Memorial Stadium Memories Memorialized

So many times I was at the 33rd Street in Baltimore to watch sorts at Memorial Stadium and no one told me it was The World’s Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum. Fitting, the inmates never know. The structure I knew is gone; I never knew it was first called “Venable Stadium.”

Also apparently to this video my high school pal Kevin sent me this week, that the stadium was “weird”, that its baseball geometry was off kilter and the placement of the football field lost in the middle. I never knew.

And I was there in 1976 with Kevin (was it also Larry?) at the Baltimore Colts playoff game when a small plane crashed into the upper deck. The game was so bad, the Colts so terrible, that like most, me and my friends exited very quickly. I do remember we were walking across the parking lot and heard the sounds of the plane coming in. It dipped in the stadium once, came out, circled back, went in and again, and we heard the crash. The announcers on the radio for the post game show were screaming because it crashed not far above the media booths. What I learned from the video is that its pilot Donald Kroner had some kind of beef about a tossed toilet paper roll.

Weird.

But I did find my ticket stub, though so worn, you cant read much. But I was there,

I remember going to Baltimore Colts games in the early 1970s. I knew my grandmother took me to a few games, where we watched Johnny Unitas aka the Golden Arm play. For maybe two years, my Dad had season tickets in the mezzanine section, he would take me or one of my sisters to watch. I barely remember anything beyond being cold at some games and drinking hot cocoa out of the thermos.

Kevin and I remember the bitterness of John Elway’s snubbing the Colts number 1 draft choice. We were at the December 1983 game where we spent the entire time screaming “ELWAY SUCKS” which had little effect as he led the Broncos comeback to stomp the Colts. Look, a stub, I was there!

And we keep quiet about the day we opened newspapers in 1984 to learn that Robert Irsay packed the Colts into Mayflower moving trucks and sneaked them off to Indianapolis.

But there are so many more Memorial memories of the Orioles. The 1970 World series I sort of remember seeing on the TV, and the legend of the pitchers Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally, and Pat Dobson. And of course, so many times seeing those replays of the Human Vacuum Cleaner, 3rd baseman Brooks Robinson. I think he showed up one time to my little league game and signed my glove. Long gone. It was Brooks to shortstop Mark Belanger or 2nd baseman Davey Johnson and over to Boog Powell at first for the double plays,

In the 1970s my Mom took a job as a book keeper for a car leasing company, working for two men I recall were “Mr. Sam” and “Mr. Hoffman”? They had season tickets for the O’s and many times they shared those tickets with Mom, who then would take one of us kids to the game.

These were not any tickets. They were lower box seats, second row, in the section just on the 3rd base side of the backstop. This meant we were almost on the field, and it was right where the Oriole players would walk out of their dugout to the on deck circle. You could hear them yell, and the sound of the pitch hitting the catchers mitt was a loud thud.

Mom got tickets once to a game on my birthday as a gift. I am not sure who was more excited, but during the pre-game warm ups she called over catcher Elrod Hendricks, told him it was my birthday, and asked him to share the ball they were using to warm up to me. He agreed… but after the pitches he must have gotten the sections mixed up cause he flipped the ball to another kid. Mom did manage to make it up to me, maybe it was in buying extra hot dogs.

Those were such special times to have with just me an Mom. I remember vividly the mayhem of trying to find parking in the neighborhood before the games, but she always managed, and we would walk a few blocks to get to the big brick entrance of the stadium. The craziness was after the game, as traffic was crazy clogged, and she was not all that familiar with the streets. Her classic line was “I am going to follow that guy because he looks like he knows where he is going.” (I struggled with logic in wondering if he know where we lived?). But we always got home.

I think she got us tickets in 1973 to see a playoff game against the Chicago White Sox where Catfish Hunter pitched. I also seem to remember eating some kind of stadium food every inning. Thanks mom.

I did get to a World Series game in 1979 to watch the O’s lose to the damn Pirates, the Will Stargell era and all their damn singing “We are Family”. I was at the game where President Carter came out to toss the first pitch, one brown hair guy surrounded by a mob of Secret Service agents. I got those tickets via my cousin Sherrie, a gymnast who was the Orioles ball girl up the foul lines, doing flips and stunts to entertain the fans.

Then in high school me and Kevin had a tradition (or at least twice) in April, during the first home stand at Memorial Stadium for our ACSDGSOP (Annual Cut School Day and Go See the Orioles Play). Though there was no cutting school in 1982 as we had graduated, we must have come home from University to catch the games.

We remember well buying from Clancy the beer man, the vendor who would spring up and down the upper deck seats carrying a full tray of beer cups topped with plastic. People would yell “Clancy” from two sections over and he’d dash to make a sale. I recall Kevin saying he was a track star somewhere, but Fancy Clancy was legendary at Memorial Stadium.

In 1983 I was tuned into the radio listening when the O’s won the World Series, I had a part time job at some golf course driving range near Loch Raven. There was something serene about listening alone and yelling out into the darkness of the empty golf course. Wow so much of Oriole memories was listening to the play by play on the radio, notably Chuck Thomson with his “Go to War, Miss Agness” that I have no clue what it means.

I found an old photo I did as a double exposure when I took a film photography class at University of Delaware in 1984- that was my friend Kevin’s baseballjacket atop a photo I must have gotten when we went to a game at Memorial Stadium.

On a 2008 visit to see my sisters in Baltimore, Harriet and her husband got me tickets to see a game at Camden Yards, and it just so happened to be the night the give away was a tribute to number 34, Wild Bill Hagy.

I still own that shirt.

It was a 2012 visit with my other sister Judy who had organized a tour of Camden Yards, I finally made it on the field.

Judy definitely stored lots of the old memory stuff. When Cori and I visited her in 2024, she found in the basement a Baltimore sports team poster that my Mom had found somewhere and brought home for me, it was a fixture on my childhood bedroom.

I have not been much of an O’s follower since I moved away from town, but I do manage to keep a few hats around for wear and tear.

So the memories come flowing back, and Memorial Stadium was anything but weird, it felt like the way pro sports were played in the 1970s and 1908s. The stadium always seemed a bit worn, dirty, and likely smelled like pee and spilled beer. And those memories lead to ones of my parents who took us to games, just for the time together, not as sports nuts or gurus, just because it was fun.

And there was some irony in 2011 when my sisters and I cleaned out Mom’s house in Florida after she passed away. We found a disposable film camera, and had the developed. Mom’s last photos was her going to a minor league game with her friends to watch the Ft Myers Miracle.

I like to think on the way home she remembered those days of driving out of Memorial Stadium, just following a random car because they “looked like the knew where they were going.”

Memorable Memorial Stadium.

Thanks.

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Featured Image: Memorial Stadium in Baltimore from frame of video Memorial Stadium Was So Much Weirder Than You Think combined with various old ticket stubs from my own scrapbook.