I was recently reviewing sports trading cards (baseball, football, basketball) that our son had collected, mostly in the 1990s. My goal is to pare down what we have to a reasonable amount. Whileit is easy to keep the cards of “name” players in each sport, there were other cards that required closer examination.
Those were the cards of players who may not have been the stars of their teams, but who were significant enough to deserve trading cards featuring the appropriate action shot and their statistics.
I searched for information for every single player whose name escaped me. Of course, simply making it to the Big Leagues is a source of pride for a player, parents, relatives and friends.
I served a congregation in LaSalle, Illinois, for three years as a student rabbi for 18 weekends a year, flying from Cincinnati to Chicago and then driving to my destination. On one of my flights back to Cincinnati, I sat next to the wife of Cincinnati Reds pitcher Frank Pastore. I remember the couple with her telling her before we boarded the plane, “We will be sure to watch his games when we can.” Frank Pastore eventually became a well-known Christian radio talk-show host in Los Angeles. He died from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident in 2012.
In one of my early years as rabbi at the congregation in Topeka, Kansas, I received a call from a woman named Beth who said that her husband was looking at a job possibility in the area. She was Jewish and wanted to attend services on the Jewish High Holy Days. She eventually told me that her husband was a former baseball player named Joe Keough.
I said, “You mean Joe Keough who played on the Kansas City Royals, who got the gamewinning hit in their first regular season game in April 1969 against the Minnesota Twins?” I think I left her speechless.
It was just that type of accomplishment that led me to keep certain trading cards. Players who did something significant in one game or in one season, or who became coaches, analysts and broadcasters got my nod for retention.
As we celebrate Independence Day, we can think of all those people in the history of the United States who have made contributions to the preservation of freedom, constructive and productive discourse, and acceptance of one another as fellow travelers along this journey, which is approaching 250 years in the not-too-distant future.
We are also closing in on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission. Books, articles, documentaries, and feature films continue to chronicle this accomplishment. We are finding out more and more about the diverse group of people who comprised the team that made Apollo 11 happen. Every person involved in the mission, from the construction of the vehicles to the splashdown recovery team, had a significant role in the success of that historic flight and the space program.
An 1800-year-old rabbinic saying highlights the importance of each person to our world and our lives: “Despise no one, and call nothing useless, for there is no one that doesn’t have his/her time and there is no thing that doesn’t have its place.”
Every one of us has an opportunity to further human achievement, freedom, respect and decency. May that be our continuing mission.
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