, yellow, blue and green. Inevitably, the colors would get all mixed together and it would end up this blechy greenish dark grey. My brother would get a lump of modeling clay and use it to lay out a complete baseball diamond on the floor. He would painstakingly roll the clay into long strings about the thickness of raw spaghetti and press it flat on the tile for his foul lines. He'd carefully form pieces of clay into little square base bags, use a kitchen knife to cut out a clay home plate, and form a pitcher's mound out of clay. For his baseball teams, he would use those old green plastic army men with “stands” that came in 50-count bags for some ridiculously low price. He and his teams du jour of little army guys would play game after game there on the floor. He would do all the sound effects -- the crack of the ball against the bat, the roar of the crowd, the announcers' commentary. He'd spend hours recreating on the floor what he watched on TV.
It took a lot of time to lay out his little baseball diamonds and, once he got one made, he wanted to leave it there -- for weeks! He would become quite irate if it was disturbed in any way. It would drive my mom crazy. My mom is a neat freak. It is her mission in life to rid the world of "piles of crud." If you are not actually reading a book or magazine, you couldn't just set it aside and come back to it later; it had to be closed and put away (if it was a magazine, you'd better take it to your room and hide it, because if it had been in the house more than a day or two, it was likely to get thrown away!). The instant you are done playing with a toy or game, she wants it picked up and put away. If you were working one of those 500- or 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles as my dad and I loved to do, or you were playing some board game, or coloring in a coloring book, or constructing a little room with cardboard furniture in a shoebox, or putting a plastic model together, or making a blanket cave/hideout/secret headquarters, or whatever else you might be doing, you'd better be able to finish it in the time you had available so that when you had to stop playing, you could "put all that crud away." But, since my brother was the youngest and because he frequently couldn't play outdoors, she'd suck it up and let him have his baseball diamonds on the floor. But even he would periodically have to scrape them up so she could sweep and mop. I think about two weeks was her maximum, ultimate limit.
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