Baseball Bats in Simons

By kiki

I don't know why, but I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about the baseball bats we used in our late 1940s summer baseball games...Baseballs and bats were sacred in Simons because nobody could afford them. 

So whenever our one and only bat would be used as firewood in somebody's wood-burning stove, we would improvise and replace it with a long two-by-four. Then, when that two-by-four would become ashes in somebody's stove, we would fall back on "desperate times calls for desperate measures" How you ask? First, we would walk to Vail Elementary School, where the playground was open for summer programs. If the equipment room was empty, one of the guys would walk in and grab a bat, and then we would all run like hell down the hill from the playground and disappear into our safety zone of El Hoyo Simons to start a game with our new bat. We never had a problem in El Hoyo:  we kids needed help finding a solution...And there was never a dull moment either.