Читать книгу Beep - David Wanczyk - Страница 13

THREE

The Summer of ’64

I swing big with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big.

I like to live as big as I can.

—Babe Ruth

WHAT CHARLIE FAIRBANKS really liked to do was sing. He wasn’t a big sports guy, the grandfather of beep baseball, but when he saw a problem, he acted.

It was 1964, and Mr. Fairbanks had heard that teachers at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind couldn’t get their youngest visually impaired students to play ball. Tossing and chasing were important developmental steps, stuff the school encouraged as they taught students how to be independent, but they’d tried everything, up to and including a football with a bell attached. The ringing pigskin worked fine for handoffs, but it got a lot less fun when it hit the ground and stopped making noise. So Fairbanks, an engineer with the Mountain Bell Telephone Company by day, headed to his basement workshop to become Edison-for-the-blind by night. He repeated one of his favorite sayings to himself, “If I can’t make it, you don’t need it,” and since the school needed an audible ball, he was going to make an audible ball, period.

A former military Mr. Fixit who was known around Mountain Bell for belting the songs from The King and I, Fairbanks suddenly had a new mission, and a shrill tune stuck in his head.

For his first models, Fairbanks tried Frankensteining a Wiffle Ball, then a tennis ball, then a golf ball. He opened them up and inserted telephone parts that he’d hoarded down in his workshop: Radio Shack oscillators, speakers from old Princess model rotary telephones. Next to one of the partially made cuckoo clocks he liked to build, and the doll hospital he ran for his daughters, he pieced together the first audio ball. Legend has it that for this particular model, a crude cardboard cube, Fairbanks pilfered a part from his family’s own phone to make the sound, and there are conflicting reports on whether or not this brilliant stroke of sports innovation annoyed his wife, Vi. Mrs. Fairbanks came onboard with the project soon enough, though. After her husband tore apart the regulation softballs he’d decided were the best carriers for the beep, she would hand-stitch each one of them back together, putting the finishing touches on what would become a new sport.

The rest of Fairbanks’s family helped too. “Durability was a big issue with the early balls,” Charlie’s daughter Deb told me, and she and her sister, Cheryl, little kids at the time of the construction, were the testers (read: destroyers) of the new gadgets. When they came home with a muted, busted ball, their dad would flash his lopsided smile and say, “Well, that didn’t work.”

The tinkering continued. Some of the modified softballs had wires connected to them that needed to be taped together, MacGyver-style, in order to activate the sound. One early prototype had a zipper, but that was found to be hard on the hands, so zipper ball was scrapped. Ultimately, Fairbanks rigged up a speaker and circuit board connected to a rechargeable NiCad battery, and he put this contraption inside his disemboweled softball, which itself had a small recessed jack. When the ball was plugged into a wall, the battery charged up, and as he removed the plug from the ball, a mechanism in it closed, activating the circuit board’s speaker. Eureka! Audio ball.

Fairbanks’s friend and collaborator, Ed Schnegelberger, remembers working on the ball many nights until 2 a.m. “His wife would holler down and ask us to quit,” he said. But Fairbanks kept at it. “He liked to find things that were broken and fix ’em.”

In total, Fairbanks tried six designs, and the beep emitting from all of them was strong, but he wanted the sound to keep up all day. If the schoolkids hoped for a marathon session of some game they’d invented, he needed his ball to ring off the hook.

“They just wanted to be able to play sports just like any other normal person could,” Fairbanks told the Houston Chronicle in 1991, the year he saw his first Beep Baseball World Series.

To give them that chance, he collected different compounds to place inside the balls that would cushion the circuit boards and make the ball more reliable. But he had to do more mad-scientist work to get the shapes he needed. One night, as his wife cooked chicken à la king for the family, Charlie heated foam rubber in a pot on the same stove. After supper, he reshaped his concoction and inserted it into the balls, creating armor for the machinery. He’d whistle show tunes and the ball would beep its accompaniment.

After months of trial and error, stewing and sewing, Charlie Fairbanks’s design worked. It could withstand being thrown around. But when he delivered an early version of the ball to the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, he realized it needed to be even stronger than he’d planned, because the little kids weren’t the only ones interested in the invention. Though the audio ball had originally been meant to help them play tag and keep-away—just a toy—the older students decided it could help them start an even more exciting game.

