Bread of Life baseball

I’ve been reading David Kuo’s Tempting Faith, which brought the following to mind. I’ve also been a bit hard on my evangelical brethren lately, so this story might help to round out the portrait. …

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The first time I went to Mrs. Washington’s house I didn’t know it was Mrs. Washington’s house. I thought of it as Darren’s house.

Darren was a classmate of mine in third grade, a quiet kid from Plainfield who spoke so little at school that it wasn’t until we got to his house that day in the spring that we learned nobody called him Darren. His brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, neighbors and friends all called him “Wheatie.” So from then on that’s what we called him too.

I spent a good bit of the next seven summers in and around that house on West Seventh Street, but in all that time I was never fully able to sort who was who in the huge supporting cast of family and adopted family. All I knew for sure was what I learned within five minutes of arriving there: This was Mrs. Washington’s house and she was in charge. She was in charge of the whole block, it seemed.

The houses in that part of Plainfield were all big old mansions that dated back to a time when Plainfield was where you’d move to get up and out of Newark, after Newark was no longer where you’d move to get up and out of New York. The mansions had all become multi-family homes, each with anywhere from four to eight mailboxes. The one exception was Mrs. Washington’s house, which was home to a single family, but an extended family with more people living there than anywhere else on the block — anywhere else I’d ever seen.

Mrs. Washington was also in charge of Bread of Life Ministries, Inc., a storefront church that did a little of everything. Their latest project was a baseball team for the kids on the block. Bread of Life only had a half-dozen or so kids lined up though, so Wheatie had invited us, his classmates from Timothy Christian School, to help fill out the roster.

The Bread of Life Bulldogs were an odd mix that first year. Half of us were white kids from Piscataway, shuttled to and from games in station wagons by our parents who sat in the stands and cheered us on. The other half of the team were kids from the block. Their parents didn’t have station wagons, so they all piled into Buck’s Impala for the long drive out to Warinaco Park where the county rec league games were played. I don’t think we won a single game that first year, but we had a lot of fun.

By the following summer, word had gotten out all over Seventh Street and Bread of Life had enough kids signed up to field two teams. Most of my classmates from Timothy had joined leagues closer to home, with nicer practice fields. Or they were playing soccer.

I stayed on because I liked my coaches and my teammates, and because I loved baseball. Probably more important, I stayed on because my dad loved baseball. Buck and the rest of my coaches were baseball smart. They taught us to turn two, to hit the cut-off man, to back up on every play, to never make the third out at third base — all things my dad also felt it was necessary for me to know.

What really sealed it, though, was that our pitching coach Chuck (who was, I think, married to one of Wheatie’s older sisters) was Joe Black’s nephew. That meant nothing to me — as far as I knew at that point, the Dodgers had always played in Los Angeles. I had no memory of the unhittable rookie who led Brooklyn to the National League pennant and beat the Yankees in Game 1 of the 1952 World Series. But my dad did, so as far as he was concerned, this was the team for me.

That worked out well for Bread of Life, since my dad also drove a van and came to play an invaluable role in the Bread of Life League as its semi-official chauffeur. In recognition of that he was given a plaque that read “MVP.” That plaque hung on the wall of his office, next to his law degree, until the day he retired.

I said Bread of Life League because by the third summer, that’s what it was. With enough kids for four teams, we no longer played in the county rec league.

By my final year in BOL baseball, there were more than 70 kids from the neighborhood involved. We couldn’t all fit in Buck’s Impala and my dad’s van anymore, so they had raised the money to buy an old school bus, which they let us kids paint. (Yeah, it was pink — you got a problem with that?)

By that point the league also included a handful of prep-school kids, serious ballplayers who left the manicured stadiums they had been playing on to join us at Roosevelt Park, with its curfew and weeds and broken glass, because Bread of Life had a reputation for serious baseball. (“Don’t feel bad,” Hector would say whenever I returned to the bench after making an out. “You’re still the fifth-best white guy in the league.” There were four.)

The last time I went to Mrs. Washington’s house, I didn’t recognize it. It was almost 10 years later, after I had graduated college and moved to Pennsylvania. I was back in Jersey visiting my folks, and while I was there I’d signed up for a Habitat for Humanity cleanup day in Plainfield. I was teamed up with a couple of older men and they dropped us off somewhere on West Sixth Street with work gloves and trash bags. We were supposed to work our way down the block, up the alley and back around. They’d pick us up in an hour, they said.

I didn’t realize where we were until we made the turn onto Seventh and there it was. Mrs. Washington’s house looked run-down. The front yard — where we had played pickle waiting for the caravan to leave for practice — was overgrown and strewn with litter. There were six mailboxes by the front door.

This wasn’t Mrs. Washington’s house anymore. This wasn’t Mrs. Washington’s block anymore.

An old man sat on the front porch next door, so I asked him what happened to Mrs. Washington and her family, what happened to Bread of Life Ministries, Inc.? “They all moved south a few years ago,” he said. Did he know where?

“No, but I sure miss them.”