Little League... Toilets... Pancakes
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published July 1979
5/5/2017
On the same day the National League was just managing to beat the American League in the All-Star game, I was seated in a ball park in El Segundo watching the Lunada Bay All-Stars beat the Hermosa Beach All-Stars 5-2.
This caused me a great deal of heaviness of heart, for I have for many years been an unshakable supporter of the Hermosa Beach Little League.
I have watched the four or five Little League teams Hermosa Beach is able to scrape together battle their way through the season.
I have sweated over the selection of an All-Star team. I have seen my hopes rise as managers and coaches got the All-Stars in shape. And I have had them dashed when somebody else’s All-Star team (whose members always look bigger and tougher) has managed to defeat Hermosa’s heroic little band.
One has to take such buffets in life — but I still retain a firm faith that one year little old Hermosa’s team is going to get to Williamsport, Pa., for the World Series. Not only get there, but win.
Let me tell you something you perhaps already know — the world is a dull place if Jack doesn’t occasionally kill the giant and the timorous mouse turn round and roar. It is from such feats that we all get strength.
I owe a debt to the Hermosa Beach Little League, for it was through that organization that I learned what little I know about the mysterious American game called baseball.
Many years ago I was appointed a member of the board which governed, prayed, exhorted and sweated over the Hermosa Beach Little League. I had this qualification for the job — I knew that the button end of a baseball bat was the end you held in your hand.
Anyone as dumb as that — but full of enthusiasm — obviously made an excellent board member.
One of the first things we of the board did was recognize the acute need for toilets at Clark Stadium, the nearest available being so far away as to induce stricture in the healthiest. We voted to erect toilets and then we found that we had to erect them ourselves.
Al James, a building contractor who lives down on the Strand, was a board member and took charge of the job and Tom Fredericks, who is now a judge of the Superior Court, and a bunch of other guys including myself worked on it.
We worked weekends and evenings and under Al’s instruction we dug the foundations and put in the plumbing and got the toilet basins in right and put up the walls. When it came to the walls, Al said, in reward for all my labor, I could lay one course of hollow concrete blocks. And so I did.
It is the only solid and lasting achievement of my whole life. And you can recognize the course I laid, for there is too much mortar between some of the blocks and not enough between others. Also, the blocks have a bit of a wave in them.
Al said we ought to take it out and put it in again and I said, “Hell, no!” — and grabbed a shovel and so it remains. I never pass it by without a feeling of affection and experiencing an inner glow that when I am long gone I will have a partial memorial in the comfort station I helped erect at Clark Stadium, Hermosa Beach.
One other thing I did as a director of the Hermosa Beach Little League was organize a pancake breakfast. I hate pancakes and for years my breakfast consisted of two cups of coffee and five cigarettes — excellent reasons for putting me in charge of the event.
I did know enough about pancake batter to realize that if you try to pour the stuff out of a big container onto the hotplate, it runs all over the place and puts out the gas. Beyond that, nil.
I got the pancake breakfast together in a prolonged fit of hysteria, for I had not yet learned the good old American custom of delegating work. I had to have tickets printed and find chairs and tables and paper plates and hotplates and enough pancake mix to fill a hot tub.
I had to know bow much milk you add to the stuff you make pancakes out of and do you put in eggs or are the eggs in it already? And if one package of Aunt Jemima will serve 32 people, does that mean hungry people or well-fed people and how many people hungry and/or well fed, are going to turn up anyway? And how many would want orange juice and how many would want milk and how many for coffee and should we serve eggs?
Things like inflation, the energy crisis and the matching of socks in a large family are all insolvable problems. I just ordered lots of everything, borrowed hotplates from as far away as Inglewood, got a kind-hearted professional baker on Pier Avenue to mix up the batter and the whole thing went off very well, proving that muddling through is far better than planning through.
The whole experience has left me a confirmed optimist — but with an increased aversion to pancakes.
Never mind the Dodgers and the Angels and the New York Yankees. When it comes to baseball, I’m for Hermosa Beach — body, blood and soul.
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