Random Thoughts

If I am remembering correctly (and I think I am), my Dad took me to my first big-league baseball game in 1964. It occurred to me the other day that means this year will be 50 years since I went to my first ballgame.

The ballgame was at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. It was actually a twi-night double-header between the Phillies and the Mets. We only stayed for the first game, though. The Phillies won. (It was ’64 — the Phils were great and the Mets sucked. Of course the Phillies won.)

My most vivid memory from that game …

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I was living in Philadelphia, the Cradle of Liberty.

I spent the night of the 4th in a Philadelphia jail, after squinting too closely at the badge number of one of Philly’s Finest, who was in the process of dropping a series of f-bombs on a poor foreign tourist couple who barely spoke English and who had the audacity to appear to have been asking the cop for directions. Welcome to Amerika…

The cops, of course, had been ordered by Hizzoner Frank Rizzo to round up all the radicals and hippies, who he said were planning on blowing up City …

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I was running around all day Thursday, and it wasn’t until late in the day that I noticed the date: March 28th. That’s a big day for me. The anniversary of the Three Mile Island fiasco…. er, accident. Thirty-four years this year.

I was there. I lived just a couple of miles away from the plant. As a reporter for Harrisburg Magazine, I covered the entire thing, so I got — literally — the inside scoop. I went on a tour of the damaged plant, I attended a press conference with President Jimmy Carter, I went to the NRC …

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