My passion for professional baseball began when I was ten. In 1954, my parents signed me up with a Little League team at the U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, West Germany. The six teams in the league were named after major league teams back home in America.
I ended up on the team named after the Brooklyn Dodgers. With my interest in big league baseball piqued, I made a scrapbook about the Dodgers from articles in the sports section of the U.S. military newspaper known as The Stars and Stripes. The first clipping in my scrapbook was the line score of Game 7 of the 1955 World Series, between the Dodgers and the New York Yankees.