After last week’s installment, all about matching faces to names, I’m going to do something I rarely ever do. I’m going to repeat the same theme for a second week in a row. Last week’s blog went over so enormously well, it seemed a shame not to do some more digging and find some more photos that directly reference portions of my book, “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts.” So let’s get right to it!

Early in the book, when writing about my childhood, I explained the annual summer wonder of Wampler’s Lake, in Michigan. It was beyond idyllic and it was enormously fun. It was also the first time my sister Mary and I ever went anywhere without our parents being around full-time. Our grandparents took care of us, our cousins were at our side, and we had the freedom to do just about anything we wanted, without ever having an actual agenda on any given day.

I wrote about the dock, and the pontoon boat that was always tied up at the end of it. In this old photo, there’s a chance that’s my mom on the dock (Big Del and Taffy would drop us off and pick us up and manage to spend a day or two at either end of the trip), because the hair and the glasses are right, but it really doesn’t look like her. Who knows? I’m pretty sure that’s me climbing up on the pontoon. I’d say it’s almost certain that my cousin Donna (left) is on the boat, and the other girl is either my sister Cindy or my cousin Karen. The photo is timestamped 1969, so I’d be 13 in this photo. Seems like yesterday.

And I have no idea who would’ve been brave enough (or foolish enough) to walk out into neck-deep water to take this photo. Cameras were pretty precious, back then.

During the summers when we were all gathering at Wampler’s Lake, they were building Michigan International Speedway only about 10-12 miles away, just outside of Brooklyn. If we needed real groceries, or a drug store, or if we wanted to watch a movie, we had to drive into Brooklyn. We watched that track being built and were in awe of the size of it. This photo would’ve been taken just about 10 months after it opened.

Moving ahead to 1977, the scan to the right would be your 1977 SIUE Cougar Baseball Team. When these photos were taken, all one after another on a cold winter day, we felt like we were going to be pretty good. We ended up going back to our second consecutive NCAA Div. II World Series and just a couple of years ago we were inducted into the SIUE Athletic Department Hall of Fame, as a group. We did okay, I guess.

I wrote extensively about James Noffke, Lance McCord, Steve Novak, Kent Wells, Mike Brown, Dave Schaake, Stan Osterbur, and others in the book. Here they all are! Fun facts: Those of us wearing a batting helmet in our photos are wearing the same helmet. They only brought one to the photo shoot. The logo on that helmet or the hats some guys are wearing was the 1976 version. With the “S” and “I” intertwined inside the “U” we called them our “Dollar University” hats. One look should explain that. James Noffke’s name is attributed correctly on the roster, but he’s listed as Jim under his photo. At no time is James “Oscar” Noffke known as Jim. Definitely not Jimmy. Only James or Oscar. Also, on the roster you will see that I’m listed at 6-foot and 173 pounds. The 6-foot was about right (I was actually probably a little taller than that by the time the season started) but the 173 was pure fiction. I begged the Sports Information Director to list me at 173. I was probably more like 159 or 160 at the time.

This scan is from the center spread of the ’77 Media Guide and it was my first inclination that Coach Lee would be expecting me to solidify my spot in the starting lineup as a junior. They only included photos of guys they felt would be starters that year. Hence, Lance is listed on the roster, but as a pitcher who was an incoming junior college transfer he was mostly going to be used in relief. As juniors, Novak, Wells, Greg McBride, Don Lange, and I were the lone remaining scholarship players from our class. We all arrived on campus as wide-eyed freshmen in the fall of 1974.

Next up, on our faces and places parade, is another Paintsville Hilanders shot from the summer of 1978, in the Appalachian League. We were in Johnson City to play the Cardinals when the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper sent a reporter and photographer to do a big feature story on us. We were, at the time, the only professional baseball team based in the state of Kentucky.

