In tribute to Le Roy “Lee” Hammer
Livingston, NJ
1920-2006
The lady from down the street,
when I meet her someplace
an elementary school friend
asked about him.
“He always had his baseball uniform on”,
“Day and night as we played in the neighborhood
it was a part of him
as much as his hands,”
“I wondered whether he slept in it,”.
Baseball.
His was a generation of baseball.
A generation that traded cards
and then their uniforms – for those of their Country
while their mothers cried at home
whenever they looked in their closets—
They played pickup games while waiting to ship out
nap sacks as bases
then cleaned up for horrors so bleak
that they returned to never talk about it,
used silent hand signals from the bench
known only to each other
and not those in the stands.
He took stenographic notes
of the trials of those who ran the wrong way
then faced firing squads for the sake of the team
cried at night –
although baseball players are not supposed to cry.
He returned to become a Livingston, NJ diamond
coached Legion Ball and taught boys of summer
how to become men, face life,
and use the correct parts of speech.
After the field, the Legion Hall was his third base
an unspoken fraternity where they sat
wondered without saying
what they had been through
still balked about talking about it,
even to each other,
watched the Yankees and listened to Mel Allen
- he waited for when the Pirates were in town.
I wish I could have been there
instead of a safety patrol for the school bus
in Baptistown, New Jersey when
in the 60’s series
Virdon’s ball hit a little stone
popped the Adam’s Apple in Kubek’s tree,
then Mazeroski smashed one over the fence.
I cried – though I am sure he had that wry little smile
of satisfaction, one of the few times the Pirates
lived up to their name and stole something.
“So, did you ever hear about the golfer
who needed two pair of pants
in case he got a ‘hole in one’?”,
he asked the first time he meet me.
Those that he touched
filed past
knowing that like the cowboys of old,
he, for certain,
died with his spikes on.
Ray Brown
