I am a huge baseball fan.* Football, basketball, soccer, golf, etc., etc.--not for me. I am well aware that baseball is, by the numbers, not longer truly "America's Past time", but it sure is at my house. Recently I saw this photo in a New York Times article
( http://www.nytimes.com/... ) and was so struck by it: these baseball greats, Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg (sorry, Eddie Pellagrini, I'm not familiar with your history---yet) with an impossibly young JFK, still very frail from his WW2 injuries.
I had a major "revisit" with JFK's history last fall on the 50th anniversary of his assassination. Yes, I'm old enough to remember and still feel that trauma all these years later. (I know: so much crap has happened since. But for some of us of a certain age, that November 22, 1963 was the major, cruel turning point.)
But the photo, with its unexpected and perhaps incongruous mix of a rising young political star
Campaigning in Milwaukee the autumn before the 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary, Kennedy, 42, accosted Stan Musial, 38, . . . and said, "They tell me you're too old to play ball and I'm too young to be president, but maybe we'll fool them.'
--and baseball legends--that just grabbed me. I'm not sure even what I think of it all. I know baseball was still segregated in 1946. I know JFK was far from perfect (and do we have a political figure who was?) But; still.
Maybe there's another nostalgic trigger here. This Memorial Day I was looking at photos of my dad, who served in the Army-Air Corps in WW2.
And I remembered another reason I was so drawn to JFK.
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*Huge baseball fan. Deeply in love with those San Francisco Giants.