The "You're A What?"

It was an ordinary day.  Running the offset press in room 168 at the Manheim Township High School in Neffsville, Pennsylvania.  Helping me run box after box of #10 envelopes is my good friend Mike who has worked with me in the summer with the school district's in-house printing needs since 1980. If you're trying to figure out how many years that is, it's a long time!  My job is to make sure the envelopes feed correctly and Mike's job is to make sure the ink coverage is suitable as well as remove them from the press and stack them in the boxes from which I took them.  I really enjoy the days we run the press together since we have a chance to catch up on the lives of our families as well as what we both have been doing.  Today we talked about Mike's recent trip to San Francisco to explore the city with his wife, three grown daughters and their spouses.  Then he told me he has been writing a column for The Ephrata Review Newspaper.  

Photo of Mike appears in the Ephrata Review with his column.

Wow!  That's pretty impressive.  The newspaper was founded in 1878 and is now published on Wednesday of each week.  Paper deals with the nearby town of Ephrata and the surrounding community of Cocalico.  Mostly local news with sections on: Arts/Entertainment, Police/Fire Log, Religion, Social, Sports, Births, Obituaries, "Years Ago" and Opinion/Letters.  Mike grew up in the Ephrata/Akron area on Lancaster County and went to school at Ephrata High School where he was a stand-out baseball player.  He graduated from Millersville University and began to teach in the Manheim Township School District where I was a teacher.  Mike was an elementary school teacher who went to sign his teaching contract with the school principal as well as a young woman who was also going to teach in the same school with Mike.  That young woman, Anne, ended up being his wife after a few years.  Mike spent many summers supervising the playground at the Akron Elementary School near Ephrata when he began teaching.   The Ephrata Review was interested in publishing stories about the playgrounds that were open to students during the summer months and asked Mike if he could write a column telling of the times spent on the playground.  Didn't take long before his column began to appear in the paper.  And what a column it is.  A third of a page wide and the entire length of the newspaper column.  As we were running the press, I looked at Mike and told him I can't believe I'm working with a newspaper columnist.  Told him I just had to see what he was writing and asked him to bring in a few of the newspapers for me to read.  Well, wasn't long before I was reading a story titled "Field Day, Water Week, and golf competitions."  I'm sure those still living in the Ephrata, Akron and Cocalico area are loving his column.  Many names appear in the story from the 1970s and I can just imagine how many people are buying and reading the paper to see if their name can be found in his stories.  Now, isn't that exactly what the staff at The Ephrata Review wanted?  I loved the column, but really enjoyed an earlier column titled "APBA Baseball on the Playground."  Mike told of the game that was developed by a Lancaster resident in the 1950s which was based on a player's major league statistics.  Each player received a card about the size of a playing card with column's on it with numbers based on the previous year's stats.  To play the game you would roll dice and match the two numbers to numbers on the card to see if you had a hit, walk or made an out.  There were four large boards that you matched the number to that told the result.  Mike reported that the children loved to play the game and set up leagues for summer play on the playground.  He told of one young boy who became so frustrated while playing a game that he threw his dice over his head.  Realizing he couldn't continue without them, he searched for them.  Could only find one die so Mike gave him another set of dice and had him throw then the same direction as his original set.  They followed the flight of dice and sure enough, the second die was found.  Mike says "The love of APBA and baseball by so many on the playground led to our one day playground trip to Cooperstown."  Cooperstown, New York is where the Baseball Hall Of Fame is located.  I must say I thoroughly enjoy reading Mike's columns and hope the newspaper will keep him on after he has told all the tales he can muster about the summer playgrounds.  And to think I work with a famous newspaper columnist!  Pretty neat!!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.