Don Demeter has come home
I lost my favorite baseball glove when I was in my mid-20s. It was at a softball game. I loaned it to my friend, because I was using my other glove, a first-baseman's mitt. My friend left my glove on the bench at the end of the game, and finally told me after we'd all gone home. I went back to the field, but never found it. My friend didn't understand why I was so upset. And he never offered to replace it.
Oh, did i mention he was my ex-friend.
A book like Noah Liberman's "Glove Affairs: The Romance, History, and Tradition of the Baseball Glove" are full of similar heart-breaking stories. But a story like the one that came through the news pike the last couple of days, about a man whose glove turned up at a swap meet and was found by his brother, brings a lump in my throat.
Read on:
The L.A. Times had this story first in its Friday California section.
This version in the Daily Breeze of Torrance seems to hit home a little better:
Long-Lost Glove Is A Real Catch
Brother finds decades-old mitt at Alpine Village swap meet.
By Ian Hanigan
Daily Breeze
As a young Little Leaguer, Patrick Reynolds fantasized about his baseball mitt making him a hometown celebrity one day.
He just didn't imagine it would happen this way.
On Friday, the 57-year-old Lomita resident was fielding calls from reporters far and wide after he was reunited with his childhood glove. Amazingly enough, the hunk of leather was found and purchased for $5 by his own brother at a local flea market more than 40 years after Reynolds saw it last.
Apparently, if you love something, it's OK to set it free. Just don't forget to first write your name and telephone number in indelible ink.
"It's a chance thing," said Reynolds, a supervising landscape architect for Los Angeles County's Department of Parks and Recreation. "It's really one of those mysteries that make life what it is."
Reynolds said he last remembered seeing the glove at around age 13. A few years earlier he bought it at the May Co. store for the hefty price of $14. Eventually, he got a glove better suited for first base, which he played at North High School in Torrance.
As for the story of the glove's recovery, it's best to let his brother tell that one.
Jeff Reynolds, 47, said he was strolling with his wife, Connie, through the swap meet at Alpine Village near Carson on Father's Day. At the back of the very last booth, he spotted a bucket containing a left-handed mitt, tagged in dark ink with the name "Pat Reynolds."
"It was sitting there like this," he said, holding the glove flat. "I could see his name. I said, 'What the heck?' " Upon closer inspection, there was the family's original phone number with the "FR" prefix (for Fremont) familiar to early local dialers.
With his best poker face, Jeff Reynolds asked how much. The booth's operator said five bucks. "I tried not to come across like it was a long-lost family heirloom or the guy would have tried to get me for $20," he said.
The glove, a Rawlings "Big Trap-Eze" with the signature of former Dodger center fielder Don Demeter, is broken in in all the right places these days, still looking like it has plenty of catches left in it. So where the devil has it been all these years? The Reynolds brothers, who were raised in Torrance, believe their father may have given it to a neighborhood kid who simply needed a glove.
Jim Reynolds, who was 80 when he died in October, was a former high school star who was drafted by the St. Louis Browns and the U.S. Army. Though the Army trumped the Browns' offer, he later played in local leagues and coached young ball players.
Pounding his ol' mitt on Friday after 40-some-odd years naturally brought back a few memories for Patrick Reynolds. Like the time he was subbed in to play right field for his former Little League team, the Beavers.
He wasn't all that experienced then, and naturally the opposing team's best hitter cracked a towering fly in his direction. The ball seemed to hang in the sky for a minute or more, and a young Reynolds stood frozen with his Don Demeter-signature model down by his waist.
"It was a rainmaker," he recalled.
But wouldn't you know it, when the ball came down it landed softly in his mitt. Beavers win.
"The rest of the team was so excited that they came out and carried me out on their shoulders," he said.
Some moments, it seems, are meant to be.
And if anyone ever comes across a old, dark brown Willie Montanez Rawlings with the phone number 676-4469 on it, give me a shout.