Someone once said to a relative of mine regarding me: "I didn't think he would ever get out of or very far from Pimento." How often one does not know what they think they know.
You know sometimes in life one makes a decision that few others, often even the closest of people, want, or would support.
In 1948 he has spent forty years of his life in baseball and sixteen of them as a successful baseball manager. His wife said, "We were happy and looking forward to life differently." She had taken retirement. They both thought now is the time for other things. Or at least she did. When he got the call. "I knew he had this meeting with the owners. I couldn't sleep. I waited up for him to come home from the interview."
He came home very late and went straight into his den. His wife hearing him come in got up went downstairs and found him sitting by a window just staring out. He said nothing, just raised his head slowly and looked at his wife. "Tell me you didn't," she said to him. There was a pause and then his words, "I had to. I'll only take the job for one year." She was speechless. Calling his wife by her first name he said I had to. "I've got to prove to them I'm better than they think I am." He went on to say "I have confidence in myself but others do not."
Well he did the job more than one year. He went on to become one of the most noted and famous managers in all of baseball. He manged the New York Yankees from 1949 to 1960. Winning ten pennants, seven world series, five of them in a row. In 1981 he was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Interesting his wife Edna supported her husband, Casey Stengel, in this decision and all future decisions regarding his chosen profession. She never "drew a line in the sand" so to speak, none of this "if you do this." Sometimes a person just has to " Do what they think they have to do."
In 1978 my family and I were living in Franklin,Tennessee. Late that year I was contacted and offered a position that would entail my family and I moving completely across the country. Living just a short distance from an area (New York City) completely different to anywhere we had ever been or lived. It would take us far from any of our family and friends to a place where we had no family or friends. I even ended up having to make a decision about the house we bought without my wife ever seeing it before she walked into it in June of 1979. She never said, "Oh we can't go, or that's too far from my mother, we don't know anyone there." She supported this decision and this move. We spent nearly twenty-five years there and I think did very well.
You know sometimes the most important thing needed in a decision is support. Recently my wife and I celebrated our 52th wedding anniversary, nearly twenty-five of those years were spent in New Jersey, about twenty-five miles west of New York city. Barbara. thank you for your part and support of that decision.
Someone once said: "I didn't' think he'd ever get out of or very far from Pimento."
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July 20, 2017
Keep on,
Larry Adamson