1974 - #715

Dear Boo and Bubble,

A friend reminded me the other day just how much your great, great grandmother Mary loved baseball.  This was true all of her life, but in the later years, her interest coalesced around an absolute devotion to the Atlanta Braves.  Truth be known, she is buried with two Braves tickets in her coffin, an excursion that granddaddy Schaefer had planned as a surprise but God interrupted with His eternal call to home.

As a teenager in high school, and later in college, I tolerated Mamaw’s obsession with the sport ignoring that she stayed up all night listening to the radio until games on the West Coast ended or that she drove all over town in her little VW bug with a yellow Styrofoam ball stuck to the radio antenna which was a marketing ploy by the Greenville Braves farm team to identify fans in the community.  But in 1974, her fixation collided with my life’s events and I could no longer disregard the situation

Captain asked me to marry him at Thanksgiving of 1973.  We set our wedding date for May 18 of the next year.  The usual swirl of excitement consumed 3 Lakecrest Drive. We planned all the details for the ceremony, decided on my gown and those of the bridesmaids, and selected our china and silver patterns and my engagement ring.  The calendar filled with offers for showers and parties from our generous friends. 

As spring approached, not only did the countdown to our nuptial date begin, but also baseball season.  It was to be no ordinary season.  The Atlanta Braves had Hank Aaron, who pursued the chance to break Babe Ruth’s all-time record of 714 homeruns.  For Mamaw, there was no confusion about priorities – the wedding festivities be damned, she would not miss one minute of one game until Aaron hit number 715.

I was curious how she would manage this goal as the showers and parties fell on weekend evenings, the exact time of many of the games.  Mamaw had a strategy, though.  She tucked a portable radio with earphones into her oversized purse.  Before we left the house, she donned a sweater over whatever she wore, ran one wire up her arm through the sleeve, and popped the earphone bud into her ear.  For all anybody knew, it could be a hearing aid.  Once at the party, she carried the purse crooked in her arm until game time, at which point she excused herself to the bathroom and turned on the radio.

On several occasions, I would be opening presents, oohing and aahing over the contents.  Mamaw would lean over and whisper in my ear – “He hit another one,”

The running joke leading up to the wedding went like this ---

Granddaddy Schaefer would walk me down the aisle.  The ceremony would start and we’d get to the vows. 

“Beth, do you take John to be your wedded husband to have and to hold, etc., etc.…….”

“I do.”

“John, do you take Beth to be your wedded wife, to have and to hold, etc., etc……….”

“I do.”

At which point Mamaw would jump up, ramrod straight from her pew and shout “HE DID IT!!”

Of course, everybody in the congregation would think that she was overjoyed that Captain really went through with marrying me, when in fact, she had the radio in her pearl-beaded clutch purse with a wire running up the chiffon sleeve of her soft green mother-of-the-bride gown and an earbud in her ear  -   and Hank Aaron had just hit the benchmark home run.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to worry about this fiction becoming fact.  On April 8, 1974, Aaron achieved that miraculous number 715, a record that stood until August 7, 2007, when Barry Bonds broke it.  To Hank, I am forever grateful.

By the way, I know that Mamaw is sitting up in heaven this season very proud of the Atlanta Braves.  She stuck with them through thick and thin and is now (and forever) an eternal fan.