Opening day blizzard of ‘82
Post-Star editorial right on the money
The Front Page
Evening update
Thursday, April 1, 2021
By Ken Tingley
Opening Day was an especially important day for me as a young man. It was a day filled with hope and possibilities for the coming baseball season.
But on April 6, 1982, it snowed, not only in the Bronx, but up and down the east coast. The blizzard of snow resulted in a blizzard of cancelations. It showed so much that the Yankees did not open for four more days.
As I looked at the photographs of snow-covered Yankee Stadium that year, I couldn’t help but think of my grandmother - Ruth Guild Tingley - who we called “Nana.”
I was her oldest male grandson and I got to be the first to mow her lawn. Afterward on those warm sunny days there was lemonade and conversations and we got to know each other. She often entrusted me with what she really thought about something one of her four children had done. I was sworn to secrecy.
She passed from the cancer on a January day in 1982. And I cried.
That was 39 years ago. So when I saw the forecast for some snow on this opening day, I went to my file cabinet and found the column I wrote on opening day 1982 when I was 24.
Over the years, I have squabbled with professional baseball, vowed never to watch again only to be thrilled once again by its sudden twists and turns.
But of all the opening days I’ve experienced - I’m now 63 - this was the most meaningful.
A special memory of a very special baseball fan
By Ken Tingley
Staff Writer
The hollow confines of Yankee Stadium stood strangely quiet Tuesday; almost ghostlike after being buried beneath nearly a foot of snow on what was supposed to be a day of celebration and revelry - opening day.
For me, it seemed almost an appropriate beginning for baseball this year - still and at rest. A perfect time for reflection.
When writers choose to look back on baseball’s past, nouns such as Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle inevitably abound in lauding sentences with such numbers as 714, 2,130, 56 and 536 rattled off as impressive adjectives that attest to the greatness of these gods of the game.
But my own reflections are of a much more personal nature.
I could describe my first visit to Yankee Stadium in 1967 with the thrill of seeing “the Mick” in the twilight of his career. Joe Pepitone hit a home run that day, but my heroes lost both ends of a doubleheader to the Red Sox.
I could tell of Thurman Munson’s two-out, ninth-inning home run to beat the White Sox in 1974 in the very first pennant race I remember for the Yankees. Terry Forster lost the game on that 3-2 pitch.
I might even recall a 12th-inning Graig Nettles shot that beat the Red Sox during the tense ‘78 race.
But with the snow blanketing the Yankee Stadium infield, my thoughts turned to a certain baseball fan - my grandmother.
For as long as I could remember while growing up, my grandmother was somewhat opposed to her grandsons participation in sports, especially football. “Oh Kenny, why do you do it?” She would ask me after inspecting some of my latest bruises during football season. Or she would take her wrath out on my father, “I told you so,” after he returned from another trip to the emergency room for X-rays for my knee.
Despite our differences over competitive sports, we developed a good relationship. During breaks from mowing her spacious lawn, we would have long conversations over lemonade. We talked of my future. We talked of her past. We would even gossip about other members of the family. Sometimes it hardly seemed like our ages were 52 years apart. And I think she even appreciated by sarcastic humor.
Once upon returning from college, I was shocked to learn of a Yankee trade. While the trade was hardly unexpected, my source of information was. Sometime late in the 70s, my grandmother had discovered baseball, specifically the Yankees. And not just a game here and there. She watched them all the time. So there I was learning of all the Yankees’ latest deals, not from my father, not from my brother, but from my grandmother.
The Yankees gradually became known as “her boys” around the family and she took the game seriously.
Despite being in her mid-70s, I can recall several times when she got her dander up. Usually, it was over the length of one of her grandsons’ hair or the fact that one of her children planned to vote Democratic. But the most memorable had to to be when the Yankees traded her favorite player, Mickey Rivers, to the Texas Rangers. She vowed to become a Texas fan, but she never did.
Where once we had discussed my work and relatives over lemonade, we now debated the merits of free agency, the antics of George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson and the injuries of Graig Nettles and Willie Randolph. They were just like a second family.
And she was able to keep her cool a lot better than Steinbrenner. After last year’s final World Series game. - the last game she would see - she proclaimed time and time again, “My boys will be back. They had a good year.”
But probably the memory I’ll always treasure will be at last year’s annual Tingley reunion (notorious for being quite dull unless you’re an avid softball fan or crazed bingo player). So when I saw grandma sneaking off toward her house with her folding chair under her arm, I couldn’t let but ask loudly, “And where are you sneaking off to?”
“I have to see how my boys are doing,” she laughed.
(Reprinted from the April 7, 1982 Plattsburgh (N.Y.) Press-Republican).
More Metivier
My praise for Queensbury Town Board member Tony Metivier in an earlier newsletter this week was followed up Thursday morning by an editorial in The Post-Star that rightfully went a little further.
It called on local Republicans to stop ostracizing Metivier because he voted against party orders in 2017 when Mike Grasso was party chair. Grasso told Metivier at the time that there would be consequences if he voted against changing the town’s law firm to a more Republican-friendly outfit.
So here we are again four years later, and another Republican is forcing Metivier into a primary.
This is why political parties are dying.
Tweet of the Day
According to the map, this is Yankee country. All Red Sox fans should be aware.
https://www.facebook.com/1453763397/posts/10222738436876895/
