Family Hero Story

I chose my mother and father as my family heroes. Enjoy their story and the stories attached.

                                                                                    FOR THE LOVE OF BASEBALL

                                                                                by Frances Vitali

If you are up in the big sports stadium in Philadelphia, you’ll see grandma and grandpa Vitali sitting all the way up in the highest bleachers. Sometimes all by themselves sharing their favorite picnic of green pepper and egg sandwiches and watching the baseball game. My grandmother wasn’t always crazy about the game of baseball. When she went to a baseball game with a friend at Marian Anderson Field in South Philadelphia and met a ball pitcher named Dan, all that changed.

When my grandparents Barbara and Daniel married in 1949, some people thought they were crazy!

Crazy because they couldn’t marry in Philadelphia; it was against the law, so they went to Elkton, Maryland, where it was legal for interracial couples to marry.

Crazy because they traveled to New York on their honeymoon as Mr. and Mrs. Vitali in a brand new Chrysler Coupe car that my grandfather didn’t even know how to drive. (It’s a good thing he was a fast learner.) They stayed at The Sugar Ray Robinson Hotel in Harlem.

Crazy because he wanted to be a baseball player and raise a family. (At least my grandmother thought he was. My grandmother encouraged my grandfather to get a job that could provide for his family.)

Crazy because my grandmother was African American and my grandfather was Italian American. (Interracial couples experienced many problems socially.)

Crazy because my grandfather’s parents didn’t think their marriage was a good idea at the time.

Crazy because back then people didn’t have the same rights as white people. Those were the rules.

Crazy because those rules didn’t matter to my grandparents Barb and Dan. They lived by the rules of baseball.

To everyone else they may have been crazy but to each other they were in love .

Many times they couldn’t go places because they couldn’t sit together, like on the bus, or at restaurants or movies. That didn’t stop them. They just didn’t go to those places.

But there was always one place that was safe and it happened to be their favorite place. The ballpark! Where they first met, and many ball games after that.

Grandpa Dan was a pitcher for a local baseball team. The other black players didn’t notice that grandpa Dan wasn’t black. They just loved to play ball and sometimes win and invited him to play on their team.

My grandma didn’t know a lot about baseball when she first met my grandpa. In fact she began to learn everything about the game and is quite a baseball expert now.

Now they still talk baseball to each other. It is their language of love, you could say. They never paid attention to those other rules, because their love ruled their hearts and those of their children.

So if you happen to be up in the big stadium in Philadelphia, you’ll see grandma and grandpa Vitali sitting all the way up in the highest bleachers. Sometimes all by themselves sharing their favorite picnic of green pepper and egg sandwiches and watching the game that my grandfather loved and my grandmother learned to love. The game that brought them together.

They are still crazy – about one another after all these innings!