Dennis Crocker Memories - Part 7 (June 22, 2013)
When we were growing up, we played a lot of baseball. Maybe that would be better phrased by saying we played a lot with a baseball. The middlefield between Bob Shack's house and ours was the scene of most of our early efforts. Rarely could we field more than 6 kids, so it was usually 3 to a side. Often we'd play without a pitcher, cause if you had a pitcher, you had to have a catcher, and that only left one person to be a fielder. Other times, we'd play with a pitcher, but the catcher would be a person who was not batting from the side who was at bat.
Sometimes it'd be just Bob and me, and we'd take turns shagging flies. The ground was so rough, we tried not to hit many grounders, as invariably when you went down to scoop it up, it'd hit a bump and take a bad hop that more often than not, seemed to involve your nose!! Consequently, as we got older, we were better judges of the fly ball, and could field it better than we could field grounders.
Occasionally, we'd get together with some of the mill hill kids and go to the ball park and play a real game. We also would go as often as we could to the "real " ball games, as Pacolet Mills fielded a team in the textile league. We thought those guys were really great, and truly some of them were pretty darn good.
Of course baseball was a summer time activity, and we'd play hard and really get hot and sweaty. There was an outdoor spigot just outside our back porch, and the well itself was on the back porch. Of course this was after we got indoor plumbing, about 1951 or 1952. At any rate, when we got too hot, we'd take a water break , and go over to that spigot. If we let it run just a few minutes, the water would be nice and cold, being pumped straight up from the well. We'd stick our heads under the water to cool down. If any adults were around they would always caution us about cooling off too fast. "Not so fast , if you cool down too fast you are liable to catch polio." would be their caution.
I think, that before Dr Jonas Salk isolated the poliomelytis virus and developed a vaccine for it, it was common for folks back then to think that one of the causes was getting too hot and cooling off too fast. At least that was what my folks thought, and I believe it was common belief back then.
Another hazard from those long ago days was the "mad dog". Hydrophobia was fairly common in dogs back then, as most people let their dogs run loose, and I don't think a vaccine for it had been developed. Taking a pet to the vet was unknown to us. If the animal got sick, it either got better, or it died. If your dog got hit by a car, and was adjudged to be too badly hut to recover, Dad usually would "put it out of its misery". It was a very sad thing when such happened.
In those days, my Mother had a wringer style washing machine. It lived on the back porch , which was screened in. You older folks will know what a "wringer washer' is, but for the younger folk who might read this, the washer had 2 rollers mounted over the washing machine's tub. One of them was power driven, and to wring the water out of a garment, you'd start it through the wringer by hand, and the rolling motion would pull it on through, and the spring loaded rollers would press all the water out of the garment. They would come out quite damp, but with no free water in them. Then, you'd take all these garments to the clothes line where you'd hang them in the sunshine to finally dry.
One day my Mom was washing clothes, and she looked up the dirt road, and she saw a fairly large dog loping down the hill. She'd just dispatched my sister Charlotte and me to go out the road to MaMa Loftis" to get a half gallon of milk. We were not keeping a cow at that time. MaMa was milking 2 cows, so she had extra milk to sell, course she didn't charge us for it. At any rate, the way the dog was loping, she felt sure that it must be "Mad", and it was heading the direction that we were walking, but much faster than we could go. So it was sure to catch us before we got to MaMa's.
Mom ran to the chest of drawers and retrieved the long barreled S&W 32 that was kept for self defense, and came running out to the road bank. By the time she got there the dog had passed and was between her and us. She yelled to us "Move to the edge of the road and freeze, Stand very still, that's a mad dog coming down the road toward y'all!" We scampered to the shoulder of the road , and I held Charlotte's hand and whispered "Charl, don't move. Be very still." We both froze like Lot's wife, and the dog loped on past us. We could see it was frothing at the mouth, so it probably was mad.
In later years I have often wondered what Mom would have done had she got to the road bank before the dog passed. I have done a lot of competitive pistol shooting, and I now realize that Mom's chance of dispatching that dog was pretty slim. I am sure she would have tried to shoot it-best it had passed. No telling what would have happened if she'd have wounded it.
I reminisced about this with Charlotte a couple of weeks ago/ I told her that I was so worried that she would move and attract the dog to us. "Are you kidding?" she asked "My feet had put down roots and you couldn't have moved me with a bulldozer!" That was one of the few times I had seen her scared growing up. She was such a tomboy, and though 3 1/2 years younger , constantly tried to keep up with Bob and me (to our great chagrin). She had to get tough to stay with us, as I am sure we constantly tried to keep her from following us around.
Well, just another memory. Glad we don't have polio and Mad dogs to worry about today. Until next time, stay safe, and don't cool off too fast!
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