Stories from Bob's Life

It was 1998, and we’d just moved from Stuttgart, Germany, where we’d lived in government housing on Patch Barracks, to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where I’d spent much of my life and career and where my kids had spent some years in school.  When our family was moving into the new house we’d bought on Thomas Bishop Lane in Virginia Beach, I was looking for more storage space, and noticed a section of the upstairs that had been nailed shut accessing the eaves under the roof on the second floor. I pried it open to see if I could store things there, crawled in with a flashlight, and saw two cardboard boxes filled with what appeared to be some old Christmas ornaments, and assorted junk. So flashlight in hand, I sorted through this “junk” and was stunned to find two old baseballs, with signatures of baseball stars whose names I recognized, from when I’d been a big fan of Major League Baseball in the 1950s and 60s. Further inspection revealed that these baseballs were signed by the entire  New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox  base ball teams from I believe 1952 or 53!   One had Ted Williams signature prominent between the two seams; the other obviously of the NY Yankees had the signatures of such greats as Whitey Ford, Billy Martin, a young Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra.  Also in the box I found letters written in a young boy’s handwriting to a number of these players, and their responses with signed pictures.  I recall seeing one from Yogi Berra and some from some players whose names I didn’t recognize. I wish I had spent more time looking at them – I had struck gold!

But then I had a few misgivings – these were clearly someone’s treasures.  From the old letters, I had the name and address (from nearly 50 years earlier) of the boy who’d written and received these letters.  I felt I at least had an obligation to make some effort to find him, of course hoping my effort would be fruitless, so that in completely good conscience, I could keep these treasures.

So I looked in the phone book (we still had phone books in 1998) and found a person with that name and gave him a call.  When he answered I asked if it was XXX (I don’t remember his name) and he said yes.  And then I asked him if he’d lived on YYY street in Norfolk in the 1950s, to which he responded “WHO IS THIS?”  I told him who I was and I asked him if he’d been into baseball as a kid – he with some hesitation said, yes….to which I responded with a question about whether he’d had any signed baseballs.  He yelled into the phone: “You’ve got the baseballs?! You’ve got the baseballs?!”

I then told him how I’d found those baseballs and the letters, and he explained that back in the mid 1980s, he’d owned and lived in the house I’d bought and while there had gone through a nasty divorce and assumed his then wife had thrown that box out with all the other things of his she’d disposed of, and he’d sadly written them off with so much else that went with that divorce.

I told him they were his baseballs and letters etc, not mine, and I’d be happy to give them back to him.  We agreed on a time for him to come by and he did, and I delivered the two boxes back to their original and rightful owner. He offered to pay me and I refused. I offered to let him come up and see where they had been stored, where I’d found them, and he declined, saying that he had a bad case of Lupus and going up and down stairs was very difficult for him.

The aftermath of the story was that he had a son who went to the same high school as my son, and his son told my son what an awesome thing I’d done for his dad, and his dad had bequethed those baseballs to him.

In retrospect, I’ve had whole lot more fun telling that story than I would have had, had I kept the baseballs. In fact, I do have a baseball signed by the 1958 San Francisco Giants given to me by  my uncle, with the signatures of famous baseball greats Alvin Dark (the manager) Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and others from that team.  I’ve been carrying that baseball around with me for 7 decades, wrapped in tissue in a drawer somewhere.  My wife says she thinks she knows where it is. I’ll give it to my son and suspect he’ll probably lose it!