The Way I See It: Love of baseball spans several generations

The Way I See It
Love of baseball spans three generations

BY JAY ST. CLAIR
Special to the Rice News

I love L.A.

Before the song, before the Dodgers slugged their last Brooklyn walkoff and left their trolley cars, before the Lakers shunned the Minnesotan tundra and made a fast break for the sun, before the Rams were sold to St. Louis by a showgirl, before the obsession of media and celebrity became the message of the place, I loved L.A.

I was born at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. I would return there two years later, shuttling from Children’s Hospital of L.A., as I was fully paralyzed with polio, headed for an iron lung. Instead I was treated with experimental drugs and a protocol developed by one Jonas Salk, obtained through my pediatrician, William Mapes, a golfing buddy of my grandfather. Grandpa simply wouldn’t stop until he found a way [to cure me], because he wouldn’t stand for the thought of me being unable to walk. It was simply unacceptable; we had a ballgame. We would always have a ballgame, Grandpa and me.

	JAY AND COLE ST. CLAIR

My grandfather’s name was Cole. Jay Byron Cole.

Now, Grandpa would counsel and occasionally chastise, but he couldn’t change the fact that I didn’t like Dr. Mapes much at the time; he gave me a lot of shots. “Watch it, buster” was one impertinence I recall issuing in his direction a few years later, as the shots never seemed to stop. He remembered.

Twenty-five years later I walked into my former pediatrician’s office at Children’s Hospital, this time as a consultant charged with reorganizing the board and top management of the hospital. My Dr. Mapes was now the emeritus chief of staff and knew that the two of us again had serious business to deal with. But that didn’t stop him from crying when he saw me stride in. Then he said, “Watch it, buster.”

My grandparents raised me in a modest, comfortable home with a ubiquitous, southern colonial fa