These were the days of Harmon Killebrew and Willie Mays winning home run titles with prodigious blasts—49 and 47 homers in ’64, respectively—and just a few years after Roger Maris’s historic 61-home-run record. Baseball on the radio was a mainstay for the blind, and in Colorado Jack Buck and Harry Caray were their friendly radio idols, broadcasting live out of St. Louis on KMOX-AM 1120, the station whose thousand-mile reach made the Cardinals a national team. Caray and Buck colorfully described those games and filled in the imaginations of children, sighted and not, from Bismarck to Danville to Baton Rouge to Denver. Late in his life, Buck said, “The biggest kick I get is to communicate with those who are exiled from the game—in hospitals, homes, prisons—those who have seldom seen a game, who can’t travel to a game, those who are blind.”

Those blind kids dreamed of hitting home runs, too, so it wasn’t long before Charlie Fairbanks’s Colorado bunch started swatting the audio ball with bats the deaf students on campus used. And though Fairbanks would soon hand off the production of the ball to telephone industry colleagues—reportedly dismayed by others’ desire to profit off it—he had started something big. The blind students weren’t exiled from baseball anymore.

“We were invited to go down to graduation at the blind school the year he gave the ball,” Deb said. “They wanted to thank my father. And he said, ‘You don’t thank me, I thank you.’” At that point, Charlie Fairbanks teared up and had to sit down. “He always said that, in our family, our bladders were too close to our eyeballs,” Deb recalled.

In later years, Fairbanks felt embarrassed by the credit he received for his role in creating beep baseball. In 1991, a player gave Fairbanks his MVP trophy, but the Grandfather of Beep returned it right away. The audio ball was only one of his side projects, and he didn’t think he deserved any kudos.

That year, the players made Fairbanks and his daughter Deb honorary members of the league and invited them to play at the exhibition “Midnight Beep” game. Deb remembers that she and her father protested, pointing out that it was too dark outside.

“They just laughed,” Deb said. “They blindfolded Dad and I don’t think he ever hit the ball. He got closer and closer.”

As he took his cuts at the updated version of his ball, Charlie Fairbanks tasted what his invention meant for visually impaired athletes. When I asked Deb what motivated her father to help out in these quiet ways, she didn’t know for sure. She just remembered that when he brought dolls to a homeless shelter—another side project—he made sure that they had those eyes that would open and close. And she remembered a photograph they had in their house of a blind boy holding a beep baseball to his ear and smiling.

“You know how you’re in church and there’s this lady that’s behind you and has the loudest voice? That was Dad,” Deb said. “Even though he appeared to be really gruff, he was a marshmallow. He hated sad movies or sad endings. He didn’t want any part of them.”

• • •

Five decades after the invention of the ball that made his sport possible, long-armed Ethan Johnston, a twenty-something from Denver, takes extra infield practice before his team’s World Series game against the Minnesota Millers. He’s lanky and bouncing, light on his cleated feet down by third base as he locates beep after beep. When two practice balls roll toward him at the same time, the sound is like a London crime scene, and Ethan is blind Sherlock.

Ethan doesn’t really know a lot about Charlie Fairbanks, even though they share a state and a game, but Fairbanks, who died in 2007, would have wanted it that way. In the words of his former boss at the phone company, Will Sinton, “Charlie didn’t ring his own bell.” Neither does Ethan Johnston. He hit .600 in the 2013 Series, but he laughs off some of his accomplishments.

“Blind people crack me up,” he told me. “They think they’re great athletes, but if it wasn’t for the pitcher and the spotter, they would suck.”

That may be partly true, but Johnston is impressive anyway, with a sweeping uppercut swing and a calm demeanor in the field that helps him rack up close to a third of his team’s putouts.

Ethan wears the white and blue of the Colorado Storm proudly now as he tracks the ball, but at his first practice in 2007, he showed up in a Kobe Bryant jersey and mesh shorts. He wasn’t sure what to make of blind baseball then, didn’t think it was realistic. Basketball was his game, as long as he played in natural light so he could make out the square above the rim. But after he threw himself around at beep ball practice, he changed his mind. The bruises made it feel real, and baseball became a possibility for him in spite of (or because of) his sore hips.

Born Esubalew Truneh, Ethan grew up poor in a remote village in Ethiopia during that country’s civil war and shortly after a widespread famine that left nearly four hundred thousand dead. I say that he’s twenty-something because Ethan doesn’t know his actual age, but sometime when he was still a little boy, his mother left him in the care of two men—“typical skinny-ass Ethiopians,” he described them—who promised to take him to a school in the capital city, Addis Ababa. On the way, the men attacked Ethan with sticks and a chemical, conniving to blind him so he’d be a more pitiful and successful beggar for their crime syndicate. In place of school, he received his education on the hectic streets of the capital.

