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- The Best Baseball Season Ever
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- Dick Meister
Like many others, I'm looking forward to the new Major League Baseball season, although I know it can't possibly match my favorite season -- the 1950 season of Northern California's Mendocino County League. I was a young shortstop for Boonville, one of the semi-professional league's six teams, certain I was taking the first step toward major league stardom.
No major league team has ever had more loyal -- and boisterous -- fans than ours. Just about everyone in town jammed our little ballpark for every game, bellowing out encouragment virtually non-stop, offering us beer and other refreshment between innings and in the town bar across from the park before and after the games.
It was a great time to be young, a great time to be playing baseball.
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Piece Description
Like many others, I'm looking forward to the new Major League Baseball season, although I know it can't possibly match my favorite season -- the 1950 season of Northern California's Mendocino County League. I was a young shortstop for Boonville, one of the semi-professional league's six teams, certain I was taking the first step toward major league stardom. No major league team has ever had more loyal -- and boisterous -- fans than ours. Just about everyone in town jammed our little ballpark for every game, bellowing out encouragment virtually non-stop, offering us beer and other refreshment between innings and in the town bar across from the park before and after the games. It was a great time to be young, a great time to be playing baseball.
Broadcast History
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Transcript
This baseball season is going to be great. Count on it. But still I know it won?t even come close to matching my favorite baseball season ever.
That was a long, long time ago ? 1950. I was a 17-year-old shortstop not yet out of high school in San Francisco taking the first step on the way to what I was sure would be a terrific major league baseball career.
You have to start somewhere. And my somewhere was Boonville, California ? home of the Loggers of the semi-professional Mendocino County League. Boonville, about 120 miles north of San Francisco, was just a bit smaller than the city ?A few hundred residents, two grocery stores, a service station, pool hall and a combination bar and restaurant with a dozen crumbling one-room cabins behind it -- the Boonville Lodge, our main source of food, lodging and entertainment for the summer.
Small Boonville was, but very well place...
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Timing and Cues
INTRO: Dick Meister recalls his favorite baseball seson.
OUTRO: Dick Meister is a San Francisco writer.
