As promised, here are a few excerpts from the baseball book: "Anatomy of Baseball" a compendium of short stories written by some heady types as John Thorn and Roger Angell.
This is from the chapter "Nostalgia: "The 1950s and My Mitts" penned by Christopher Buckley.
"My amazing new Wilson Bob Feller, however, was so supple I had no problems breaking it in. My only concern was forming a big and sure pocket. The first thing I did was ride my bike down to Jeflick's Saddlery on De la Vina Street and buy, for a quarter, a rawhide string, one stronger and thicker than the leather the factory used to lace the tips of the fingers together. For my taste, mitts were always laced too loosely, and on any glove I owned I pulled them tightly together. I used a metal pick that looked almost like a dentist's tool, which came from a set we had for cracking walnuts and digging out the meat. I poked through the new rawhide string and then tied it off tight on the little finger. This curved the fingers inward and made a deep pocket from which any ball was unlikely to escape. Then, as many did, I placed a softball inside the glove, tied the fingers around it with string or rawhide, and placed the mitt beneath my mattress for a few days. Thus, the pocket was formed. . . .
"My glove and I were celebrities for a week or so; I had the newest and best mitt at school, and while I did not openly gloat, I must have beaming the whole day long. . . ."I was sure the mitt was magic, and that extra confidence just may have helped with an amazing play or two."
TRAGEDY STRIKES!
. . . "We were playing work-ups after school, and I was waiting for the second bus home so I could get my "ups" when the bus arrived and started to load. I ran to the edge of the field to collect my books and sweater when a friend's younger brother, Timmy Armour, asked to borrow my glove. I said I had to leave but he kept pleading that he was stuck in right field and unless caught a fly ball, he'd never get up. He swore he'd put my glove back in the eighth-grade classroom in my desk. All this time, and I hadn't learned a thing about holding on to your mitt. I loaned it to him. And of course it was not in my desk the next morning. I checked the coat hooks in back of the room where some kids hung their gloves -- nothing. I caught up with Timmy at lunch and asked for my glove. He said he'd thrown it in the breezeway by our classroom, where left our lunch bags before school. I reminded him he'd promised to put it in my desk, but he brushed me off and ran off to play as if my mitt were nothing more than a half-eaten five-cent bag of Fritos. I wanted to ring his neck. Forty-six years later and counting, I still want wring his neck! No apologies, not the slightest attempt at restitution, as if such could be made for that sun-yellow steer hide wonder."
The story gets a little worse. But it shows how gloves of our youth were treasured. And, some lost. Remember this tale the next time you bid on a Bob Feller Wilson glove.
. That nokona is just as good, beautiful, and soft as the day I bought it 15 years ago.