A Tribute to Excellence...

Photos from Yearbooks.

A memory from Alison Ullman Long:

"I Lettered in Junior Year Softball. Anyone who has known me will be astonished to find me contributing to the Sports category. I was tall and lanky, so gym teachers thought I’d be good at basketball. I wasn’t. I couldn’t shoot. I couldn’t block. I couldn’t run.

I also hated field hockey because all fall, during gym, I had to pant up and down the outside edge of the field, out of everyone’s way. Even if I came across the ball, I was too clumsy to do anything useful with it.

In the beginning of my junior year I began exploring colleges. I borrowed a few college admission guides from Mon Cochran, our counselor. Those usually had an application form tucked inside. On the front page of all those forms were spaces for our names, photos, addresses – and our sports record. I had nothing!

The only sport I had the faintest interest in or knowledge about was baseball.

Years before, my cousin Pete Welker wanted to be a Red Sox player and he used to practice his pitching, once breaking my little sister Debbie’s nose with his fastball. She was four. Mostly, we would play versions of Wiffle Ball and Croquet with other nearby kids if we got out of the water long enough. So I had some understanding of the rules and could hit a softball pretty well.

Unbeknownst to me, come the spring of ‘59, the good athletes largely boycotted the softball coach. Consequently, I made the team. I didn’t own a glove and had to borrow one from the opposition when we played. I was sent to an outfield to stay out of the way. If a ball was hit in my direction, it would either bounce off my glove or whiz between my feet. (Two decades later, I learned how to catch by watching our children being taught by their coach.)

Despite three or four good players, the eight of us on the team began to lose as soon as the season started. The first two encounters ended with scores something like 27 to 2 or 23 to 6. Then we played Falmouth. At 40 to nothing, part way through the third inning, the game was called and turned into a practice.

I still earned my Orleans O. I have it somewhere. I had attended half the games and three-quarters of the practices – actually most or both but those were the only requirements. My father wrote an editorial about us, inaccurate but funny!"