To Mom

Anna (Kundick) Emeigh
b. September 11, 1927
m. Merl Eugene Emeigh, October 22, 1952
d. July 28, 2006

The baseball is signed by the members of the 1960 Pirate team, Pittsburgh’s first World Championship team in 35 years. My Uncle Mike (my mother’s only brother, after whom I am named) got it, and I remember my mother showing it to me when I was about 10 or so, a few years after the series, and I remember that she got a stand for it and gave it to me at some point - perhaps when I went away to college, perhaps when I moved out of the house into my own place. Somewhere along the way - I don’t exactly remember when - it found its way back from my possession to my parents’ house. It remained on the windowsill for a number of years, until my sister noticed that some of the signatures were fading, and moved it to the mantel. I haven’t given it much thought in recent years.

As I posted in my last note here, Mom passed away last Friday, after a 2 1/2 year battle with lung cancer. Dad says that she was never much of a baseball fan, and that she’d fall asleep during games. Yet growing up, I can’t remember more than a cursory conversation with Dad about baseball, and I can recall dozens of conversations with Mom. I remember Mom telling me about the Pirates of her youth, going to games on the old “Flying Fraction”, the 77/54 trolley line between Pittsburgh’s North Side where she lived and the Oakland area where Forbes Field was located. I remember that her favorite player was the old infielder, Frankie Gustine, who later ran a restaurant across from Forbes Field. And I remember some other things about Mom, me, and baseball:

-- Mom told a story about coming upon me at age 3 while I was reading the baseball statistics in the Pittsburgh Press, and then later telling the older neighborhood kids about them. I don’t remember this, but those old neighbors do. When Mom told this story in front of me, it was always with a touch of pride in her voice - it was an achievement that she treasured.
-- Mom always made sure that I had something to eat both before I went out to a game, and after I came home, even when games were scheduled during family dinner hour, which was extremely important to her (I can still remember hearing “this is not a cafeteria” each time I asked for something as an early dinner.)
-- Mom may have complained about the bare spots in her back yard where home plate, the bases, and the pitchers’ mound were located for our whiffleball games, or when we banged a rubber ball off the front door while trying to throw it against the front porch steps - yet she never once told us to move the games someplace else.
-- I had a pretty good-sized collection of baseball cards when I was a kid, and later on started playing simulation games - All-Star Baseball, SOM, APBA, and Pursue the Pennant. My buddy Bob and I kept stats for our All-Star baseball league (he had a cousin named Don Minch, so he always wanted Don Mincher on his teams), and later on I kept extensive stats from my APBA games. We didn’t have a lot of money, and baseball and box games weren’t exactly inexpensive - yet somehow there were always a few nickels and dimes available for the Topps box when I went with Mom to the five-and-ten, and somehow I managed to get an APBA game when I was 15. And I don’t remember Mom ever complaining about the shoeboxes full of baseball cards and the home-grown scoresheets and stat sheets that littered the bottom of my bed from the time I first started playing All-Star Baseball in Bob’s back yard until the time I went away to college.

Mom may not have been a baseball fan after all; we didn’t talk baseball very much once I became an adult and went out on my own. But it doesn’t matter whether or not she liked the game. Mom recognized the passion inside that three-year-old boy sitting on the porch reading and memorizing baseball statistics, and took pains to make sure that it would never be extinguished.

The baseball now sits on the top shelf of my desk. It’s still in the same old plastic holder on the stand that Mom got so many years ago. It’s a testament to the boy’s love for the game, and the mother’s love for the boy. And this article - as best as it can - is the testament of the boy’s love for the mother.

Bye, Mom.