THE MAN, 1959, BASEBALL CARDS

Last night in the Republican Debate, they called it the ObamaDepression.  I made it one word on my own.  But maybe that's why I'm stuck in another long ago decade this morning.  A retreat to a safer, better time, maybe only because it's past and I got through it with relative ease.

Stan Musial was my first baseball hero.  Along with Kenny Boyer and Don Blasingame and Sad Sam Jones and Larry Jackson.  Telling me about my heroes was Harry Carey on KMOX radio, along with Buddy Blattner.

That's when baseball cards were really cards.  That is cardboard, not plastic, not like credit  cards.  Yes, the kinds kids stuck in their spokes on their bikes to make them sound louder, like the little motorcycles/mopeds that flooded the SIU campus back then.

Or maybe my nostalgia was started by a FaceBook post by a friend that generated 85 responses about stores and businesses in our home town about that time.  Of course, I added my two cents worth recalling a clothing store that wouldn't hire me as high school senior and the next door barber shop I went to for a friend's dad to chop off excess hair and to give me the just right modified Beatle cut.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or it just might have been the closing of all the city's Marie Callendar Restaurants as announced in today's paper.  No more pies for me (although it's been over one year since I tasted their superior lemon pie.)  Hey, maybe that's why they closed. At least that's going to be my argument for the next DQ Blizzard I want.

Maybe that should have been used in last evening's debate.  "Obama said he was going to outsource Dairy Queens to China.  Not if I'm elected.  We have enough P.F. Changs here already."