Many of those streets, Ethan’s old confines, are named after the countries of Africa, so on Chad Street he’d be instructed to hold onto the back rail of an open-air bus until the riders tossed him a few coins; he might hear the money pinging into the gutter. Sometimes he’d be dragged by the buses. Though starving and alone—“they keep you separate so you can’t plot,” he told me—Ethan stayed positive, and he was propped up by one old woman who sometimes fed him traditional Ethiopian stews.

Finally, somewhere near Sudan Street, near the U.S. Embassy and the Children’s Hospital and the Sheraton, Ethan encountered a couple in a café who ran a blind school in the city.

“My guide took me in and this couple—the wife could see, the husband was blind—they heard me begging. The wife saw me and gave me ten cents.”

The two tried to coax Ethan and his criminal handlers to come to their school’s neighborhood, but his handlers were suspicious and forbade further contact. Coincidentally, though, Ethan ran into the teachers again on a bus, and they helped him get off at their stop. His handlers followed. The couple tried to make a deal, offering to adopt Ethan.

“That’s when my guides said they weren’t going to let that happen,” Ethan told me. An argument erupted, and the couple called for the school’s guards, who flashed their guns. Ethan doesn’t believe they ever intended to shoot, but the show of force got the attention of the handlers and they scurried away, pursued on foot by the good guys. For Ethan, mercifully, there wasn’t going to be any more following the pinging sound of tossed coins. He was safe, and after his rescue he received treatment for the tuberculosis he’d contracted. Unfortunately, the little boy had mostly forgotten the village he’d come from; so instead of going home to his mother, he was relocated through the work of adoption advocates to the town of Ashland, in central Missouri. Ethan had been begging for two and a half years.

“At that time,” he told me, “I thought America was a small town in Ethiopia that I’d never heard of.”

After thirteen operations, Ethan’s vision was still poor, but he could see a little bit more, and he settled in. Sports played a big part in Ethan’s understanding of the culture of his new small town, America. He took to calling himself the eleventh draft pick of his family because he was the eleventh of twenty-one they adopted, and basketball terminology was his first fluency. Aping the call of an arena’s public address announcer, Ethan described himself as “a four-foot, eleven-inch forward from East Africa. Eighty-six pounds. Mini-Shaq. Ethan Johnston!”

Now Ethan has a decent low post game for a guy who sees in shadow, and before many of my conversations with him, he’d just been on the court. He told me that if he was taller than five foot seven he’d be the first blind man to dunk, no doubt. But even during his early sports frenzy, baseball remained an unacquired taste.

“I thought it was boring,” Ethan said, “partly because I’d just learned English. Learning the language and the terminology and how the game is played was the big change.” Ethan thinks the Cardinals won the first game he went to, and maybe that made the difference. Either way, the voice of radio play-by-play man Mike Shannon (KMOX-AM 1120) became his company. “I love them now,” he said. “Us Missourians are very diehard Cardinals fans.”

It’s a long way from following the Cardinals to playing organized baseball, especially for a guy with an artificial cornea, but that’s where Charlie Fairbanks’s and Ethan Johnston’s paths run parallel. After a move to Denver to take part in a program at the Colorado Center for the Blind, Ethan met Demetris “TwoLegs” Morrow, a veteran of the Colorado Storm, and TwoLegs asked him if he wanted to come check out beep baseball. Ethan’s first reaction was doubt. “He was pretty suspicious about a lot of things back then,” said TwoLegs, who got his old-timey nickname when a troublesome sciatic nerve that limited his play in 2012 improved in 2013. “Yeah, when I was first telling him about it he didn’t think I was serious.” But because of TwoLegs’s insistence and Fairbanks’s imagination, Ethan eventually found that his new country had an exciting (modified) pastime.

A few years down his long road, it’s Ethan’s goal to be one of the best athletes in the league—he already has a defensive MVP award from 2010—and he desperately wants to win a series. Though Colorado is a top-tier team, they’re unlikely to win the title anytime soon, and so Ethan has thought of moving on. “There are a few teams that want to recruit me, but I’m loyal,” he said. “Unless we don’t have a team. And then I’ll skip to Taiwan.” He likes Homerun’s speed and their intangibles. “They win with dignity and honor and respect. I’m always rooting for Taiwan.”

