Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508140037
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's game night for the Salem Avalanche, and for the first time in more years than Jessie Reynolds can remember, she doesn't have to care.
Her noisy - and sometimes destructive - Florida Street neighbors are gone.
And so are the days when a Salem baseball home game meant parking her car in her back yard, having 10-year-olds swarm her front yard in search of coveted balls and praying that a long home run over the right field wall wouldn't shatter her storm door.
Yet for Reynolds and other residents of Salem's East Bottom, who've had baseballs rain on their homes for years, the team's parting for the $10 million greener pastures of Salem Memorial Stadium is bittersweet.
Bitter, said Ruby Palmer who lives a few doors up from Reynolds, because she'll miss the hours of people-watching.
Sweet, Reynolds said, because she can finally park her car out front.
But the truth is, not much else will change, Reynolds said.
"We still have baseball," she explained. "Not as often, not as many cars, and not as many people. But we still have it."
She's right.
Professional baseball is a quarter-century tradition at Municipal Field. And it isn't dying just because organized baseball turned up its nose at the 60-some-year-old field. City Council renamed the diamond Kiwanis Field in May and said it will be available for kids and amateur leagues to use.
Now that's a tradition that harkens back to the days when Joyce Crosswhite-Baldwin was growing up.
That field, you see, has always been an integral part of the neighborhood and the Salem community, said Reynolds, who has lived on Florida Street since 1944.
"Everything that happened, happened over here," she said.
Ethel Crosswhite, Crosswhite-Baldwin's mother, echoes that sentiment.
"It used to be a center of entertainment," said Crosswhite, who has lived in the white house across from the field for 54 years. "We used to have Halloween parties there. They'd start downtown and end up at the ball field. For the Fourth of July celebration, we had fireworks there. As a mother of eight, I enjoyed having it for recreation for my children."
Of course, the heavy metal chains that lock the fence today weren't there then - the gates stayed open.
"It was like a playground for us," Crosswhite-Baldwin said.
And anything was possible.
"One time someone had a cow over there," said Reynolds, who learned how to hit a golf ball not too far from home plate.
All kinds of games were played within the field's fence: sandlot football, softball and donkey baseball.
Yes, donkey baseball.
"The batter would climb up on the donkey and try to get around the bases. I can't remember if everyone was on donkeys or not," Crosswhite-Baldwin said.
As a senior at Andrew Lewis High School, Reynolds had an assigned seat at the school's baseball games. Her boyfriend, who later became her husband, played shortstop.
"I sat in the stands right behind home plate. He picked the seat so he could keep an eye on me up there," she said with a chuckle.
Those were in the days before Salem's football stadium. All of the high school's football games and baseball games were at Municipal Field. The band even practiced there. Mothers would put their children in strollers and take them over to listen, Crosswhite said.
Reynolds remembers when the lights, which illuminate her backyard at night, went up.
"My husband didn't go to work that day. He stayed over there to watch them put the lights up there. We spent all our time over there. It was baseball, baseball, baseball," Reynolds said.
That pace burned her out early - she hasn't been to a single Carolina League Game. But for Jimmy Bain, who could hear the roar of the crowd from his upstairs window, living near the ballpark was a coup.
He had always liked the game, but when he moved onto Delaware Street, a block from center field, he turned into a bit of a fanatic. At his wedding, he and his wife danced the first dance to "Take Me Out To the Ball Game."
"It's going to be kind of sad driving by the old park, and I can't look at the scoreboard and see how the team is doing," Bain said. "I'm not sure if it's for the better or the worse for the neighborhood."
In the evenings, he said, he would watch kids line up in the street with baseball gloves to catch errant balls and play basketball by the light of the field.
"I think everyone is going to miss it, unless you lived on Florida Street and had your windows knocked out from home runs," he said.
But Reynolds, who has had home runs crack her bay window twice and shatter the back window in her car, said she harbors no resentment for the field's last tenants. But she won't shed any tears over their leaving, either.
"I won't be sad to see them go, because there will always be someone using the field," said Reynolds, who would like to see it return to its prior community usage. "I like seeing the ball fence, it's like home. This place has a history, and I'd hate to see anything over here, except what's here now."
by CNB