Published Sunday, July 05, 2009

A cold Fourth of July in Cleveland

Sports Column by TOMMY CAMP

tommy@newnan.com

Growing up I always associated the Fourth of July with hot weather and outdoor activities.

You know, stuff like softball games, picnics, parades, fishing, swimming, fireworks, cookouts, all accompanied by the obligatory outpouring of perspiration that goes with living in a place where high humidity is a way of life.

All that changed in 1960.

My family traveled to Cleveland, Ohio where my mother's brother, my uncle Creston, lived.

He would come to Georgia once or twice a year, but that was our first-ever reciprocal visit to, as the billboards proclaimed on the outskirts of the city, "beautiful, scenic Cleveland."

Imagine my shock when I discovered Cleveland to be neither beautiful nor scenic, but rather seedy in appearance and full of, well, people who talked funny.

It did have one redeeming quality, however. It was the home of the Cleveland Indians who played in cavernous Municipal Stadium right on the banks of Lake Erie, a body of water which was advertised much as the city was, but one which fell far short of its buildup as well.

As fortune would have it the Indians were scheduled to host the Kansas City Athletics in a Fourth of July doubleheader while we were there and my daddy and I, as we did in most places we ever visited, made plans to take in the games.

Of course we had ventured northward taking with us nothing but the clothes we always wore in Georgia in the summer time. Not in our wildest imaginings did we think that mid-summer weather anywhere else could be any different than what we were used to back home.

But the morning of the Fourth dawned cold in Cleveland. I'm not talking chilly. I'm talking cold.

The weatherman on TV said it was 39 degrees at daybreak.

Uncle Creston said it'd probably warm up by August.

Daddy said he wasn't worried, it'd warm up by game time.

Daddy was wrong.

When we got to ball park the temperature hovered at around 40 degrees and the wind coming off the Lake was whipping into the stadium at what I estimated to be roughly 200 miles per hour.

The wind chill, a term unknown in those days, was such that had Eskimo fishermen encountered it, they would've canceled the day's activities in exchange for the warmth of their igloos.

Of course we were dressed accordingly.

I had on a T-shirt and shorts which afforded me about as much protection from the wind and cold as wrapping myself in tissue paper would have.

We got to the ball park early, as we always did to watch batting practice.

What that meant was that on this particular holiday, we watched two hours worth of BP, then the first nine-inning game, then sat through a 30-minute pause between games which gave us plenty of time to dwell on just how bone-chillingly cold it really was, followed by the second nine-inning marathon, all under conditions one would more readily associate with exploring the arctic than watching baseball.

I shivered through every pitch, every pop up, every ground ball, every run and not even an infusion of what the concession stand attendants called hot chocolate which was anything but hot and not very chocolatey either, stemmed the tide of that misery.

I've loved baseball all my life and loved watching it, but not on that day.

On a Fourth of July, of all days, when we celebrate our nation's independence here in the south the way it should be celebrated, by sweating and fanning, we celebrated it up north by watching the coldest doubleheader in the history of mankind and I vowed by everything I held holy that it'd be a hot July day in Cleveland before I'd ever celebrated it like that again.