The player in this photo plays a big role in my chapters about Paintsville in ’78 and Lakeland in ’79. This is Roy Dixon. When he played at NC State his teammates called him “Pie” but he was a guy with an advanced comedy level, so he put the mathematical symbol for Pi on the knob of his bats. I’ve never seen nor spoken to Roy since the 1979 season, and I continue to scan social media to see if I can ever track him down. So far, no luck, but I’ll keep looking. Anybody know where Pie is these days? And, sorry, this old pic doesn’t really enlarge much when you click on it.

Behind Roy, in this photo, you might be able to make out a very strange feature in the Johnson City ballpark. That’s a very steep hill out in right field! It was covered in thick grass (I’m not sure how they mowed it) it almost went straight up and was at least 15-feet high. The outfield wall was at the top of the hill, so the entire slope was in play. I don’t recall ever seeing Roy or anyone else climb that hill to make a catch but I saw plenty of guys crash into it. It looked like a pretty soft landing. And if you’re ever in the Tri-Cities, maybe for a race in Bristol, the Johnson City ballpark is still there, and it’s been nicely updated and renovated. Sadly, the hill was removed at some point. The Bristol and Elizabethton ballparks are also still there and still in use. Johnson Central Park, up in Paintsville, has been torn down and replaced. That needed to be done, but Paintsville no longer has a pro baseball team.

Moving ahead one season, this is the only surviving photo I have of me in a Lakeland Tigers uniform. You’ll have to trust me that I’m the guy in uniform and next to me is my buddy, pitcher Howie Bailey. It’s a terrible old Polaroid shot that looked lousy the day we took it, but it’s all I’ve got to show for that weird season in the Florida State League.

I did my best to mess with the photo and lighten it up, because in its actual physical form it’s almost impossible to see anything but two silhouettes and a big grandstand.

Howie was a great guy and a lot of fun, and he ended up in the Major Leagues with Detroit. He played in Tiger Stadium. Marchant Stadium, seen behind us, ended up being the largest ballpark I ever played in as my home field. Those big light towers were special to me. They were my first sight of the park as I drove into town for Spring Training. They were like a beacon, welcoming me to Tiger Town.

With this shot being taken before a game in Lakeland, I am wearing my home uniform. White uniform with orange stirrup socks and a hat that was white on the front and orange on the rest. For road games, we wore gray uniforms with dark blue stirrups and blue and white hats. That was cool, to have two completely different looks right down to the socks and hats.

I pretty much used up my inventory of useful Medford photos last week, and there are so few photos of me when I was a scout for the Blue Jays I’d have to guess the one I used last week also exhausted my supply, so we’ll move ahead to when I worked for Converse Shoes. My boss, Roger Morningstar (whom I rave about, rightfully, in the book) put an item on my bonus plan to have one semipro baseball team fully sponsored by Converse. Roger was a great boss.

We were completely decked out that year, with duffel bags (complete with laminated name badges), batting practice t-shirts (“Sauget Baseball” on the front, Converse logo on the back) and, of course, shoes. Blue spikes with a white Star & Chevron logo. We were a very good team. And we looked big league!

And the photo at right is connected to the book in another big way. It was taken as we were getting ready and getting loose before a game in the Valmeyer Tournament. You can see that another game is still going on out on the field. The Valmeyer Tournament is well documented in the book, and it was always one of my favorite baseball experiences.

All of the Wizards teams I was a part of, throughout the mid-to-late ’80s and into the ’90s, were really special groups. It may seem odd, but some of those Sauget teams were the best baseball teams I ever played on. The reason for that is because many of us had played pro ball, and the rest had either played high level college ball or were still in college, utilizing the Wizards as their summer team. What made us so good was our experience and our dedication.

I was alway surrounded by great players on those teams, and we were all doing it for the love of the game. That meant we all made a huge commitment to Coach Hughes and the group, for nothing more than the joy of playing. We played more than 70 games in about 100 days each summer. We played hard. We had a lot of fun but we took the actual playing very seriously. And with all that experience to draw on, we won a lot of games, including that one special night when we beat Team USA in Tennessee. One thing we weren’t was a group of guys who “wanted” to be ballplayers. We were ballplayers. We were just playing the game for free.

