Did you know?
I don’t quite know when I fell out of love with Major League baseball, but I can assure you I fell back in love with it this past season.
Maybe it was the oh-so brief rise of the Pittsburgh Pirates. But it was confirmed with Game 6 of the World Series.
The St. Louis Cardinals were one strike away from going home World Championship runners-up — not once — but twice.
They survived; won that game, and they became World Series champions in a sport that is, once again for me, at least as exciting as professional football.
I believe my newly rekindled love for the game has a lot to do with the intimacy we feel we now have with the participants on television.
When there are critical moments, we’re shown the close-ups of the eyes of the pitchers, then tight shots of batter’s faces. We’re privy to flashes of the tiniest hints of emotion, on and off the field.
The only things missing are the inner-thoughts of the players. That could be next!
But consider what the readers of the Uniontown News Standard must’ve envisioned when they turned to the sports page on May 18, 1939.
“Baseball Games By Television,” was the headline for a story about how NBC had successfully completed a trial for the transmission of sporting events by broadcasting the previous day’s college baseball game between Columbia and Princeton.
That game was only transmitted from the top of the Empire State Building for a range of 55 miles.
While the picture quality was considered “spotty” and the prospects of telecasting a wide-range of sporting events presented “many difficult engineering problems,” there was certainly optimism about the future of what we now consider an everyday part of our lives.
“A gigantic retransmission network must be developed before such things as championship fights, World Series baseball games and other sports events can be carried with present facilities on a nation-wide basis,” the article said.
If they could only see us now.
By the way, did you ever wonder about the three musical tones NBC uses as it’s signature? Well, NBC was owned by the General Electric Co. Those three notes are G-E-C in honor of its parent company.
A month after that television trial, readers of the Daily News Standard found a rather odd local story on the front page.
The June 16 edition reported that a 36 year-old woman was in Connellsville State Hospital after she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to make a dinner out of her pet duck named “Sniffer.”
It seems because times weren’t “so good,” the “rather portly” woman waddled after “Sniffer,” for the purposes of making him a meal.
She was said to have chased her prey around the house three times, before she decided to dive for him.
“The duck ducked, but the woman got close enough to catch him, by falling headlong into some old lumber,” the playful writer wrote.
The woman landed in the hospital, and “Sniffer” landed on the dinner table. But because the woman sustained a knee injury, she wasn’t able to get even a bite of her formally beloved pet duck.
I found another odd story that was published on the front page of the Uniontown Morning Herald on Sept. 15, 1924.
A Lawton Avenue, Uniontown, woman had to be placed under the care of a doctor, after getting a letter from her husband, who she had seen die a week earlier.
The woman’s husband had died in Brownsville Hospital the previous week.
She had been at the hospital and even witnessed her husband put his signature on his handwritten will, before he met his demise.
However, before her husband was involved in a serious accident, he sent a letter to her, while she was vacationing Deer Park, Md.
However, before that letter reached his wife, she returned to Fayette County.
The letter was forwarded to the woman a week later, and after her husband’s death.
The woman’s shock was the result of getting (what must have seemed like) a letter from the grave.
Readers of the Morning Herald on Feb. 8, 1926, may have been mighty curious about one front-page story.
A 25-year-old Lemont man, who had only been married for one week, disappeared.
He told his new wife that he was going to visit his uncle in Smithfield, but he hadn’t returned home.
The Pennsylvania State Police were investigating the disappearance.
A few days later, the mystery was solved. Although many readers may have been heartened to have learned about the upcoming visit to Uniontown, by the reigning Miss America, the case of the missing newlywed had become an ongoing saga.
In the Feb. 13 edition of the Morning Herald, it was reported that the man had been found in an East Liberty hotel room with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his head.
It turned out that the Lemont man had discovered he’d married an already married woman. So he took his own life.
Sadly, his father was quoted as saying, “Even though he is my son, I think he did a damn fool act.”
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