Yahoo Autos Woodburn: Frigid day warmed by friendship
“The coldest winter I ever spent,” Mark Twain is credited with quipping, “was a summer in San Francisco.”
The great writer apparently never spent an autumn day at a Cleveland Indians game, in the old Municipal Stadium, with an arctic-like wind whipping in off Lake Erie. Nine innings at nine-below-zero is how I recall an abominable day when I was eight.
I have long forgotten whom the Tribe was even playing, but I remember rushing to the men’s room more frequently than an elderly man with a troubled prostrate — not to use the urinal, but because there were electric heaters on the ceiling.
It was my first time to a Major League Baseball game and since you can’t watch a home run from the men’s room, when the Indians came to bat I would trek back to my seat like Robert Peary braving the elements on the way to the North Pole.
By the bottom of fifth inning, I was rooting for the Indians to go down 1-2-3 so I could seek warm refuge again.
By the seventh-inning stretch-and-shiver, I had stuffed crumpled pages from the game program inside my jacket for insulation like a homeless person using a newspaper as a blanket on a Twain-ian summer night in San Francisco.
“Hey, Mom,” I mumbled from blue lips when I got home. “Check out the souvenir I got.”
Mom, excitedly: “You caught a foul ball?”
Me, with teeth chattering: “N-n-n-no, I caught frostbite!”
In the half century since, I have never felt colder. And yet the other day, in our Pacific paradise, my mind flashed Erie-ily back to Cleveland’s “Mistake on the Lake” Stadium.
