Word: club
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reminded of the drunk who, when he had been thrown down the stairs of a club for the third time, gathered himself up, and said, 'I am on to those people. They don't want me in there.' " -William Jennings Bryan, after losing his third try for the presidency...
...World's Largest Peanut Sheller, but now it lay like an abandoned farm. The light poles had been moved around for football lighting, and the sandy gray soil had been harrowed and was awaiting fresh sod for the high school football season. Letters saying "Graceville Oilers Booster Club" had almost faded away on the concrete-block centerfield fence. The portable bleachers in left field had begun to rot beyond salvation. Gone were the dugouts, rickety frame sheds resembling the busstop shelters put along rural roads for school children. When it was in use, the park was probably the very worst...
...leagues because even without them overall baseball attendance is higher than ever. To me, one of the thousands who hitchhiked into a Class D town as a teen-ager begging for a tryout, these stories are missing the point. They do not account for what a minor league ball club meant to towns like Graceville, Fla., and Valdosta, Ga., and Hornell, N.Y. and Thibodaux, La. Nor what it meant to the men who played it; men with names like Ernie Oravetz and Al Rivenbark and R.C. Otey and Country Brown, who would have spent their lives in coal mines...
...crash came to Graceville in the late Fifties, like it did all over the country. The Oilers had tried to operate as an "independent," meaning they had no full-time affiliation with a major league club. They were not subsidized in any way, receiving no financial aid and no promising young players, which is as hopeless as a city of today trying to make it without federal funds. Graceville dropped out of the league halfway through the 1958 season. "We just couldn't afford it anymore," explained one of the club directors, Mike Tool of Cash Drugs on Brown Street...
...losers of all, in spite of the protests of Mike Tool, were the players. In 1948 there were roughly 7,500 jobs open for players in the minor leagues. Today there are only slightly more than 2,000, and most of these go to young chattels of major league clubs who are then replaced by other hopefuls if they do not make it to the big club in three or four years. No longer is there room for the player who does not have big-league possibilities but can do quite well in Class AA for 10 or even...