One of my very special places was a field of dreams
I was 8 years old when my family moved across town in Beckley, WV. Daddy had bought a new house, a modest 2-bedroom, 1 bath Cape Cod with an attic and basement. I believe it cost $12,000. The house was fine, but I found myself in a new school system and living on a block entirely occupied by girls. I was devastated.
Then, my life changed. About a year later, a boy named Freddy Arnold moved into a house two doors away. Freddy was a year older but he and I became fast friends, bonded together by a love of sports. Baseball in particular.
Freddy was a Yankee fan while I worshipped the Brooklyn Dodgers. Each morning during the summer, I met the paper boy at the curbside and tore open the sports pages to see if Duke Snider had homered.
Beside Freddy’s house was a large, empty field – maybe five or six acres. It was just a hay field, seldom cut, but Freddy and I had other plans for this unused piece of real estate. It would become our field of dreams.
As much as we both hated lawn mowing, we went to work with our sickles and mowers and knocked the knee-high grass down to size. We carved out base paths and foul lines and we played ball. Every day, we played ball. From soon after breakfast until our mothers called us in for dinner, we played ball.
You can play basketball with two players and you can round up a game of touch football with as few as 4, but it took multiple warm bodies to play a game of baseball in our field of dreams. So we recruited any boy age 6 or older within ten blocks and any willing females – as outfielders of course. In order to get the girls to agree to play, we sometimes had to play hopscotch with them or do a little rope skipping, whatever it took to play ball on our field of dreams
Baseballs became our most precious commodities. If someone fouled a ball out into the high grass, we dropped our gloves in place and sent out search parties. He hunted until we found the errant balls, otherwise we couldn’t play. We played with the balls until all the stitches came out, then we taped them up and continued to play. Getting a new ball for our field of dreams was like striking the mother lode of gold.
Bats were also treasured. I remember having a 29-inch Louisville Slugger with Hank Sauer’s name inscribed. Sauer was a Chicago Cub at the time. I would have much preferred a Carl Furillo or Gil Hodges bat, but Sauer did hit 41 dingers in 1954, a worthy stat to say the least. When I splintered the bat near the handle, we tackled it back together, secured it with black tape and kept on playing.
Our field of dreams did not exactly have a level playing field. It had a reasonably steep incline from home plate up to the centerfield wall. At the end of the field was a wire fence, marking the back of some woman’s property in the adjoining neighborhood. I don’t recall the lady’s name, but she had lots of roses and flower beds and was not overly find of young boys climbing over her fence to retrieve the occasional home run. One of us would stand guard, looking for the enemy, while another scooted across the fence, tossed the ball back into play and came flying back across. We were scolded on more than one occasion, but she finally gave up and just let us hop across unscathed.
Behind our house today is an open school yard – it even has a baseball diamond, but the only time children ever play there is when some adult has organized some sort of team. In 1954, adults were not allowed on our field of dreams, only ballplayers. We made our own rules, we mowed our own field and we recruited our own teams and players. We used our imaginations and the meager equipment we had at hand. And we played ball Afterall, that’s what a field of dreams is for.
