Posted By:
Ted ZanidakisHAL
I am honored that you and Dave V. would join me as a
9 year old in Hillside, NJ. Forget for the moment BB
cards.....think "Stick Ball". Hopefully, you and Dave
have your favorite stick bats. If not, then we just
find some neighbor's brooms or rakes and we saw them
down for you. You better be in shape to play stickball
from day break till our Mom calls us home for dinner.
Conveniently, we had a Country Club near us, so we al-
ways had a fresh supply of tennis balls to play with.
The "Pink Spaldings" were cheap, but did not compare
with the performance of a "free" new tennis ball.
After dinner we might walk two blocks and visit with
"the Scooter, Phil Rizzuto. He was always very nice to
us kids, who peppered him with an endless number of
questions after that afternoon's ballgame.
Unfortunately, where we lived only the 1st series of
1949 Leaf BB cards were available. Of course, after
some time we realized there were only 49 cards for
our sets. But, Leaf's skip-numbering scheme certainly
did work. Mizell Platt was #159 and we kept spending
our pennies thinking we needed 110 more Leaf cards in
order to complete the set.
Subsequently, the 1949 Bowmans were available, they did
not appeal to us kids at first. The Leafs were bigger and
made of heavier cardboard; therefore, really great for
flipping.
Finally, to answer your question....YES....I did trade a
Satchell Paige for a Luke Appling. But, they were Bowmans;
Appling (#175) was a much tougher card in the Hi# series
than Paige (#224) that year.
And Hal, we did indeed know of Paige. He had a short but
impressive year on the mound in 1948. But, even more im-
portant was that we tried to emulate his patented "double-
loop" wind-up in his pitching motion.