Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14049
AUGUST 2010 SPORTS & EDUCATION 62 BASEBALL IN LONG BEACH WRITTEN BY EDGARD ZUNIGA PHOTOGRAPHED BY WES KRONINGER No other sport in the United States preserves and cares for its history more than baseball. Author Tom Meigs continues that tradition with "Baseball in Long Beach," a collection of anecdotes and loads and loads of photos, including many from baseball's early days, when the Clothiers and, later on, Ell Bees (LBs, get it?) called Long Beach home. Meigs has carefully condensed a century's worth of memories into an album that chronicles Long Beach's contributions to baseball in Southern California and the rest of the country. These days, Long Beach State's resilient Dirtbags might attract the eyes of the baseball world but Long Beach and baseball have always shared a special relationship. LLB: What compelled you to go from video- game development to writing about baseball and why specifically Long Beach? Tom Meigs: I had been working on several baseball games over the years and it reignited an interest in the area. I started researching Oscar Charleston, the famous Negro League player. I realized that he'd played in Long Beach, while digging through archives. As I was doing that, I realized, wow, there's a whole untold story about baseball in Long Beach. LLB: What were your feelings as you first came across these old photos? TM: Well, actually, the photos were surprisingly hard to assemble. I got maybe two or three photographs from the library. I didn't really get anything from the newspaper. It turns out that a lot of those materials weren't archived as the paper changed ownership. I had to actually go out to the community itself, to former players, coaches and umpires. There's a group that meets for lunch once a month called the Old Timers and I started going to their meetings. The majority came from Chuck Stevens, who is kind of an institution in Long Beach baseball. He didn't have too many, the first time I approached him. Kind of miraculously, this friend of his called and delivered a boxful of photographs from his garage. That box, literally, made the book possible. Often times, the person providing a photo had some idea, usually, of context history; who was in it, what was going on. In some cases, they didn't know anything about what was going on in the scene. So, I'd pass them around at these group meetings. LLB: What was it like talking to these people? TM: It was a real privilege. Some of them have been active in baseball for 60-plus years. Most of these guys are in their 80s and 90s. They are living archives, for at least the modern baseball era in the city. The one regret I have about the book is that it's kind of a photographic format, where there are a lot of photographs and captions. I don't get a real opportunity to include a whole lot of the stories that were collected, like the one about Chuck Stevens facing Satchel Paige and seeing Babe Ruth active in the city, when he was a child. A lot of that didn't get in there, but the stories are endless. LLB: What is it about Long Beach that has produced so many players, umpires and people that love the game so much? TM: One of the most direct and funny answers I got was just one word, "weather." You can probably play baseball 363 days a year. These players got really good because they played so frequently, especially a lot of the players in the '40s, '50s and '60s. The city had a strong recreation department and they had more resources dedicated to recreation than they may have now. Adults played. They had strong ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT : WISE BOOKS