Babe Ruth: Baseball Boy
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| The Babe Ruth book that sparked a frenzy. |
It's out of that love, that my love for creative writing was born.
In fact, I'll be just honest with you, I don't think you can be a good writer unless you are first a reader.
You have to be in love with words.
I don't have the great vocabulary of my friends Ed "Wordman" Lorenz or Chuck Toney, but I like to think all those years in the newspaper business taught me how to write so people can understand and enjoy what I put on paper.
Let's get in the way-back machine.
Let's go back to Mrs. Edith Wright's second-grade class at Cumming (GA) Elementary School on Elm Street, in Cumming. Like every other child in that class, I learned to read in first grade. (My teacher was Miss Johnson and she curiously disappeared from the face of the Earth after that one year. The born-from-hell heathen Van Piper was clearly too much for her.)
Mrs. Wright introduced us to the library, which was under the gentle care of Mrs. Elizabeth Mize. I loved both of those women. Mrs. Wright walked our class down to the library each week, Mrs. Mize helped us check out books we could actually read, and then Mrs. Wright gave us time each day to read those books. If we finished one before our next Library Day, we would slip down to the library during recess or after school and check out another one. My dear friend from church Lynn Raines - now Lynn McClure and a teacher herself - and I fell into a friendly competition to see who could read the most books in a week. I think between the two of us we were reading 10 books a week at a high point. (Lynn and I were also baptized the same Sunday at the First Baptist Church. To be completely honest, she was my Kindergarten crush. I loved her so much that I named a dog, Lynn. Lynn the Boxer.)
It was through all that second-grade reading that our class discovered the Childhood of Famous Americans series of books. These were easy-to-read, 200-page books about, well, the childhoods of famous Americans. Not only were Lynn and I consuming every one of these titles, but all of our friends were reading them, too. It was a Childhood of Famous Americans frenzy. (I was going to call it a palooza, but it wasn't a drunken party with a plethora of second-grade friends. It was, however, a frenzy.) There were dozens and dozens of titles. People like James Oglethorpe, Francis Marion, Nathan Hale, Paul Revere, Sequoyah, Washington Irving, Daniel Boone, Annie Oakley, The Ringling Brothers, Martha Washington, Molly Pitcher, Nancy Hanks . . . and, Babe Ruth.
Ah, Babe Ruth.
It was a perfect storm. The Atlanta Braves had just relocated to Atlanta. We are all about the age to start playing baseball. Someone's older uncle passed along their Topps baseball cards, and those cards made their way to school and Show-And-Tell. Then, someone found the Babe Ruth book in the library - the Babe Ruth book that was part of the Childhood of Famous Americans series.
That's when we all learned about a waiting list. That single, little 200-page book on the childhood of Babe Ruth had a waiting list in the library. It never went to a shelf. When someone finished reading it, they turned it in, and Mrs. Mize sought out and gave it to the next person on the list. It even got ugly. Let's say you were far down the list and your friend had the Babe Ruth book. You gave your friend a dime or a candy bar or your yeast roll in the lunchroom and your friend slid you the Babe Ruth book rather than turn it into the library.
Today, more than 50 years later, thanks to my friend and cousin Marcy Smith - our grandfathers were first cousins - I have that Babe Ruth book. Marcy's famed career as an educator led her back to administration at our elementary school. Before the Babe Ruth book could be recycled in the late 80s, she rescued it from the library and gave it to me to safeguard for our entire generation. I still have it on my desk; I see it every day.
That Babe Ruth book reminds me of how valuable teachers are for the promotion of reading. It also reminds me how much I love reading, the precious friends who read along with me, and the value of reading for whatever you decide to do with your life.
www.scottdvaughan.com
(Scott Vaughan writes about his second-grade experience in the school library and about other school memories in Elm Street, one of his books in the Memories of a Home series available on Amazon or at shopsvministry.com).
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