Baseball Ink

Baseball The Way It Was Meant To Be

The Sox and I

As a pre-teen, living on the south side of Chicago, it was an easy transition from plastering my bedroom walls with photos of Roy Rogers and Trigger to pictures of the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox of the 1950's were an exciting team to watch (far more so than the struggling Cubs!) My heroes were Nellie Fox, Chico Carrasquel, Eddie Robinson, Billy Pierce, Minnie Minoso...the list was long.

My friends and I chewed pounds of bubble gum to acquire baseball cards, which we traded at recess in the spring. We memorized information on the players, and used the baseball cards as flash cards to test each other.

We listened to White Sox games on the radio, and occasionally journeyed to Comiskey Park to see our heroes in action. We became avid autograph seekers. The best place to get autographs, we discovered, was in front of the hotels where the visiting players boarded team buses to go to the ballpark. We also haunted the apartment hotels where some of the White Sox lived. Thanks to my nervy friends, I was able to collect a number of autographs: Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra, Dizzy Dean, Jim Piersall, Dom DiMaggio, Allie Reynolds, to name just a few.

Wish I could find that autograph book now!

Sandra Pollock
Roswell, Georgia