A Ball Players Career | Page 6

sport, and one that had no use for anything that savored of crookedness. There was nothing whatever of the Puritan in his makeup, and from my early youth he allowed me to participate in any sort of game that took my fancy. He had no idea at that time of my ever becoming a professional. Neither had I. There were but few professional sports outside of the gamblers, and even these few led a most precarious existence.
I was quite an expert at billiards long before I was ever heard of as a ball player. There was a billiard table in the old Anson House and it was upon that that I practiced when I was scarcely large enough to handle a cue. It was rather a primitive piece of furniture, but it answered the purpose for which it had been designed. It was one of the old six pocket affairs, with a bass-wood bed instead of slate, and the balls sometimes went wabbling over it very much the same fashion as eggs would roll if pushed about on a kitchen table with a broomstick. In spite of having to use such poor tools I soon became quite proficient at the game and many a poor drummer was taken into camp by the long, gawky country lad at Marshalltown, whose backers were always looking about for a chance to make some easy money.
Next to base-ball, billiards was at that time my favorite sport and there was not an hour in the day that I was not willing to leave anything that I might be engaged upon to take a hand in either one of these games.
When it came to weeding a garden or hoeing a field of corn I was not to be relied upon, but at laying out a ball, ground I was a whole team. The public square at Marshalltown, the land for which had been donated, by my father, struck me as being an ideal place to play ball in. There were too many trees growing there, however, to make it available for the purpose. I had made up my mind to turn it into a ball ground in spite of this, and shouldering an ax one fine morning I started in.
How long it took me to accomplish the purpose I had in view I have forgotten, but I know that I succeeded finely in getting the timber all out of the way. It was hard work, but you see the base-ball fever was on me and that treeless park for many a long day after was a spot hat I took great pride in.
At the present time it is shaded by stately elms, while, almost in the center of its velvet lawn, flanked by cannon, stands a handsome stone courthouse that is the pride of Marshall County.
Then it was ankle deep in meadow grass and surrounded by a low picket fence over which the ball was often batted, both by members of the home team and by their visitors from abroad.
Many a broken window in Main Street the Anson family were responsible for in those days, but as all the owners of stores on that thoroughfare in the immediate vicinity of the grounds were base-ball enthusiasts, broken windows counted for but little so long as Marshalltown carried off the honors.
CHAPTER III.
SOME FACTS ABOUT THE NATIONAL GAME.
Just at what particular time the base-ball fever became epidemic in Marshalltown it is difficult to say, for the reason that, unfortunately, all of the records of the game there, together with the trophies accumulated, were destroyed by a fire that swept the place in 1897, and that also destroyed all of the files of the newspapers then published there.
The fever had been raging in the East many years previous to that time, however, and had gradually worked its way over the mountains and across the broad prairies until the sport had obtained a foothold in every little village and hamlet in the land. Before entering further on my experience it may be well to give here and now a brief history of the game and its origin.
When and where the game first made its appearance is a matter of great uncertainty, but the general opinion of the historians seems to be that by some mysterious process of evolution it developed from the boys' game of more than a century ago, then known as "one old cat," in which there was a pitcher, a catcher, and a batter. John M. Ward, a famous base-ball player in his day, and now a prosperous lawyer in the city of Brooklyn, and the late Professor Proctor, carried on a controversy through the columns of the New York newspapers in 1888, the latter claiming that base-ball was taken from the old English game of "rounders," while