Maybe it’s Ethan’s cosmopolitanism that leads him to favor Homerun. They come a long way from Taipei, he’s come a long way from Addis Ababa. But what really connects him is a personality trait he shares with a lot of those guys on that team. He’s almost always composed, blessed and cursed by a sense of proportion he had forced on him at a young age. How could a beep ball loss really get him down for too long?

In the perennial fight between Taiwan and Austin, meanwhile, Ethan sees a battle between understated mastery and bluster. He’s not a rowdy guy, not into what he calls “hooplah-rah nonsense,” and he tries to lead with quiet preparation. As for the Austin Blackhawks, he likes those guys, but he wouldn’t want to play for them: “They talk a lot of trash. It is a sport, you know. But I like when a team plays with dignity.”

It was around this point in one of my conversations with Ethan that I made a blunder. I’d been looking forward to talking to him for weeks because his story—violence, enslavement, and, finally, sports success—felt almost impossible to me. So through some mental trick, I expected Ethan to be devastated and haunted, but in a mythical way, a Magic Blind Man. I expected him to teach me something beautiful about sports, suffering, and the interplay of the two.

“Pardon me for saying this,” I stammered. “But . . .” And I didn’t know how to continue without insulting him. I started to tell him I was surprised he could be an everyday guy, chatting about the Broncos and about his regular route on the D Line in Denver from Oxford Station to the downtown Chipotle. (His order is corn salsa. Extra cheese. Emphatically no beans. Caramel macchiato at Starbucks, too.)

Shouldn’t he be some kind of sage? I thought. But his violent history doesn’t affect everything, and this was the mistake I’d made about blind baseball in general, influenced as I was by dozens of well-meaning TV segments on people with disabilities. No one is a possessor of secret wisdom just because of blindness, no one’s a Yoda-like caricature spewing maxims about perseverance.

Instead, Ethan is a charming patroller of the hot corner who sometimes talks like he’s had a media-preparedness lesson from Crash Davis of the classic baseball movie Bull Durham. “You’re gonna have to learn your clichés,” Kevin Costner’s Crash tells Tim Robbins’s Nuke LaLoosh, the rookie pitcher, and Ethan’s learned his. He talks about giving “110 percent” as an athlete, believes that you can’t worry about the past, and thinks “things happen for a reason.” We should almost expect him to say that he’s going to help the Colorado Storm any way he can, that he gives all the credit to his teammates, and that he takes it one game at a time.

So even though his past doesn’t always insert itself into the conversation, his love of sports lingo does, and that steady language of competition has been an education for Ethan. He’s learned that the physical world, the one he’s heard about on SportsCenter and experienced on the beep ball field, can be rewarding, too. In one of his first World Series appearances, he delivered a game-winning hit against the Boston Renegades and was mobbed by his teammates. They carried him off the field, and Ethan felt like he was flying in that moment, like he’d experienced some of the joy he’d heard on Cardinals’ radio broadcasts.

He wants that joy again, wants a job as a radio announcer so he can jaw about sports all day long, but by some measures the unemployment rate for the blind stands at around 70 percent, and Ethan’s in that majority. He’s had a few bites, but nothing steady, and he’s especially motivated to find work so he can help support his family back in Ethiopia, which he has improbably reconnected with.

“My mom right now lives in a grass hut, so I’m trying to get a job to put her in a stable house. My priority is family, and then beep ball.” On a recent trip back to his Ethiopian village, he displayed those priorities. As he held hands with his long-lost sister, and as he greeted a large extended family, he wore his Beep Baseball World Series T-shirt.

A year before that reunion, Esubalew “Ethan Johnston” Truneh had listened to the MLB World Series from his apartment in Colorado. That was the series in which David Freese came to the plate in game six, representing the Cardinals’ last chance. When he was down in the count, 1–2, Freese took a 98-mph fastball deep to right for a two-run, game-tying triple. In the eleventh, he homered to win the game, and the Cardinals, Ethan’s Cardinals, came back to take the series in seven. Ethan screamed and jumped around his apartment. He’s since memorized Shannon’s radio call: “Get up, baby, get up. David Freese has done it again!” he says.

“No one gave us a shot,” Ethan said. “But that’s the thing about baseball. You never know what’s going to happen until the last strike, the last out.”

Ethan thinks every new year could be Colorado’s year. He wants that ring. And it could happen, if Colorado gets all the bounces. But as I watched Ethan circling the beep ball and gathering it up, I only thought about the difference between the little boy begging for coins in the big city and this leader of the Storm, lunging for another kind of sound.

