Dad, the unlikely major leaguer

When I was a kid back in the 1960's the man across the street (we'll call him Mr. Smith) was a major league umpire.  He would come home from work at the stadium and empty his pockets.  And what were umpires pockets full of?   Baseballs!  I suspect that they can't bring home baseballs today, but back then baseball was a little looser operation I guess.

Mr. Smith was very popular with the kids in the neighborhood because he kept us in baseballs and from time to time, he would bring home a signed baseball from a Pittsburgh Pirate or from some other team.  But in the 60’s we didn’t care much about collecting, we played with those signed balls.  They wore out or ended up as a fly ball deep into the woods (home run to left field), in Fabrizi's pool (home run to right field) or lost in the ground cover (foulball behind first base). 

 As you can imagine, Mr. Smith would bring home lots of plain, slightly used balls, but only a few signed balls.  But we all wanted the signed balls and made special requests that were difficult for him to fulfill.  My dad, a great creative thinker, had a solution.  Dad would take the orders, and when Mr. Smith would bring home extra baseballs, my dad would get them, autograph them with the name of whoever we had requested and then would distribute them to us.  After all, we lost most of them anyway and there was no Ebay or Antiques Road Show back then.   No harm no foul in that earlier age. 

My one concern is that somewhere out there is one of our old neighborhood kids that thinks they have an autographed Mickey Mantle or Roberto Clemente baseball in that special display case that is really a Hal Schmitt autograph.  A final note, I have a genuine autographed baseball, it’s just autographed by Mr. Smith.  Not of any monetary value, but a pleasant reminder of my old neighborhood.