Wayback When-sday

With the warmer weather and spring training underway, it seemed fitting to post this for today's Wayback When-sday selection. This photo is of the Police Club baseball team my brother Stephen and I played on in Grifton, N.C., in the mid 1970s. I'm the guy kneeling in the center with the goofy hat and goofier checkered pants. If you are looking at me, Stephen is the guy behind me and to the left -- he's standing there with his hands straight at his sides. The field we played on was surrounded by corn and tobacco fields. There was a dirt road that cut from our neighborhood through the fields to the baseball field. Sometimes Mama would take us to practice that way and we'd sit on the flipped down tailgate of the Ford Country Squire station wagon dragging our feet in the dirt and hanging on. While we were riding back there, we'd look for soda bottles and yell for Mama to stop if we saw one. They were worth a nickel each so we'd collect them and when we had enough we returned them to the Piggly Wiggly on Queen Street. Mama would let us keep the money for all the bottles we found. Sometimes we'd use it to buy those wax bottles filled with that sugar gunk.