Womack: The need for baseball oral history
From SABR member Graham Womack at Baseball Past and Present on May 14, 2015:
I recently joined the newly-relaunched Oral History Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research. A slightly modified version of the following piece appears in the committee’s Spring 2015 newsletter.
______________________I worked in an ice cream shop my senior year of high school, a few blocks from where Edmonds Field stood in Sacramento.
The home of the Sacramento Solons, Edmonds Field met the wrecking ball in 1964, but there are still remnants of its presence, still people who remember it as one of the nicer ballparks of the old Pacific Coast League.
One of the perks of working in food service is the chance to meet, or at least have brief interactions with a variety of interesting people. One day, an elderly customer told me she had lived beside Edmonds Field.
I was working at the time on a high school senior project about the Solons, and my interest piqued. I asked the woman if she would be up for an interview, handing her my phone number. One of my coworkers laughed, thinking I was trying to pick up on the old woman.
I didn’t get to interview the woman, but she went one better, getting me in contact with an 89-year-old man named Bud Beasley. A former pitcher for the Solons and a number of other minor league teams, Beasley had been opposing pitcher for the Seattle Rainers on a fateful night in Sacramento history, July 11, 1948.
Read the full article here: http://baseballpastandpresent.com/2015/05/14/the-need-for-oral-history/
Originally published: May 15, 2015. Last Updated: May 15, 2015.