I wrote about these two guys in “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” and did so glowingly. Robert Giegling played his college ball at Nicholls State, and how he went undrafted I will never understand. He was as good as any outfielder I ever played next to, and a truly great guy. Jim Donohue was  great catcher and fine hitter. He signed with the Philadelphia Phillies not too long after this. He also crushed the home run that put us back in the lead to help us beat Team USA. After his playing career, he was the Cardinals bullpen catcher for many years. A couple of truly great guys on a fantastic team full of great guys.

Now, let’s move ahead to what is most likely 1987. I was working for my brother Del at his sports marketing agency, DelWilber+Associates, in McLean, Virginia. In the book, I wrote about us landing a new client, the International Baseball Federation, and my assignment to travel to Italy for a week, with the DW+A Vice President I reported to, Maidie Oliveau. We went there to meet with the IBF staff, but also to tour the Italian cities where an upcoming world tournament would be held. It was my job to get out of the car at each ballpark and verify that, yes indeed, it was a ballpark suitable for the tournament.

I wrote about what was going on in this very photo in the book. The man on the left was our driver for the week, Sergio Bernini. Maidie is in the middle, and I’m on the right. We were in Parma, Italy and the hotel had forgotten to reserve the dining room for us. The hotel manager was embarrassed, so they emptied the lobby, brought in a table, and had an army of waiters taking care of everything we needed. Great memories.

Finally, I shall wrap up this nostalgic “faces and places” blog with one final photo, and it’s tied into so many different aspects of my life it’s amazing.

In 1997, Lance and I set up a reunion of our SIUE Cougar teammates. It ended up being a big old hullaballoo and Lance and I were both very proud of what we had done. Just about everyone was there, and a lot of us traveled quite a distance to get there for a full weekend, including one of our former roommates who did not play baseball.

This photo is from that reunion, and it was taken at Rusty’s restaurant in Edwardsville. Rusty’s was our regular Friday night hangout when we were in school. That roommate who did not play baseball was Theresa Natta, and she was there to see all of us. That meant we had a chance to take this photo as three of the four roomies from the 1978-79 school year. Since the photo features the three of us, but not T Natta’s boyfriend from the period of time we all lived together, it’s likely that the fourth person, Oscar Noffke, took the shot.

And yes, T Natta paid us in free haircuts, in lieu of rent. What a fun year that was.

And, the other major connection tied to this photo and that reunion is this: After the reunion, Lance introduced me to a young lady by the name of Barbara Doyle, because he knew her from working at IBM, he was sure we’d make a great couple, and I was one of only a few single guys at the reunion.

That introduction turned into a marriage that just clicked off its 20th anniversary on New Year’s Eve. I’d say Lance did a heck of a job.

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed these faces and places and memories.

Oh yeah, one other thing. There was a football game of some importance, held this past Sunday in downtown Minneapolis. It ended up being a little exciting. Just a bit. No, I actually did not go as crazy as many fans did because I was really too shocked to scream. I think I yelled “Oh my God” but that was about it. Barbara was upstairs watching something else, because it looked like the Vikings had blown their big lead and the game. And then Case Keenum and Stefon Diggs shocked the football world with what now is being called “The Minneapolis Miracle.”

I may not have gone nuts at the moment, but we sure went nuts for the rest of the night and most of Monday. I bet I’ve watched that pass and the touchdown 50 times since it happened.

Do the Vikings have a chance against the Eagles this weekend?  Sure, but it won’t be easy and they very well might not win. To many Minnesotans, that would hurt but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. The Minneapolis Miracle erased about five decades of frustrations that had built up to the point of making most Vikings fans very fatalistic and pessimistic. It sure felt like Keenum and Diggs performed some kind of exorcism for Vikings fans. So we’ll see, and we’ll root for them. May the better team win. In a couple of more weeks, the Super Bowl will be right here, at US Bank Stadium. Gotta admit, it would be pretty cool if the home team was in that game.

That’s all for this week. As always, help me out in this way: If you just read this blog and liked it, please “Like” it by clicking on the button at the top. See ya next week!

Bob Wilber, at your service and connecting dots.