A Ball Players Career | Page 6

but later on I managed to hold my own and sometimes to
get even a shade the better of it.
The old gentleman was an athlete of no mean ability. He was a crack
shot, a good ball player and a man that could play a game of billiards
that in those days was regarded as something wonderful for an amateur.
My love of sport, therefore, came to me naturally. I inherited it, and if I
have excelled in any particular branch it is because of my father's
teachings. He was a square 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