Charlie Fairbanks never met Ethan, but he would have liked him. They’re both Colorado guys, both unassuming. And Ethan doesn’t live far from Fairbanks’s old house. In fact, he often eats at an Ethiopian restaurant on Fillmore Street, only six houses down from where Fairbanks created the first ball. Mr. Fairbanks died the year Ethan found beep, but if he could have seen what his invention has done for the younger man, he would have whistled a tune and cracked one more lopsided smile.

“Well,” he would’ve said. “That worked.”

• • •

Ethan Johnston’s biography is singular and devastating, but the pattern of slow, consistent success following a trauma is a familiar one in the beep baseball world.

The man who’s known as the first beep baseball player, a brash Minnesotan named John Ross, had limited sight as a small child and endured multiple surgeries to maintain it, but he was also a rambunctious kid, “as healthy and as active as a curious jack rabbit,” he wrote in his memoir, Feeling Sports. During one period of recovery, in the 1940s, little John Ross, age seven, had his head stabilized so that tissue around his eyes would heal. But John, who would eventually marshal dozens of blind athletes and help create a new sports subculture, couldn’t stay out of a neighborhood football game.

For a few quarters, he did sit dutifully on the steps of the family house, but he just had to break his parents’ rules and carry the ball. Running left to the front corner of his lawn’s end zone, he veered toward some rose bushes that marked the sideline, and after one of his friends gave him a hard two-hand touch, Ross tumbled into the bushes. He felt a thorn pierce his good eye.

Hearing the commotion, Ross’s mother rushed onto the gridiron, into her garden. Ross remembered that “her face was becoming so red,” and as I read his account I imagined a flushed, anxious parent. What the little boy actually saw was much worse. “Her features,” Ross wrote, “began to disappear in an ocean of brilliant crimson.” He was, in fact, bleeding to blindness. He clung to his mother, but just like in the iris shot at the end of an old melodrama, the color closed in on her face and the film ended.

The Rosses were stricken, but instead of placing their son under a cone of protection, his parents made every effort to raise a self-reliant young man. Johnny had a paper route, and he participated in many sports, eventually and improbably playing offensive guard for his high school football team. In an Associated Press article from 1954, his father, Don, remembered the bittersweet feeling of playing catch with his boy: “Finally, my heart became so heavy I couldn’t stand it any longer and I excused myself. I went inside and watched him through the window. John was playing an imaginary game of football with himself, acting as if he were throwing the ball up and catching it. That was a thrill. I knew then my boy had something on the ball.”

“At that time, the blind were put in a corner and expected to make baskets,” Kevin Barrett, historian of the NBBA, told me. “But John Ross did all sorts of things that blind people don’t do.”

Ross did all sorts of things that almost no person does. His life story is a catalogue of uncanny Americana, including the old tale of the blind man driving and the not-so-old tale of the blind man waterskiing professionally. But it’s as a journalist that John Ross first flashed onto the national scene. When he was eleven, the boy who would eventually popularize baseball for the blind was among the very last people to interview Babe Ruth.

At the time, in 1948, the Babe was on a publicity tour through the Upper Midwest, but he was also suffering from the final stages of throat cancer. Because of his limited energy, he’d decided to cancel the slate of interviews he’d previously scheduled in the Twin Cities, but he didn’t cancel on John Ross. So, with the seasoned beat reporters eating their hearts out, Johnny took his place on Babe Ruth’s lap and tossed him some softball questions. The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, writing about the unlikely interview, called Ross “perhaps the city’s No. 1 sports enthusiast” and “a cheerful young fellow who sees all the big sports events here even though illness deprived him of his eyesight a few years ago.”

In the best moment of the interview, John Ross asked, “Would you sooner pitch or play the outfield?” “I’d like to be in there every day,” Ruth replied. “That’s how much I like to play. I think that tells you, Johnny.” Ruth was only fifty-three, but Ross remembered that his voice sounded like it was being dragged over broken glass that night. Nevertheless, everything the baseball legend said was a pearl of wisdom for the aspiring blind athlete and sportswriter. Like the Babe, Ross liked to be in some kind of game every day, and he wouldn’t let his blindness keep him from competition.

“Had I not lost my sight, I would have tried my best to become a professional baseball player,” he once wrote. Little did he know at the time of his high-profile interview that he would become the Blind Bambino, the Sultan of Beep.

