The first Major League All Star Game was played on July 6, 1933 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park (the original one), where the American League defeated the National League 4-2. No, I wasn’t around to witness history in the making. I mean, look at the visage below. That guy couldn’t be much more than 64 years old.
I did take in the game in 1967, however, on a black and white television in a cabin at Lake Murray in Oklahoma, during a family vacation that is peripherally tied to the annals of Arlington. It was there that, as I threw baseball “pop ups” to myself near the lake, the kid in the cabin next to ours asked if he could join me. He told me his name was Ardis Bell. I soon learned his dad was a physician. I told him I had visited a Dr. Bell once when I had a sore throat a few years earlier, but it couldn’t be the same guy; I lived in North Richland Hills, Texas. Ardis told me he lived in North Richland Hills, Texas. Sure enough, Dr. Bell – of the practice Bell and Jacobson – lived in my hometown. I would learn many years later that Dr. Bell’s partner is the father of Michael Jacobson, President and CEO of the Greater Arlington Chamber of Commerce. But it was during that All Star weekend that I learned how small our big world can be.
I suspect that, by now, if you glanced at our cover and then backtracked to this missive after poring over the content on pages 26-92, you know where I’m going here. So I’m going to go there.
THIS IS OUR ALL STAR EDITION, FOLKS!
It’s the issue that annually reveals who our much-cherished readers deemed as the best of the best – or, at least, as their favorites – in more than 160 categories that by and large define our city. It’s the issue that practically everyone reads, if just to say, “see, I told you that Dr. Kenyon Godwin is a great chiropractor!” It’s the issue prior to which many advertisers break convention and call us, rather than the other way around, because they know that practically everyone will be reading and that a lot of those readers voted for them and they want to say “thank you” for the veneration.
As much as anything, it’s the issue that epitomizes what the Arlington/Mansfield/Grand Prairie area is all about: Good folks supporting other good folks – and routinely celebrating bonds that transcend an online ballot box and several tens of thousands of words that define a multitude of All Star qualities.
Still, we’re very happy to have created that ballot box and to write those words. This is the seventh time we’ve gotten to do that, and with each passing year, more people virtually race to the former and literally fix eyeballs on the latter. And even if they disagree with some of the choices, they agree that it’s a fun endeavor.
Maybe not as fun as playing catch by the lake with a new friend named Ardis Bell, but pretty darned close.
