Mike McClurg Sr - Mason Dixon Tabletop League
Stories
My personal favorite was my son Liam's first trip to Lancaster. He was 13 months old. My brother Mike and I drove over from New Jersey. It was about two and a half hours then. It was before traffic lights on Rt 206. My wife was at work and I had child care duties. Our daughter was in school.
This was in 1987. Remember when there were no cell phones or internet? I left no note of where I and more importantly, the baby were. I belted him and his car seat into the back of Mike's car and off we went. We got our cards then sat in a McDonald's in Lancaster with the baby on the seat, for 3 hours as we looked at the cards.
My wife came home with our daughter to find my car there but no baby. It would be another 3 hours until I walked in with a sleeping child. Sleeping until the holy hell broke loose.
My brother Greg loved the all you could eat buffets at the Plain and Fancy or Good and Plenty. He was once cut off at the Treadway Hotel breakfast buffet. It was all you can eat but after 8 strip steaks, they cut him off.
Mike and I stayed at the Treadway once. They had an indoor pool with two floors of rooms overlooking the pool. Mike would jump from the second floor into the pool.
Fond memories
Patrick Freaney
These notes brought back a fond memory of our old friend Elliott. When my now grown and getting old kids were still toddlers Elliott and his wife drove up from the beach to have dinner with my wife and I and to play a few APBA games. My wife wanted a guess as to how long it might take for us to play our four game series. I told her 20 minutes per game. We started the first game and Elliott breaks out a tiny shot glass with the smallest dice I have ever seen. He would shake the shot glass and I swear it seemed like those dice would never stop bouncing around :) Took almost 2 hours to play those 4 games. I am giving him Elliott a hard time the entire time and he just keeps laughing. Good memory.
The other fond memory involves another former manager, Jim Boylan. Jim lived in Richmond and once a year a few of the Virginia Beach boys and I would meet a t Jim's house for a day of APBA. Jim was a bachelor and a tight wad accountant and had only the most basic of home decor. He has a big picnic table set up in his family room and we have two sets of hames going at one time with 8 of us sharing the picnic table. Someone gets a little miffed at constantly hitting into double plays so they decide to try something new and they roll the dice across the floor. Problem is the dice bounce into the fireplace (no fire) that is full of leaves. We spent 10 minutes looking through the leaves to find those dice. Jim then announced a new rulle, no throwing dice in the fireplace. Had to be there but it was hilarious.
As for Lancaster - I only started traveling to Lancaster during the last few years. They have a great place there called Sight and Sound that is well worth the trip all by itself. Not to mention the great food and Amish experience. Anyway, on my first trip I had to go by the old APBA location and much to my surprise and happiness it looked pretty much the same as all of the pictures I had seen over the years. Might be crazy but just standing in the parking lot brought tons of fond memories and great appreciation for the people that brought and continue to bring us the great game.
That reminds me....
I started playing APBA in high school and continued playing anytime I was home from college. (I thought taking the game to school with me would be a bad idea. For once, I was right.) When I was home from college and not playing APBA or working, I dated the same young lady. We married six days after graduation.
To hear her tell it, I never mentioned my APBA addiction. Once we were married and moved in to our apartment, she says, I started a conversation with 'I have a confession to make'. She was thinking another woman or some other (relatively) minor issue. I confessed my APBA obsession. Shortly thereafter, I started playing games at the dining room table (it was one of those folding card tables.)
As Christmas approached, she wrote to APBA. She told Dick that she was concerned that we would never have babies since she couldn't lure me away from the dining room table. (Clearly libel. But never mind that.) She also ordered the newest version of the game for my Christmas present. Dick wrote back to say he understood and that there was an APBA wives club is she was interested. He also included two of those tickets to the box at the Vet (and parking pass). She wasn't a Phillies fan, or much of a baseball fan. But we did enjoy ourselves.
Today, she enjoys Phillies baseball. Gets pissed off when Kruk is not doing the color commentary for the games and puts up with my ABPA obsession. The woman is a saint.
Now if I could only remember where I put that letter from Dick.....
I may have told you all before, but when I grew up in Columbia, PA about 9 miles west of Lancaster, my older brother and I would go to the original APBA store on the first floor of a house on Old Rt. 30 (now Rt.462).
It remained there till it moved to the Millersville Rd. Location that most of you probably visited a few miles away from the original location. We were in college then at Millersville State down the road from APBA and ended up getting about 10 kids on our dorm floor to play APBA. Most of them formerly played Strat-O-Matic baseball.
It was a great time- we all played intramural softball at the college and went to one Phillies game each spring at the “new Vet” or Veterans Stadium. Every year for about a decade my brother Dave and I would get our cards and talk baseball with Veryl Lincoln. It was always exciting when we received 2 tickets in the mail from APBA to see the Phillies from the APBA box seats right behind the Visitors dugout. You either got 2 front row seats with a regular parking ticket or 2 second row seats with VIP parking tickets under the stadium where the players parked. The 4 seats in the box were folding padded chairs.
I remember seeing my Braves play and Dale Murphy accepted a baseball from me and brought it back with several signatures- his, Pedro Borbon, Phil Niekro, Biff Pocoroba.
I had asked him for his and Pocoroba’s so I could at some later time hand the ball over to my son Biff who was named after him. What a terrific person Murphy was and still is.
I don’t know if the McDonalds is the same one you ate at, but we would stop across the street from the original APBA on Rt.462(the Columbia Pike) and check out cards there before heading back to Columbia.