RonPrice

Nice to hear from you. Yes, I'm a White Sox fan, but not in the usual sense. The White Sox, the Yankees and the Indians were very big in my pantheon of teams back in the early 1950s. When you have not seen a baseball game in over 40 years, as is the case with me, your loyalties soften. When you hear in the media one of them is in the World Series, your heart rises to the occasion and 'wishes them well.'-Ron

I wrote this little piece about the context for my own first baseball experiences in the ealry 1950s when the White Sox had a new lease on life--as they are now. _______________________________ DRY GRASS AND THE KINGDOM Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision approachable by no other means. -F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. -R.M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 17 February 1903. I can remember those days when I was young, dry grass under a tree where we sat in summer and wondered what to do on long hot days: you could only play so much baseball and it was too early to go swimming. We all sat there: George, Benny, Ken Pizer. Life had hardly started yet--1953-- the beginning of an age, a Kingdom, celebrated with Monopoly, Sorry, swimming and endless sittings under this tree. We were not troubled by war, women or the wickedness of the world. Scientific discoveries interested us not, as long as we could watch our television programs at the end of the day and our parents didn’t argue. Secret disquietudes, inner lonelinesses, the tensions of a society on the edge of self-destruction did not touch us on this dry grass under the tree. Ron Price November 2001

DAWN OF ANOTHER GO-GO ERA The last time—before 2005—that the Chicago White Sox won the American League pennant and played in the World Series it was 1959. While Chicago played the World Series that year I joined the Baha’i Faith. I was 15, in grade 10 and played baseball in the Halton County League in Canada. Chicago had not won the pennant since 1920. By that time my mother’s parents, who had come to Canada from England in 1900, had given up farming for jobs in Hamilton and raising their 3 children. My mother was 16 that year. Chicago last won the World Series in 1917; that was 88 years ago. Millions had died and would die in the trenches in Europe. That same year, 1917, the major inspiration for the design of the mother-temple of the West in Chicago came to its architect, Louis Bourgeois.1 White Sox history went back to November 1893.2 Baha’i history in the USA went back to December 1892. There has been a remarkable synchronicity between these two lines of history in the USA: a baseball team and a new world religion. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Bruce Whitmore, “Temple of Light,” World Order, Fall 1983, p.26; and 2The “Major League Baseball Site,” Internet, October 17th 2005. It’s been a long stony road, Chicago, since that inspirational year of 1917. There have been glimmers of light, though, in a fascinating, chequered history going right back to 1893. The parallels are unmistakable to me living in the Antipodes.1 Distance sharpens appreciation of a city that frightened me back2 then in ’62 at the dawn of my life. You had your design for that Park, Comiskey, the same year the dust of the Bab found its home at last, 1909 was a big year for both of us! I don’t want to write history here, just want to say: ‘wish you well in the Series.’ I’m a long way from home, but you’ve been in my sights since that ‘go-go era’ dawned for the Sox in the early fifties when the Baha’is finished their temple with its wonderful, its thrilling motion.2 1 I have lived in Australia since 1971. 2 In 1962 I went to Chicago; I was a small town boy of 18; Chicago was immense. 3 ‘Abdu’l-Baha in God Passes By, Wilmette, Illinois, 1957. p.351. --Ron Price October 17th 2005