[Robert Coats]

From a gifted writer and former co-worker...found this gem while cleaning out an old drive:

11-Dec-90 13:16:36
Sb: Mailbox Baseball
To: All
Some vandal has smashed my mailbox, and my neighbor said it looks like the result of "Mailbox Baseball." Is this some local game, or what?
Thanks,
WR

There is one reply!

Sb: Mailbox Baseball
Fm: Shel Hall 76701,103
To: W.R. Holdsworth 79705,3070
WR-
Mailbox Baseball is as old as teen-age driving privileges, and is played at varying levels of expertise all over the nation.

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 he 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 a masonry mailbox he had twice demolished that same month.

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 somewhat 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 floodlights 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 red-plastic taillight fragments, 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 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. Al's short appearance in Federal court earned him a year's probation, and his parents were still buying new mailboxes months later.

So, yes, I'd say we know about Mailbox Baseball hereabouts.

-Shel

Copyright (c) 1990, Sheldon T. Hall