It was a line drive in the summer of 1921, a purely magic time for my father, who had been discovered by a baseball scout on a red-clay ballpark in the Mississippi hill country. He was 26, newly married, playing pickup ball after work. He was a southpaw, and family legend says Dad’s blazing fast ball was so hard it once split his brother’s hand when he caught it.
How a baseball scout ever heard of my father remains a mystery, but he gave him a minor-league contract to play in Exeter, Neb., in the spring of 1921.
Exeter is a small town in southeast Nebraska where the Plains begin. Its residents were crazy about baseball; they had a ball field and grandstands and intense rivalry with other minor-league teams. My father’s pitching stats quickly made him a hero. My mother and their infant daughter were feted by the townspeople with gifts and attention. The team was winning and a regional title seemed certain as summer began to wane.
Dad never talked about the line drive that shattered his ankle, ended his baseball career and left him with a lifelong limp. In later years he would show his grandchildren how to throw a curve or a slider, and in my mind’s eye I can still see their small fingers as he wrapped them around a baseball to demonstrate. But he never talked about That Hit. I was an adult before I understood that most of us do not want to talk about our worst defeats.
In 1958, while driving my parents to Kansas to visit my brother, I discovered that we were not far from Exeter, and I suggested that we drive there just to see the town that I had heard about all my life. My father protested that he did not want to go, but my mother and I persuaded him.
When we reached Exeter, my parents were astounded. Interstate 80 had missed the town, and the place was unchanged; quiet and serene. We were walking up the main street, with my mother saying “This is the cafe where we ate, this is the store where we bought our groceries,” when we passed an elderly man who tipped his hat to us, stopped, did a classic double-take and came running back, yelling, “Lefty Hamilton! You’re Lefty Hamilton! You are! You are!”
Don’t ever tell me that baseball is not otherworldly. We went into a nearby cafe where the man got on the phone and began making calls. Soon a group of Lefty Hamilton fans who had known my father 37 years before hurried in, and the party began. The laughter was so loud that the years seemed to vanish, leaving only that long-ago summer, perfectly preserved in time.
I sat back watching my parents. They looked younger; my father looked happily dazed. The words of an old song came back to me: “Memories, how they linger.” The talk swirled around the tables: “How about that shutout game you pitched against… the day when you balked… and that suicide squeeze…” When Dad expressed surprise that people still remembered him, a man replied, “Of course we remember. It’s baseball, Lefty.”
I was dazed myself. These people, these wonderful people, still recalled my father, Lefty Hamilton, after all those years. He had pitched on a minor-league team in a very small town for one brief summer season, and they remembered him.
My parents’ home had burned down years before the Exeter trip, and the only photo that had survived the flames was one of my father and the Exeter baseball team. It is charred on three corners, a priceless memento, and looking at it used to sadden me because I felt something had gone out of my father’s life that summer. To have a dream come true and then have it snatched away so quickly is more devastating than never having it cometrue at all.
But the Exeter trip changed my father; it reassured him that he was not forgotten, that the name of Lefty Hamilton still lives in baseball’s pantheon of players.
This October I’ll watch the World Series, and I will forget the obscene salaries, the fields that resemble amusement parks under the lights, the rent-a-player late-season trades. I won’t even think about the ticket prices that bar many fans from ever seeing a major-league game in person. I’ll be caught up in the ageless pageantry of baseball, and when that first pitch crosses the plate, all my memories will be of Exeter, Neb.–a little town that gave a man’s life back to him.
