“How did a Topps Baseball Card employee from Pawtucket, Rhode Island end up on a farm on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, that’s was your next question is. Am I right?” asked the Farmer looking straight at me, no tears in sight.  Wow, did his skin just absorb those tears or what?  “You’re from Pawtucket?  You lost your accent.  I’m from North Kingstown.  I know about the Pawtucket location where you worked.  It closed years and years ago.”  The Farmer looked at me with a very concerned eye and asked the obvious, “are you a cop, a federal agent or something?”  I giggled, not out of disrespect to those lines of work, just that he would assume that I was some undercover officer on a highly sensitive trip to a targeted farm stand, there to track down a cold case of cardboard baseball card cutouts taken some 60 years ago.  “No, I am a baseball writer, like I told your grandson, I’m guessing?”  “Evan? Yeah, he’s a smart kid, way smarter than anyone in these parts.”  I snickered a bit, sensing that Evan was a bright kid from our short conversation.  “Named after his grandfather, I’m guessing?” fishing for the Farmer’s name.  “So, you know about Carter Avenue, eh?”

“Listen, Noel, I was a lousy employee.  In fact, I was a lousy student in high school.  I lost my Mom at 10.  Then, my Dad at 17. I didn’t really have a ton of study motivation.  I never really wanted to be anything.”  The Farmer was now standing and motioning me to sit where he was.  Like many, he communicated better from a standing position or pacing back and forth in front of the subject matter he was discussing.  “I wasn’t an athlete or civil service material, you know police or fireman, and I didn’t choose the military neither.  I figured I would get a job after high school, maybe figure it out as I went along.  I had been living with a family friend since my father passed and they were strict on me getting a job post-high school if I wasn’t going to go into the military or go to college.” He took a look at the cards and then turned towards me. “I answered an ad in the Providence Journal for a factory worker there in Pawtucket, then found a spot in the production division.”

I looked up at him and asked, “so how in the heck did you wind up here?” “I’m getting to that,” replied the Farmer sternly. “I was put into the production division without much training and did the best I could. Honestly, I wasn’t crazy about my job assignment and my manager was not the easiest person to work for. He didn’t care for my ‘can you help me’ and ‘I could really use some training’ comments. He just left me alone in the production room with the instructions, ‘I don’t care how you do it, just get it done. I have deadlines to meet. Get it done or your fired.’ And so I tried and tried my best. But no matter how long I worked, 10, 12, 15 hours, I could not for the life of me figure out this cardboard press machine.” I looked at the cards, not really knowing the process. “Not to bring up a sore subject here, but wasn’t there a slot for each card or a marker or some time of place setting to make your job easier?” The Farmer looked at me as if I had just called his wife a piece of you know what.

“Do you know something? Years and years later, I actually went to the library and found a book on the history of baseball cards and how they were created, produced, manufactured, etc. Do you know that 80% of what I read in that book, not one person taught me about at that factory? I was flying by the seat of my pants and making stuff up as I went along. My boss was on a deadline and I needed a job. So, I did the best I could. Which was lousy by the way.” Lousy seemed to be his favorite word. “Ok, so how did you end up here, can we just skip to that?” I asked, thinking my daycation to Chincoteague Island was getting shorter and shorter by the minute. “One night, after I had made another botched batch of baseball cards, my manager surprised me in the production room. He said that he was getting a lot of heat to fire me and that I had one last chance to make him a believer. He asked for my most recent batch to review them.” “Hold on,” I interrupted, “what do you mean by botched.” “Botched means crooked or parts of the picture cut out or the cards just coming out uneven.” I nodded, “go ahead, thanks for clarifying.” The Farmer took a deep breath. “I made up a story that the cardboard cutter needed greasing and I would have the samples first thing in the morning. It fooled my manager and he left. I looked at the five or so botched cardboard sheets of cards, all crooked and well, botched, and decided to fire myself.”

“You did what?” I asked with a little bit of surprise. “I took the liberty of firing myself. And in the process, I took the 5 or 6 cardboard sheets, wrapped them in paper like a Christmas present, locked the factory door behind me, threw the cardboard sheets in the trunk of my car, and took off and out of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I had an uncle living in Port St. Lucie, Florida and decided that was where I was going to land next. I didn’t have much money or food, I just drove and drove, pulling over a few times to nap, getting fuel, then running out of money. Then, I took a wrong turn off the highway in Maryland and ended up on the Eastern Shore here. My car ran out of gas down the road there about a mile or so.” The Farmer pointed out the window towards the Route 13 Highway Rachel and I were just on. “I walked to this very farm, down a long dirt driveway, and knocked on the farmhouse door and asked if I could stay for the night. I explained to the farmer that I could stay in the barn and where my car was and that I was out of gas and out of money and basically out of options. He let me stay in the barn for the night. When I woke up the next morning, I walked out of the barn and saw my car in the driveway.”

If you missed Parts 1 and 2 of this story, you can revisit them on my Blog Page or by clicking these links:

Part 1 – Farm Stand Surprise

Part 2 – Let Me Finish Before You Judge Me