(Editor's note: A number of years ago I had the privilege of writing a column for a publication titled "Fidalgo Magazine." The following is one of those columns.)
The search for modeling glue drew us to my office desk, drawers pulled open one at a time, contents shifted and shuffled as the search continued. What I failed to recognize until several minutes into the project was the hypnotic power a viewing of Dad's Private Stuff could exert on a 9-year-old boy.
My son's eyes opened wide, his hand shot out immediately when he spotted a tiny blue plastic box in a corner. What's this, he asked, even as the top of the box came off in his hands. Inside was a small silver "tool," the function of which was a complete mystery to him. Soon, however, he had learned that the instrument was a camera attachment. It screws onto the shutter release button of a camera and when "set" gives the photographer a chance to get into that family portrait with the rest of the gang. Nowadays many cameras have such a feature built in.
As usual, my son's excitement rubbed off a bit on me. Buried deep on the bottom of one drawer, for example, were two highly sentimental artifacts from my youthful days as a baseball player and fan. First was a gray rosin bag, given to me by an adult (I can't remember who) when I was pitching in Little League. In an era when boys didn't have fancy equipment like batting gloves and wrist bands with team logos, the rosin bag set me apart as something special, at least in my own mind. Can't say as it improved my pitching, but I sure enjoyed giving that ol' bag a couple of tosses from time to time on the mound before getting back to the business of trying to throw strikes.
This article of memorabilia, by the way, was returned to me some 30 years after I used it by my younger brother Rich, who acted as self-appointed "curator" of the Steve Berentson Collection of Neat Stuff after I moved away from home (and I thought I was a packrat). So it was obviously special to someone else besides me...
The other special baseball surprise in my desk was the official program of the 32nd Annual American/National All-Star Game of 1962. I was 10 years old when Dad and I piled into the car to head to Washington, D.C. (we lived in northern Virginia at the time) and D.C. Stadium, home of the Washington Senators.
No big deal. I only got to watch in person a few players like Brooks Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Maury Wills, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Stan Musial. Yeah. Talk about your once-in-a-lifetime collection of greats...
I don't remember if President Kennedy was there for the game, but a photograph of him throwing out the first pitch of the Senators' season was prominently displayed in the program. I don't even recall the score of the game, but if memory serves me, it was Musial's last all-star game.
The all-star statistics page offered evidence of why I and millions of other American kids counted Stan the Man among our favorites, no matter where we lived. He topped the all-star series record list in the following categories: at-bats (59 to Ted Williams' 46); hits (19 to Mays' 17); total bases (39 to Williams' 29); home runs (six to Williams' four). In the miscellaneous categories he topped the list with 21 consecutive all-star games. I'm afraid that if I checked the sports almanac I'd discover Musial struck out in a single at-bat that year, so I prefer to settle for the fuzzy memories of a great game featuring some great players. Sometimes the facts can get in the way.
This all-star program is also pretty remarkable, given the fact that an arson torched my rental house in 1978, wiping out almost all of my possessions except some journals, books and magazines protected in a credenza. Scorched edges on the cover serve as a reminder of how close this piece of childhood memorabilia was to becoming nothing more than a pile of ashes.
There were private desks and dresser drawers in my Anacortes childhood, too ... teeming with exciting stuff that I can't remember with detail. At Grandpa Berentson's there were some pocket watches and, if I recall correctly, a handful of silver tax tokens. Dad had a cigar box in his dresser, filled with great stuff like cufflinks, political buttons ("I Like Ike"), documentary evidence of his World War II stint in the Navy, some old snapshots and a fascinating, bomb-like apparatus with detailed directions on how to hook it to a car's electrical system to produce smoke and a screaming whistle (I wonder if that item is still in the box? I wonder if the box is still in the drawer?).
There's something to be said for privacy, to be sure, but our recent search for modeling glue served as a reminder of the awesome power of discovery. May our children's discoveries continue to uncover only those artifacts that inspire the kinds of stories we are happy to tell...
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