• • •

Not long before John Ross’s heart-to-heart with Babe Ruth, baseball for the blind had in fact had one of its first organized test runs. As far back as 1938, only three years after Title X of the Social Security Act buoyed the fortunes of the blind by providing a small income, there was a game of “sound baseball,” and Popular Mechanics ran a story about the inaugural contest. The sport was thought up by Robert V. Chandler and tested at the warm-and-fuzzy-sounding Industrial Home for the Adult Blind in Oakland, where Chandler was superintendent. In that game, nine fielders knelt on a pad beyond the infield, and the ball had a “jingler” inside (Charlie Fairbanks would not have been impressed). It’s not entirely clear what this jingler was—bells, metal balls?—but a 1916 story out of South Carolina told of “a game of baseball, played with two tin cans, one placed within the other so as to produce a rattling sound.” Blind ballplayers were nothing if not resourceful.

The hitters in sound baseball used a kind of field hockey stick to slap at the ball that a sighted pitcher rolled toward them. The bases buzzed, so there were some similarities to beep ball, but fielders actually had to throw the ball toward the base in front of the path of the runner in order to record an out, adding a dimension of zaniness that was probably much less fun than it sounds. Recreation magazine reported that “the scores have been quite large,” and it’s hard to imagine anyone making an out in sound baseball.

There were two teams at the Industrial Home for the Adult Blind, the Bears and the Tigers, and in April 1938, wearing uniforms donated by C. S. Howard, owner of the racehorse Seabiscuit, they met in an intramural contest dubbed “the blind world series.” Charlie Berta led the Bears, and “slugging John Bogman” seems to have captained the Tigers. A rare picture displays the cramped nature of the sport (the picture also shows a dozen men in three-piece suits and top hats acting as umpires). All of the players (and all of the dapper gentlemen) were packed into an area the size of one side of a tennis court, and the fielders had only six feet of space between them.

“The batter cocks an ear as the ball jingles toward him. Wham! He takes a mighty swing,” wrote Don Caswell, United Press correspondent. And Slugging John Bogman, though “flustered” by the attendance of California’s governor, smacked a triple over the head of the shortstop.

“The big weakness now is that the ball travels with such speed that the players are unable to locate it fast enough,” wrote J. P. Lang, supervisor of athletics for the San Francisco Recreation Department. “However, the players feel that within a short time, with practice, they will be able to play a much better game.”

On May 23, 1939, at League Park in Cleveland, the Ohio School for the Blind Reds played the Ohio School for the Blind Blues in what was a slightly better, slightly less offensively minded game.

“For three exciting innings they battled each other, every player in dead earnest, yet obviously having a swell time,” wrote Ray Dorsey after watching the earnest Reds defeat the swell Blues, 7–2; the Lions Club, a sponsor of the game, passed out twenty-two hundred canes at the event before a group of their own volunteers got shut out by the triumphant Reds, 3–0.

For months, I assumed these exhibitions were the first attempts at organized, non-tin-can blind baseball. Some New Deal spirit of progressivity, I was sure, had brought about a confidence in the capabilities of the blind that hadn’t existed before. But while I dug for more information about Chandler and the boys, I found that the earliest known precursor of beep baseball emerged not during FDR’s day, but during the second administration of Grover Cleveland, in 1894.

At the American Association of Instructors of the Blind conference that year, a Floridian named H. N. Felkel declared, “There is no game for the blind that will so enlist the emotions, quicken the perception, call forth determination and excite emulation as does baseball for its votaries.”

Mr. Felkel, however, had not yet heard what was going on in Louisville, Kentucky. After delivering his speech, he entered into a conversation with a music teacher from the Kentucky Institute for the Blind, Charles Frederick, about the exercises Frederick’s students were engaged in. Off the record, Frederick must have mentioned something to Felkel about baseball, and so we get the following conversation, captured in the riveting book Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Meeting of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind (1895):

MR. FELKEL: You mention baseball.

MR. FREDERICK: I do not know whether baseball for the blind has reached as far as Florida. The boys have modified it somewhat, so that they have a right good game. The pitcher stands about eight feet from the batter and counts one, two, three. At three he lets the ball go, and I think that twice out of five times he will hit it. When [the batter hits] the ball he runs. We had four trees that were marked very nicely for the bases. They learn these bases so that they can make them very well.

MR. FELKEL: Would it not be a good suggestion to have ropes to the bases to guide them?

MR. FREDERICK: Yes, sir; it would.