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THE SAUGUS ADVOCATE – FRIDAY, MAY 28, 2021 Page 17 October Baseball 2003 Saugus American Little League All-Star Team will play in MS4MS fundraiser (Editor’s Note: The following info is from a press release issued this week by World Series Park.) W orld Series Park in Saugus will host a fundraiser for multiple sclerosis (MS) on Saturday, Oct. 30 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The all-day event will consist of a ceremony on the field, entertainment, food, booths, auctions, raffles, activities for kids, a display of classic cars, and some surprises. The day will culminate with a softball game between the 2003 Saugus Little League team and a combined team of Saugus Police and Firefighters. The coordinator for the event HOMETOWN | FROM PAGE 16 of Tontoquon, the Indian who roamed the banks of the Saugus River a few centuries ago. And we all, to a man, love Saugus for what she is and what she has been in our lives. It was my son, Timmy, whose home is in Franklin, Maine, who said, “So you and your pals are writing a book about Saugus in this past century. For example,” he continued, “tell me about the Forties. What were they like? Why do some football players from those times write poetry? Or what in East Saugus made such music in the beginning that it now comes out of your computer, all the way from the West Coast? Or how do you hibernate in the night with an old teammate’s book of poems, or another’s sheaf of letters?” It was not smugness on his part. But I did not know if that choice of his was spontaneous or specifically directed, as if he had in mind a period related to his own age, young, impressionable, bursting, a place where we all have been. It was a catch in the throat, I said. I tried to explain it to him: There was a time in the high school corridor when a girl turned away from me and walked elegantly off to her lifetime, smiling to this day, a raving beauty yet, mother-proud, bearing regal in her skirts just cut so, and the perfect edge of temperament. It was the time when I slyly tore open my brother’s fragile V-mail letter from the wild Pacific before is Saugus’s own Dario Pizzano, a professional baseball player and a member of the Saugus Little League team that competed in the Little League World Series in 2003. For the last two years, he has been actively involved in fundraising for Mission Stadiums for Multiple Sclerosis (MS4MS). His mother, Traci, has suffered with MS for several years, and Dario wanted to be part of helping raise money for research to help find a cure. MS4MS is a registered 501c(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to raise awareness of MS at all sports stadiums while raising funds directly for families anybody else could get to it, its onionskin quality like a manuscript marked up by an editor serious at life. It was hearing my cousin’s telephone voice from a Port of Embarkation hidden somewhere on the East Coast, for the lone single last time. I remembered how he’d call with that falsetto air to his brother while skating in the swamp near Siaglo’s piggery on Longwood Avenue. He was mimicking Richie and Sumner Sears’ mother calling out for them, the night late, the cold stealing down atop us mindless except for small joys. Or it was seeing a neighbor’s son heading home with one olive drab pant leg sewn much higher than the other one. It was watching newsreels, like Pathé News, at the State Theatre on Friday nights, not really knowing what the gunfire and sudden combustion was all about, that gray mass of exploding sand or snow up there on the screen, now and then body parts in the mix, or hearing the high screech of shells or a plane diving off the clouds as if those sounds had been artificially appended to the film. Wondering if those sounds could be real. It would be early in the Fifties I’d come to know them for what they were. It all came down eventually to my lost brother, locked up forever in my mind. There is a catch in the throat, a first order of breathlessness I remember behind my eyes with a clarity that could disturb some minds. BATTING FOR MS4MS: Dario Pizzano, a professional baseball player and a member of the Saugus Little League team that competed in the Little League World Series in 2003, has been fundraising for MS4MS for the last two years. (Courtesy photos to The Saugus Advocate) It was suddenly finding someone whose ear, like mine, could turn quickly to a cool jazz musician right after hearing Puccini at his very best (…that in New Jersey, Jimmy Smith once would give anything to hear the trumpet and flugelhorn I’m tending on right this minute). Or knowing what Auden had to say about another poet, “In the nightmare of the dark/All the dogs of Europe bark,” the words on the porch on Main Street falling from my grandfather’s lips. It was as if the old gent were reading from an Old World cairn, the Red Fergus put away or one more of the warring O’Sheehaughns. The words were blessed and lovely, full of a music I vaguely could begin to hear, to recognize as my own. And a massive war about to begin that would change everything we knew or could feel, the measurements of that war forever at hand. The catch in the throat became the names in thick black type in the local newspaper pages: Basil Parker, Larry Daniels, Tommy Atkins; boys who would never again make the walk along Summer Street or Appleton Street to Stackpole Field, a walk that I would make for four years in the same Forties they trod it. A walk that teammate Don Junkins would write about, the catch again in the throat, deeper, like a barbed hook had set, clutching what was soul. The list of names came growing and running through the streets of the town; the FLASHBACK: The 2003 Saugus American Little League All-Star Team that competed in the Little League World Series that year will be on hand to support Dario Pizzano and multiple sclerosis research at a fundraising event on Oct. 30 at World Series Park. with MS Warriors and for the advancement of research at Johns Hopkins Project Restore MS Research Center, as it hopes to find a cure. (Courtesy photos to The Saugus Advocate) Volunteers are being requested to help run the event. If you would like to help or need more information about the event, contact Bob Davis at 781-233-4555. Kasabuski brothers almost in one pained but exhilarated breath (them together forever), Vitold Glinski and his pal Alexander Chojnowski from East Saugus practically together again, Walter Barrett missing in the Pacific, Charlie Lenox killed in France, Al DeStuben wounded in Germany. The list grew and grew, the catch in the throat thicker, heavier, a weight coming with it, like measurement taking place, hand spans, arms’ length of things. My heart is forever locked into this town whose streets I walk the way I might one day walk another paradise. If there is one like this, if it is one I can earn my way to, where the river comes pale and palpable in its touch at East Saugus. If it is one where you can look across to Lynn, where old pilings and boats worn out by muscle and devotion continue their journey back into the earth. Where the marsh turns suddenly brown, then white, and where friends, the old and the new, the lost and the forlorn, herald every corner I turn, telling me they love what I still have. Yes, Timmy, here is part of it, the Forties, the pain, the grace, the recall, the sound of another’s words, another’s music, coming to me at the same time. The images sound. Bart Ciampa’s trumpet or Tim Churchard’s banjo plays like one of Don Junkins’ or one of Jimmy Smith’s metaphors. There is no mouth, no voice, but a place…Saugus! God, I am still here, smack dab in the middle of it all. Remarkable, Donny. Remarkable, Bart. Remarkable, Tim. Remarkable, Jim. Remarkable, Tom Weddle. Ah, yes, Timmy, remarkable, the Forties. For two years those Forties and all the years since ran through our minds as we set them down in our book, “A Gathering Of Memories: Saugus 1900–2000.” For two years we garnered and gathered and placed them in order and ordered them in place, scribing a pass at a collection of memories. And it came about, after a total and consuming labor of love, an endless poke at the imagination. Saugonians from 47 states and places outside our borders ordered the book. John Burns and Bob Wentworth and our committee prepared for them a true feast for the memories. The book sold out in a few months, all 2,000 copies, including the last five damaged copies, after doing our own warehousing, packaging, mailing for months of pure excitement. Five hundred more were printed and sold. A perennial scholarship stands, The John Burns Millennium Book Associates Scholarship for Saugus High graduates. It was a noble effort. Perhaps that, too, will be remembered as a piece of Saugus. Like John Burns should be remembered, he who set this chapter moving, this piece of Saugus. —Tom Sheehan is an award-winning author who resides in Saugus.

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