Tag Archives: Willie Mays

3rd Avenue West

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Rickwood Field; Birmingham

When Chicago’s Comiskey Park was demolished in 1991, Birmingham’s Rickwood Field, built in 1910, became the oldest professional baseball park in the United States (www.rickwood.com). The history of the storied baseball field in what is now a less-traveled section of Birmingham’s West End will be revealed to a wider audience on June 20, 2024, when Rickwood hosts Major League Baseball’s nationally televised tribute to the Negro Leagues with a regular season game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. Birmingham native and Hall of Famer Willie Mays, who began his professional baseball career as a Birmingham Black Baron in 1948, will be the honoree.

In the years of segregation, the Birmingham Black Barons shared Rickwood with the Birmingham Barons. Even for those who are not big baseball fans, lists of the ballplayers who played at Rickwood – either as members of the local teams or with exhibitions or traveling teams – is impressive to the point of being daunting. In addition to Willie Mays, there are Hank Aaron, Vida Blue, Ty Cobb, Piper Davis, Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Satchell Paige, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and so many more. When Birmingham native Charlie O. Finley owned the Oakland A’s, his 1967 minor league Birmingham A’s roster boasted Dave Duncan, Rollie Fingers, Reggie Jackson, Tony LaRussa, and Joe Rudi.

The Birmingham Barons’ current home is Regions Field in downtown but they play a throwback game at Rickwood every season. Rickwood is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A very active Friends of Rickwood organization has worked for decades to nurture and refurbish the baseball park, which remains a facility for a local college and Birmingham city schools. Major League Baseball has chipped in with upgrades over the past year, since the Negro Leagues salute was announced. Sneak peeks indicate that the changes and upgrades have not diminished the essential character of the proud structure or its infield. I can still imagine my dad as a teenager riding his bicycle from Ensley to Rickwood to sell concessions in the stands. From Rickwood Field, one can see 3rd Avenue West.

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When I was a kid, Birmingham was still a center of heavy industry and factory-life was going strong in areas like the U.S. Steel works in Fairfield and Ensley and other industrial sites. Because of shift work, the commercial areas of these places were twenty-four-hour districts.

To a young boy, the bustle and energy of western Birmingham was exciting. I had grandparents in Ensley and Fairfield Highlands and lived in the Green Acres community from second to eighth grade; much of my growing up years was spent in those areas.

In those days before the interstate, 3rd Avenue West was the central thoroughfare of west Birmingham. Going east on 3rd Avenue West, it became 3rd Avenue North and went downtown into the theatre district. Going west, it became Bessemer Super Highway. Bessemer Super Highway was originally modelled on the German autobahn and was destined to be the first controlled-access highway in the United States. Funding dried up in the Depression, but the four-lane with wide medians was still impressive for its time.

I particularly remember a row of motels including a Wigwam Village Motor Court, a chain featuring teepee-shaped cabins around a central teepee main building. My parents bowled at the Holiday Bowl and Alabama’s first Holiday Inn was along that stretch.

Occasionally, we would hear about a “gas war” up on the highway. Gas stations would start competing for the lowest prices and cars would line up to take advantage as long as it lasted. I can remember gas getting as low as ten cents a gallon before a filling station owner blinked and gas prices began to make their way back up to the average price of 31 cents a gallon.

5 Points West Shopping City was a sprawling shopping center with a large variety of shopping options. My mother has particularly fond memories of New Williams and Parisian department stores at the site. A Parisian saleslady would lay aside boys’ clothes that she thought Mother might like to consider for me.

Across from the shopping center was the Alabama State Fairgrounds. In those days it was a real fall state fair with agricultural exhibitions, a grandstand, and a large midway with carnival rides. Kiddieland Park was the small amusement park on the southwest corner of the fairgrounds. Fair Park Drive-In Theatre was at the other end and the Birmingham International Raceway occupied the grandstand area. The Birmingham Crossplex, an athletic facility, occupies the space now.

There were other favorites along 3rd Avenue like El Charro, a Mexican restaurant in a time before there were Mexican restaurants and fast-food joints everywhere. Spinning Wheel was a local chain of ice cream drive-ins. It was close by Lowe’s Skating Rink, a popular spot where my parents had dated. Carnaggio’s had traditional Italian. A unique dining choice where my family was regular was Porter’s Cafeteria, a meat and three on a balcony overlooking a drugstore.

Those places always felt special to me.

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Memory gets burnished with time. And, as time erases remnants, younger generations who were not first-hand witnesses are strained to give credibility to those memories. That’s true of many areas in Birmingham’s West End. Much of the news from 3rd Avenue West is negative these days, but there are still places of pride and plenty of good memories in the western part of town. Rickwood Field’s upcoming moment in the spotlight should help to revive memories of that area’s importance to local history. Perhaps, also, it might inspire further positive development.

“… borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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A tropical storm is swirling to the west of us right now, bringing intermittent winds and rain to my part of Alabama. Unless I am in the brunt of a tropical storm – and I have been on a few occasions – I am drawn to the energy of that peripheral circuit of occasional storms moving ever onward with their wind-driven rain and distant thunder. Those tropical rains always seem, to me, more cleansing than other weather events.

Fittingly, the “Peggy Martin” heirloom rose that I ordered a couple of months ago was delivered to my front door today between brief showers. The Peggy Martin was bred from a rose in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, that survived for two weeks under twenty feet of water in Mrs. Martin’s yard after Hurricane Katrina. Neighbors in my parents’ Birmingham neighborhood have trained one over their garage and the blooms are magnificent. Once I heard the history of the plant, I had to have it for myself and was able to order it from Petals from the Past in Jemison, Alabama (www.petalsfromthepast.com).

When people learn of my retirement, which was official on June 1, they ask me how I plan to “celebrate.” This is not a celebratory time; I can think of no appropriate celebration. A trip is out of the question and I’m not anxious to go sit in a restaurant just yet. I enjoy being outside and think it will be enough for now to take walks, work in the yard, and find some place quiet to think and reflect.

The traditional gift for retirement was a gold watch or some other sort of commemorative timepiece. It symbolized that one’s time was finally one’s own, no longer owed to an employer.

It’s a nice idea, but metal watches and I have a bad history. I can wear watches with leather or synthetic bands, but it is proven that some people’s body chemistry stops watches and I must be one of those people. Every metal-banded watch I have ever owned has died prematurely. Whenever I adjust the time or date on my father’s gold watch, I limit my contact lest my curse cause consequences.

Today, I think, a timepiece would mostly symbolize counting down the remaining days and hours of the annus horribilis that is 2020.

Nevertheless, I am fond of ritual and, to commemorate this particular milestone, I have been writing short thank you notes to people who were influential in my career and education over the years. It is a peaceful and positive step, interrupted by the news that another friend from my Tuscaloosa years has died – the fourth such friend I have heard about since New Year’s Day. Notes of thanks give way to an expression of sympathy and loss.

On a more positive note, I can truly celebrate that, after close to two years, I have finally finished reading every single word of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past. At times, it seemed like a burden, but I enjoyed the task overall. Throughout a lifetime of reading, I have found that I will often tackle a book at just the right time, and the past two years seemed the right time to conquer Mount Proust. It’s a masterful novel, full of digressions and rife with human foibles, not the least of which are those of the Narrator himself. His paranoiac jealousy and obsessive nature are often irritating and I occasionally tossed the novel aside in disgust. Yet I always returned.

Proust’s catty social satire, which often made me laugh out loud, is a clever indictment of a milieu I’ll never know firsthand. I was often startled to realize that the society he describes in the final volumes is barely a century past. Each time he evokes an airplane or automobile, I felt myself jolted into the modern era.

Hundreds of characters come and go through the 3300 plus pages. Some leave and never return; some leave, only to reappear volumes later. Some die.

On a more prosaic note, I ventured out for some necessities this afternoon and, as I walked past a clothing store geared to big and stout women, a woman walked past me wearing a tee-shirt that proclaimed “In the South We Say ‘Hey Y’All’.” I have no problem, really, with “Hey Y’All” and I might have said it on occasion; I can’t remember when, and it would have been ironic, no doubt, but still, I don’t find it offensive. I was actually relieved that the tee-shirt manufacturer had punctuated “y’all” correctly. Still, what kind of person would feel a need to proclaim such a thing on a tee-shirt at the big and stout store?

Baseball great Willie Mays, from the Birmingham suburb of Fairfield, has been known as the “Say Hey Kid” throughout his storied life. And, of course, the Gomer Pyle character, created by actor Jim Nabors, made “hey” a sort of mantra. Even now, whenever somebody tells me that somebody sent me a “hey,” I will usually reply, “’Hey to Goober.”

I say “y’all” whenever it feels right, but I must admit that Southern cook Paula Deen sort of ruined “y’all” for me forever.

Recently, I was talking to a pregnant friend. She was healthy and upbeat and our conversation shifted to current events. I commented that it is amazing, really, how well we are all functioning – all things considered. “It’s really horrible,” I said, “what the world is going through. And yet, we are dealing with it; we’re still functional.”

“Yeah,” she said, “we just need some certainty, some direction. Everything is so fluid now.”

My Peggy Martin rose doesn’t look like much right now, as it basks in the rains of the remnants of a tropical storm. I think, though, that I may look to it for a great deal of symbolism in the months and years to come.