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Along about this time, Bab and Rog had become great baseball fans and Willie and I had become infected with their enthusiasm. The cause of all this was the Erie team in what I seem to recall was named the Middle Atlantic League. The Erie team was usually in contention and there was great excitement in town regarding their accomplishments. Erie was a "farm club" of one of the big league teams. Some of the other teams in the league were Batavia, Bradford, Olean, Canton and Zanesville. The Erie team was known as the Sailors. It seems as though for a time we'd see the Sailors play once every week or so. The games were played at Ainsworth Field which was around 24th and Browns Avenue. Gas rationing hadn't yet arrived in 1941 and there was no problem in driving up there. We'd go up the back way via Greengarden Road, rattling over all the railroad tracks just as we do today only today there aren't as many trains. We'd get grandstand seats and sit there and urge on the Sailors and eat peanuts and popcorn and have a circus. Rog and Bab loved it. And some of the games were remarkably exciting and pretty well played. There was quite a turnover of players and managers. One manager, Kirby Farrell, went on to briefly manage the Cleveland Indians as I recall. But the league was a Class D operation or something pretty far down the line at any rate and sometimes the teams ran on pretty much of a shoestring basis. In one game we attended, I remember that the Sailors got so strapped for pitchers that they finally called in their left fielder to take over the mound duties. But the whole thing was worked out to attain the greatest suspense and the play-offs at the end of the season to determine the league champions generated as much excitement in Erie as the World Series. It was a lot of fun and something we could enjoy with Bab and Rog, which meant a lot. 
The family was quite well in 1941 but I had a recurrence of urethritis which had been plaguing me intermittently for some ten years but I'd always been wholly unable to get the doctor interested in. It came on in April and bothered me on and off from then on for the next year or so. Dr. Gage was my doctor by that time and he simply refused to take the matter seriously, feeding me some "red pills" which usually cleared it up. It was more of an annoyance that anything else because I felt fine otherwise. On one occasion, I remember pressing Dr. Gage so hard about really getting to the bottom of the trouble and [[underline]] doing [[/underline]] something about it that he told me to return in a couple of days and he'd have an instrument with which to examine me more thoroughly. Although I didn't know specifically what he was referring to, I presume it was a cystoscope which he had to borrow. But in spite of my ignorance, I must have had a premonition because my urethritis promptly disappeared almost like magic and I told Dr. Gage his special examination would be unnecessary. As a result, I was not to know the charms of the cystoscope for another fifteen years.