Back alley baseball games
Transcript
Craig Nagasawa: "There was this idea, especially for the young males, it was all sports, sports, sports, sports, endless sports. There were like The Dois, Wally Doi was the head of the Doi family. I believe he was from Hawaii, but he was also in the 442 and he had a wooden leg as a result of his combat over in Europe. But he already had practiced judo and all this stuff. I remember he had what's called cauliflower ear, one side anyway, it's all like curled up and it was from doing so much judo when he was a kid. So he was extremely, intensely into both football and baseball. He would coach little league teams and do all of this stuff with the kids.
So during the summers, every other day, we would go out into the back, the big open dirt lot that was behind all the stores down that alley. We could go through the stores, so Aloha Cafe, everybody came out to the back and there was a big dirt parking lot. And he would be a coach to us. He would get us out there and make us warm up. We'd have to run back and forth, run up and down the back parking lot to get in shape, and then we'd play catch and then he would–Oh! What was great was when you were playing catch, it was fierce. It wasn't just sort of lobbing the ball. You threw it as hard as you could. He would hold up his mitt and the ball had to go right in his mitt or otherwise he would just let it go by and he'd start yelling at you, “What's the matter with you? You got a crooked arm or something?” Plus he had his wooden leg so he wouldn't even try. He would just stand there and you had to go shag it. So we got to be very good aims with throwing the baseball. And then he would pitch to us. We would draw a square on the back of the building. It was the back of the judo club, actually—it was a cinder block building—on the wall in the back. We would draw a square that was the strike zone and he would pitch just like full-on fastball. I was always terrified. His kids weren't. Wade and Robin Doi, and Kimmy, that was the Doi family. They played baseball all the way through high school and they played football. They were like real team athletes, but it all started with Wally and little league back there. He would just throw these sort of sizzling pitches past us as little kids and I was just always terrified that I was going to get hit with one. And of course, we never got hit. He was good. But we didn't have helmets or all the gear that they had. We're just out there with our tennis shoes and our baseball bats.
But here was the thing. There was a huge warehouse across on the other side of the back parking lot. I think it was like two and a half stories high. It was an inner warehouse. I don't know who it was run by. It might have been part of the Greyhound Bus Depot. But if you hit the ball onto the roof there, it was considered a home run and you got to stop practicing for the day. So we would always be trying to hit a home run. I think I probably never did., but Wade and Robin every once in a while would hit these home runs up on the top. And as a reward, we got to, first of all, it was always in the summer, so it was sizzling hot. So we wanted to hit that home run so we could go inside. But somebody would hit one. And we'd go straight through the back of Aloha Cafe. We'd go sit at the counter, Wally would make us any soft drinks we wanted, malts, shakes, whatever you wanted, and a piece of pie. That was our reward for practice. We got to do that even when we practiced, but we got to cut short when somebody hit a home run. So that was one of the things that would happen. And then after a while, the Colonial Hotel was quite high and there were windows along that alley. So the people who had apartments that looked out that way could watch us down in the back. So after a while, it became a thing where all of these old guys were up there two and three stories up and they'd be yelling things at us out their window. “That looked like a strike to me!” “What are you guys doing out there?” You know? There was just this whole thing where everybody knew each other and even the parents would be out there, or Wally would be out there, coaching us."
Audio
Images