Just some thoughts:
My old grandmother used to often quote this scripture:
“All things work together for good to those that love the Lord.”
I must admit I have often struggled with that thought. Yet in my lifetime I have seen good come from less than desirable beginnings.
Case in point. He was born February 6, 1895. Six of his eight siblings would die in childhood. His mother would die of tuberculosis while he was still young, his father would die in a knife fight outside his own saloon. He once described himself saying “I was a bad kid.” At age seven he was taken by his father and left at an orphanage, part reform school. There were 850 boys at this school, all there as a last resort when other schools had failed them. It is said pupils there had no privacy. Everything, thing they did–sleeping, showering, dining, studying was done in community. All students there had a history of behavioral problems.
But while at that school he was to meet a Catholic Brother, Matthias Boutilier who took a special interest in the young boy. This Catholic Brother was very interest and was a very good baseball player. The young boy would later refer to Boutilier “as the greatest man I’ve ever known.”
This is where the young boy would first be introduced to the game of baseball. The brother took a special interest in him. At age eight he was playing against boys age twelve, at twelve he was playing against boys sixteen. At age nineteen he was headed to North Carolina for spring training. It would be the first time he had ever been out of Maryland, the first time he had ever been on a train. He knew nothing about major league baseball. That year would see him in the major leagues pitching for the Boston Red Sox’s. The first professional game he ever saw, he was in it.
I think one would have to agree that the boy had less than a illustrious beginning as a child. But today one name that has lived on through the ages in baseball, all of sports, is George Herman Ruth.
“He was bigger than the President. One time, coming north, we stopped at a little town in Illinois, a whistle stop. It was about ten o’clock at night and raining like hell. The train stopped for ten minutes to get water, or something. It couldn’t have been a town of more than five thousand people, and there were four thousand of them down there standing in the rain, just waiting to see the Babe.”
Richard Vidmer sportswriter–New York Times
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Posted March 25, 2019
March 3, 2018
Keep on,
Larry Adamson
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