Mailbox Baseball is as old as teen-age driving privileges, and
is played at varying levels of expertise all over the nation.
In our neck of the woods, contests matching man and mailbox
are traditionally held on Friday nights, frequently in conjunction
with high school football games.
Customarily, it is the supporters of the losing football team
who are the most enthusiastic mailbox baseball players, practicing
their craft as they return to their own disgraced part of town.
One of the finest players ever to grace the sport went to high
school with me, here in Atlanta. Al LaFarge.
Perhaps you have heard of his exploits. It was Al who first
perfected the "Lancelot" variation, whereby a short 2x4 is propped,
lance-wise, against the car's window frame, projecting forward and
slightly outward, allowing the full inertia of the automobile to be
transmitted the length of the 2x4 as the free end of the lumber
came into solid contact with the mailbox.
Before LaFarge, the standard play had been to lean from the
passenger window of a chauffeured sedan, swinging a friction-taped
Louisville Slugger at the standard bent-tin-on-a-stick suburban
mailbox, but the all-brick mailbox soon become the bane of the
bat-wielding proles.
LaFarge's new technique worked even with the all-brick items;
those it did not decapitate it uprooted. No mason's handiwork is
meant to survive a direct hit from a 1963 Chevrolet Impala 327 SS.
Big Al met his match late one night, however, when he
attempted the never-before-achieved Lancelot Trifecta, drawing a
bead on the self same masonry mailbox he had demolished on both of
the two previous Friday nights.
His team scouts, however, had failed to notice that during the
most recent rebuilding the mailbox had been reinforced with four
twelve-foot lengths of 132-pound-per-running-yard mainline railroad
rail.
The installation of the rails had required the services of a
pile-driver, since some what over seven feet of each rail was
inserted into the firm Georgia clay underlying the property of the
aggrieved homeowner.
The brick was merely veneer. Camouflage. Show business.
Set the scene: The car, each of its five passenger positions
occupied by a smart-ass white boy utterly devoid of social
conscience; the lance, tucked knight-wise under the arm of the
primary primate, one end butted against the car, the other weaving
slightly as Al aligned it with... the mailbox, an irresistible
target in pristine brick and virgin mortar, beckoning in the
moonlight.
Just before the inevitable impact, the aforesaid homeowner,
standing in his front yard at the end of a seventy-five-foot length
of electric-lawnmower extension cord, pressed the trigger on his
trusty Kodak super-eight home-movie camera, bringing into play the
triple flood lights atop the camera, bathing the scene in light.
LaFarge never wavered, his concentration was absolute. The
result was as you might imagine; the 2x4, caught between the
massively-reinforced masonry and the rump-sprung Chevrolet,
exploded into organic shrapnel as it ripped the passenger's door,
and Al, completely out of the car. The resulting lateral
displacement of the trajectory of the mortally-wounded Impala
resulted in its inebriated and incompetent driver's steering
starboard when port was required.
The first roll ejected the other student-athletes from the
car, and, after an extensive series of aerial arabesques, the
remains of the empty automobile came to rest, inverted, in a shower
of broken glass, oaths and empty beer cans.
The homeowner's movie film was back from the drugstore about
the time the doctors got the last of the splinters out of Al's
armpit, and it proved that a picture is still worth a thousand
words. Among those requesting prints of this cult hit were the
mason, the postmaster, and the Federal district attorney.
His car demolished, Al feared he would have to walk to our
exclusive private school, but the fear was unfounded; he and his
henchmen were summarily ejected from those hallowed halls. Al's
short appearance in Federal court earned him a year's probation,
and his parents were still buying their neighbors new mailboxes
months later.