A 37-year-old video clip brings back a flood of memories

The video at the top of today's post is a 1-minute snippet of a longer segment recorded on Wednesday, November 2, 1988, my 19th birthday.

The clip was captured by my dad using our trusty old – and decidedly heavy – Curtis Mathis video camera. The quality is exactly what you would expect nearly four decades on, though I'm not sure the lighting and the videographer were exactly top notch to begin with.

(I say that with all due respect to my dad, who made up for whatever he lacked in moviemaking skills with love and enthusiasm.)

No matter, though. What's important is that it captures a moment in time that, while receding further and further into the past, still vividly recalls the optimism of young adulthood.

I was a freshman at John Carroll University, while my then-fiancée Terry (seen in the last few seconds of the video) was working at Lincoln Electric and banking the money we would use to buy our first house 3 1/2 years later.

There's much to savor here, including:

• A striking resemblance between 1988 me and the 2025 version of my son Jack. People have said we look alike, and I see it here.
  
  
• A starring role for my niece Jessica, who was 3 years old at the time and the star of nearly every video my dad shot.
  
  
• Cameos from loved ones long gone (Mom, my sister Judi) and those thankfully still with us (my brother Mark, my sister-in-law Becky, my brother-in-law Jess).
  
  
• Mark with my stuffed Bill the Cat on his head.

Mine is not the first generation to have its life chronicled through home movies, though I think the VCR era did make it easier to record and watch moments like these.

And I'm so grateful for that. A few years ago I went through our VHS tapes and digitized as many as I could. They're full of clips like these I never want to lose.

Time marches on. Technology makes it possible to remember the people and places we encounter along the way in more than just our hearts.

My brother-in-law's birthday reminds me of a time when slow-pitch softball was all the rage

You can't really see it, I know, but when I was with the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1991, I wrote this feature story about my brother-in-law Jess and some of his longtime softball buddies. Jess is the guy standing in the very middle of that group of seven players.

Today is my brother-in-law Jess' birthday. He was married to my oldest sister Judi from 1972 until she died very unexpectedly in 2009. I was only 2 at the time of their wedding, so Jess has always seemed a part of my life.

Jess was an accomplished athlete at Benedictine High School, and he kept his sports career going through the 1970s and 80s and into the 90s as a slow-pitch softball player in the Cleveland area.

You wouldn't know it nowadays, given the relatively low participation numbers, but when I was growing up, softball was a thing. Every city had a league, and many people played on multiple teams.

When I started my career as a newspaper sports writer in the early 90s, my colleague Scott Kendrick and I were put in charge of The News-Herald's weekly slow-pitch softball coverage. This section took up several pages in the Saturday paper, and I was once told it accounted for hundreds – maybe 1,000 or more – in extra copies of the newspaper sold.

People loved seeing their names and their friends' names in the statistics we would publish. We also printed league standings, a weekly ranking of the top area teams (the "Sweet 16"), and a notes column that Scott and I co-wrote.

We in the newsroom also played the game ourselves. Because we worked weird night shifts, though, we weren't available to play in the regular city leagues, which scheduled most of their games on weekday evenings.

Instead, we played in the Ohio Day Men's League, which as I recall had its games on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. As you might imagine, the teams were made up of guys who did night work...policemen, fire fighters, third-shift factory workers, etc.

And us.

I always looked forward to those weekday morning games, which were relatively early (9:30 and 10:30am) for those of us who had stayed in the newsroom until the first papers came off the press some 8-9 hours earlier. But they were always so much fun that it was worth losing a little sleep.

Anyway, Jess played softball at a very high level for some of the best teams in Northeast Ohio. He was primarily a pitcher and first basemen.

He let me serve as bat boy for a few of those teams, and man, I felt like king of the world walking out onto the field several times a game to retrieve the team's bats and take them back to the dugout.

When you're 8 or 10 years old or whatever I was, getting to sit on the bench with a bunch of great athletes (all of whom were very nice to me) was a real treat.

Like I said, though, softball has waned in popularity over the years. And, now in his early 70s with the battle scars of decades of competition to prove it, Jess isn't playing these days anyway.

But like me, he still has his memories. And I hope they're good ones as he celebrates another trip around the sun today.

Happy birthday, Jess, and thanks for sharing some of those glory days with your little brother-in-law.