John Walsh

For a kid growing up in the 1950s, when TV was black-and-white, and you could count the number of Chicagoland channels on one hand, one of the greatest events of childhood was getting your first baseball mitt.

I don’t remember the day I got that mitt as well as I remember the day of its demise.

I was nine when the first announcement came for try-outs for South Elm Little League. My dad took me to Sears to buy my first mitt. He retrieved his old mitt from my grandmother’s basement. We began playing catch in our front yard. To soften up my stiff new mitt, my dad taught me to use baby oil on a clean rag. I conditioned my mitt into one of the softest in the neighborhood.

I played for the Byrne Drug Athletics. My dad was the head of all the umpires. He persuaded my Uncle Bob, who had no children yet, to be an umpire, because of his love for the game.

My friends and I played a lot of baseball. Next door to my house was an open prairie. If we couldn’t play at the school diamond, we played in the prairie. If you put a ball through a window of my house, my dad wouldn’t have minded—as long as it was an honest hit or a good throw.

When I was in 8th grade, we moved to a bigger house, since our family had grown to three little sisters, in addition to my brother and me. I played left field on our 8th grade team, using that same soft and pliable mitt.

As often happens when a family with kids moves to a bigger house, the stuff in the basement—toys, games, dolls, sports equipment--gets thrown into boxes and moved to the basement. In our house that drove my mother nuts!

For years my mom tried to get me and my brother to clean up “stuff” in the basement, but we were always too busy with more important “kid things” to do.

After high school, I went away to college, leaving behind the unkempt basement. I came home the summer of 1965 after my freshman year. I walked in the front door, and my mother was energized—not by seeing me, her first-born, but with pride at having completed a thorough cleaning of the basement. She was beside herself with excitement as she started to tell me all about her triumph. “I threw away all your boxes of baseball cards, and I got rid of that old mitt of yours.”

It took days for the shock to subside. My mitt was GONE!

Nineteen years passed before I bought my next mitt—when my eldest son was eight, and we bought mitts together. I spent my next 23 years coaching, managing, umpiring, administering, and buying after-game ice cream for kids’ baseball—my two sons and daughter.

I’ve used that second mitt to play catch with my kids and grandchildren, who all love baseball!