Farmington Hills

We played that entire summer of 1973, Tim and I, and then the big separation happened- Tim went into the Marines while I got married, got a job, and had a baby son (also named Tim.)  We didn’t have a chance to play for many years- I had moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula while Tim was living in Ypsilanti but when I finally moved back to Detroit in 1980, the game was ON!

I was living in an apartment complex in Farmington Hills and behind my apartment was a great field, as it had a barrier of gravel that we could use for our home run line. That’s usually the way it’s done, by the way- find your home run line, then go backwards for your home plate.

We hadn’t played for years (seven, to be exact) but the game came back quickly to us because the rules were so simple. Oh sure, we did have to reacquaint ourselves with some of the finer points. Tim had forgotten that it was impossible to cheat but once he had gotten used to the concept of fair play, everything was as it was in 1973. This was the first time we had included a non-family member, my friend Doug Redmann.

I met Doug when I was in high school- he had gone to Redford and was a natural athlete. He had a little song about himself called, “Six foot two and eyes of blue.” He looked like a Norse god and damn if he couldn’t hit that wiffle ball- with one hand.  “High and outside” he would call out and if you made a mistake and threw anything even close to that, you were immediately watching a small white plastic orb get even smaller as it whizzed by.

That was also the first time we started buying wiffle balls in bulk. Doug hit them so hard that they would soon crack. Up until then we played with some pretty ugly wiffle balls but really, they weren’t that expensive, so we decided to buy some extras so we always had something decent to hit. And, to tell the truth, we had some problems just finding some of those balls Doug hit.