6 years ago: Bread of Life baseball

November 8, 2007, here on slacktivist: Bread of Life baseball

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. …