Baseball!

Sometimes family history is a bit random in what I’m looking at and why. For whatever reason, when I was at the library picking up books for our Christmas travels, I was browsing the non-fiction and saw a book on Mickey Mantle. I’ve never really been a huge baseball fan, but I knew that Dad had been a big baseball fan in the era of Mickey Mantle and as a youngster was at one of the Yankee’s games.

As I sometimes do, I then read the book and proceeded to proceed down some random rabbit trails. I watched the entire Ken Burns documentary on Baseball – I learned a LOT! I internet searched Mickey Mantle and even if he doesn’t maybe get as much press as players like Babe Ruth, he was no slouch of a player and is really regarded as one of the all time greats.

Then, I started digging in some of the family history information to find some details on things that I kind of remembered. Big Springs had a town team for baseball, and I remember my Aunt Sherry talking about Grandpa Murl winning awards for his batting. There are some newspaper articles from the 1950’s that give more detail there. Just to keep it interesting, Grandpa Murl played 1st base, his brother Harold was the catcher, and his brother-in-law Irvin Kallsen was the pitcher while his other brother-in-law Vern Kallsen often played shortstop. It sounds like they switched positions now and then, but these were likely their default positions.

I don’t remember Grandpa Bob telling stories about playing baseball as an adult, but I was remembering a story about in WWII they made some of the grenades like baseballs as they figured most American boys could throw a baseball with some degree of accuracy. As with anything, trust but verify. I found this piece on Wikipedia that talks about the grenade and while it was used, it sounds like it maybe wasn’t terribly popular. I can’t tell you if these specific grenades were used in Grandpa’s paratrooper unit, but it’s very possible!