We are waiting here in the southeast's Lowcountry, somewhat patiently, for the great migration of baby boomers that is supposed to happen, well, now.  As a baby boomer myself, in a slow market, I often reflect on the 50's.  In fact, only last week a friend got me thinking when he asked if I ever wondered what became of my baseball card collection - the shoe-boxes full of Willy Mays, Mickey Mantle or Bob Feller cards or, in my case, being a Chicago boy, the heroic poses of Early Wynn, Nellie Fox or Ted Kluszewski?  I actually have thought of this when I calculate what those cards might be worth today, if I still had them.  He thinks our mothers may be to blame and he may be on to something.  This conspiracy theory starts with the times. 

I am a relatively early boomer and for as long as I can remember during the 1950's, I was rarely without my baseball glove, even during the winter, my "top ten" cards, for emergency trading purposes, and a wad of 6 or 7 pieces of Double Bubble gum jammed in my right cheek to look the part of tobacco chewing Nellie Fox, my hero, who was to lead the Chicago White Sox to the 1959 World Series.

I was not alone.  Throughout the 50's baseball was everywhere because, well, one heck of a lot of kids were outside, almost all of the time, playing it.  It wasn't only that we didn't have Game Boys or 500 TV channels or computers or texting to keep us occupied inside; our parents actually kicked us out of the house in the morning and strongly suggested that we stay out until the street lights came on or we were hit by a car or lost an arm.  But more to the point, there were simply a lot of us kids in existence.  Between the years 1946 and 1964, the baby boom years, 75.8 million little Nellie Foxes were born and everywhere you looked in the 1950's kids were playing ball, pick-up games, little league, pony league, alone throwing a ball against a garage door or off a roof or through a neighbor's window.  It was glorious.

For the 5-year period between 1956 and 1960, 21.2 million boomers were born, nearly 1 1/2 times the number born between 1941 and 1945, and the largest for any 5-year period in the 20th century. Boomers today represent 28% of the U.S. population. But in 1964, they represented about 40%.  More than a third of the population was under 19 years old!  And we were all outside and, by today's standards, in constant danger.  We didn't wear helmets anywhere, or while riding anything.  Our jungle gyms were not padded.  In fact some were built on concrete.  Cuts, scrapes, cracked heads and broken parts were the norm and it seemed just fine.

But our lives "outside" were not always easy on mothers.  I recall playing baseball with my brother, two years younger than I, when Gil ran after a fly ball, fell flat in a field of prickly bushes and let out a horrific scream.  As always, the event emptied the ball field as everyone ran to assess the damage.  Gil was sprawled out awkwardly with a one-inch thorn sticking in the white of his right eye.  A hushed silence ensued as I steadied myself and knelt over Gil to see what I could do.  Not knowing any better, I just pulled the thorn out and we all jumped back as blood flowed from Gil's eye, enough blood to generate another common happening, the mass run to Mom.

I pulled Gil up and the 10 or so of us took off directly to my house.  On the way we gathered about ten more curious kids and by the time we reached my front steps, my mother was already out and waiting, as were the mothers up and down the block, each alerted by the collective screaming that warned of our arrival.  And, as was typical, the first to arrive had only heard of the actual accident by loose word of mouth along the way.  "Gil poked his eye out!" Terry bellowed to my mother and she let out her scream and tore into the crowd throwing kids out of her way as she grabbed my brother and looked into his eye.  By that time of course the bleeding had stopped and my mother in fact could not even tell which eye had been poked.  Believing Gil was to be half blinded for life and discovering nothing of the sort led to a familiar finale with my mother's strong desire to actually blind both my brother and me.  And so it went.

At any given time during this era, if one was positioned high above any neighborhood in America, I'm convinced they would witness daily 4 or 5 of these damaged kid brigades rushing through the streets toward an already stressed out mother.  At the end of each day, when dads came home and asked "How was your day?" mothers could rarely convey the extent of the trauma they had suffered.  "Your youngest son came home with an eye poked out," my mother would say and when dad laughed and said, "Let's see her, son," she knew that no one was ever going to really understand.  I believe that were the Surgeon General to have discovered in the 1950's what we know today, that drinking during pregnancy is a very bad thing, he would have been largely ignored.

My friend thinks that somewhere along the way, as they struggled to live with the dangers of a kid dominated world, mothers secretly started to think of ways to get even.  He recently stumbled across evidence suggesting the plot was only too real - a brief blurb in our local paper about a very successful, though little known, Mutual Fund which originated in 1966 (the very year I went off to college by the way) and has been growing ever since.  It's name?  The TMBCR Fund.  Need I say more?  The Mother's Baseball Card Relief Fund will continue to grow and well, I guess they deserve it.