A Hell of a Ball Player

                                                              

This is my dad.  My mom and family call him Andy.  People in the community call him Joe.  His name is Joseph Andrew.  The story I heard is that his mother named all of her boys Joseph so they all had to go by their middle name.  My mom met him when he was stationed at Wurstsmith and they married in 1956 after dating for a short amount of time.  He got out of the air force so he could stay in Oscoda, where my mom was an elementary school teacher.  He worked various jobs before becoming a custodian for the school system.  He retired in the late eighties.  He was very active in his church and the Lions Club.  He stayed busy volunteering around town, and two or three times a week he and my mother went to Monarch Ridge, the family golf course in Spruce, to work.  Somewhere along the line it became apparent that he had a form of dementia.  After my mother had a bad fall it became apparent that he and my mother could no longer manage on their own and I brought them to Kalamazoo to live by me.  This picture was taken last fall at their assisted living facility.  I had just bought that brand new Lands End jacket for my dad after forcing him to retire his blue, silk, thread bare Detroit Tigers jacket that was  three sizes too small.  Even though I think he wasn't too happy with me he still managed to give me a goofy smile.

Anyone who knows my dad knows he loves to tell stories.  Especially about himself and what a fabulous ball player he was.  Over the years the stories have become a skeleton of their former selves and it is hard to tell what is true and what took place only in his mind.  My uncle David managed to put together some newspaper articles written when he played ball on the base that indicate that he was pretty good in his day.  But there are two stories he loves to tell (and tell).  Sometimes he tells them two or three times if he is really feeling chatty.  The first one is that he hit two grand slam home runs in one inning.  He says the pitcher was so mad at him that he charged after him, wanting to beat my dad up.  That story has never been validated.  I think we all believe it just because we have heard it so many times.  

The second one is that he went to the old baseball diamond in Oscoda when the Detroit Tigers were in town looking for people to join their team.  He got up to bat and (according to him) hit a ball out into US 23.  In the last two or three months he has started adding an interesting little tidbit.  He says when he hit that ball out into the street he hit a car that was driving by.  The car stopped in the middle of US 23 and the people in the car got out, raised the hood and the trunk to see what happened to their vehicle.   In all the years he has been telling the story I never remember hearing that little bit of information until recently.  After that he was asked if he would like to join the team.  When he said he most certainly did, they asked him how old he was.  He told them he was twenty five years old.  Sadly shaking their heads, the scouts told him he was too old.  His professional baseball career foiled because he was all of twenty five years old.  

A few weeks ago I was caring for a gentleman in the ER.  When he was cleared to go home and we were waiting for his daughter to get the car, our conversation turned to my parents.  He asked me what their names were.  I told him.  He said "you're not Joe Mosley's daughter are you?" I told him yes I was.  He looked at me, paused for a brief second, and then said "He was a hell of a ball player."  He said he used to play ball with him out on the base when they were both stationed there.  

Not that I didn't believe my dad and his stories.  I think I had just heard them so many times that I stopped listening. It made me proud to know that my dad really was the ball player he imagined himself to be.  I thanked the gentleman for giving me that very important bit of information.  The next time I saw my dad I told him that I had run into someone who knew him back when he was a superstar baseball player on the base.  He looked at me and said "did I ever tell you about the time the scouts from the Detroit Tigers came to town?"