Baseball’s True Birthplace Turns 200
Cooperstown is a rich man’s lie
Hamden NY is the birthplace of baseball, or ‘bass-ball’
Go ask 100-year-old Alice Blackman on July 13 as she glides past the down-staters in a ’57 Chevy convertible
In the July 13, 1825, edition of the Delhi Gazette, nine residents of the newly established town of Hamden, New York, issued a challenge to an “equal number of persons” from any town in Delaware County: to “meet them at any time at the house of Edward B. Chace, in said town, to play the game of BASS-BALL, for the sum of one dollar each per game.” The ad was dated the day before, and signed by the two Chase brothers, Eli Bagley, Ira and Walter Peak, H.B. Gondrich, R.F. Thurber, Asa C. Howland, and M.L. Bostwick. There is no evidence that the challenge was taken up, but the ad appeared again a week later, and a gloveless game involving wooden bats and bases is held to have been played in the region at the time. There is currently no known earlier mention in print of a baseball game on American soil.
The challengers included the local innkeeper, a town clerk, and other documented …
An Unnatural History of the Armadillo
They travel together in thundering herds, and freeze in headlights like deer on the highway
Antonio Rodriquez was given super-strength by a mad doctor — at the price of looking like a ’dillo
A colossal armadillo drawn by Jim Franklin lifts up a highway strip in its mouth as though it were a ribbon, flinging cars and trucks aside
Like many Texans who reach their seventh decade, I find myself thinking a lot about the armadillos in my life.
Many a time I have been with a ’dillo at its demise — or, to be precise, a short period after its demise, swerving in my car to avoid its remains after it was hit by a truck or car and smeared across a highway in the Lone Star state. I have been close to ’dillos in their prime — for example, during the G-8 Economic Summit in 1990, held in a Houston arena where, not far from President George H. W. Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and their peers, I sat and watched the armadillo race that was held in honor of the global leaders. And while I have not been present at the birth of armadillos, I have known and cared for their young.
When I was in junior high school during the 1970s, to earn a Boy Scout merit badge I did some work at Austin’s Natural Science Center, which …
Bloodline
The headwaters of this river come from forks leaking westward out of the Appalachians. They join in the foothills like estranged brothers and are then fed by countless and nameless tributaries dribbling from porous slabs of Kentucky limestone to form the Cumberland, which widens and deepens and continues snaking westward, twisting and falling through the rolling region and finally dropping down into Tennessee, where it spills through the concrete walls of the Cordell Hull Dam, the tailwaters bending around and meeting up with the Caney Fork, a cold, north-flowing river, in the town of Carthage, the county seat of Smith County, near where the father now waits for what’s his.
“Ain’t much opportunity in this world for boys like you,” he says. His youngest son is lying on the passenger-side bucket seat beside him, wearing a grocery bag for a diaper, listening.
They all slept here in the van …
