And Now Pete Rose is Gone

This afternoon I learned that Pete Rose passed away.  I remember seeing him in person at Candlestick Park with the Big Red Machine.  Baseball was great in those days.  The Reds were great.  I rooted for them in the 1975 World Series and when I saw them at Candlestick.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my interest in baseball.  It started coming back when I was in my early 30s, and that was after Pete Rose accepted a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball for gambling.  And when the players went on strike in 1994, that was it for me.  They came off the strike the next year and and I went on strike as a fan and have been on strike since.  (This is coming from someone who still refuses to rent from Hertz, due to their previous association with OJ Simpson.  And I have no idea why people say I'm stubborn.)  But let's get this back to Pete Rose.

There is no doubt he was one of the greatest baseball players of all time.  I remember him running to first base when he drew a walk.  From what I have read he adopted a derisive nickname and made it his own.  There was never a Charlie Hustle before and there will never be another one.  

When the gambling allegations surfaced, I'm thinking..........say it ain't so, Pete.  The investigation went on for many months, and I read that Rule 21, prohibiting gambling from the players, was conspicuously posted on the door of every clubhouse.  In other words, Pete Rose had no excuse.  Gambling problem?  Yeah, we learned he had one.  But it went deeper than that.  There was tax evasion and shady behavior on his part.  The man who I saw run to first base upon drawing a walk was doing a different kind of hustling off the field.  I was disappointed, and I agreed with the ban.

For some time, I thought MLB was going to cave, and reinstate him.  To their credit, they haven't.  In my opinion MLB isn't exactly an honest enterprise and a large part of that is due to continued fan support, which I've touched upon in a few posts from many years back.

Anyway........someone who became as controversial as OJ Simpson, but in a different way, is no longer with us.  

I hope that anyone he was ever a role model to will restrict their emulation to passionate execution in what they do for a living, and not in what Rose did off the field.

Some Genealogical Musings

Most of the updates here have been on the Parker family, which has its own page.  I am thinking of creating a "Genealogy Main" page as the first stop for anyone who stumbles here looking for information on my research.  There is the intention of creating pages for Pierson, Pilkington, and Bonsall family histories.  There are some families on my mother's side I want to research as well.  I sometimes wonder if I'm opening a can of worms here on my Parker research, as that I am learning that it just wasn't my third great grandfather's family who migrated to Indiana and then Kansas.  One of his brothers' families migrated as well, along with his younger sister's.  And earlier I learned today that some of his cousins came too.

A year or so ago I started tracing downwards as many known descendants of William Riley Parker, mainly to learn where they went after settling in Kansas.  I may have to reach back even farther and go back to his grandfather.  That will shed a lot more light on the migrations of this family, along with the Hodges who migrated with them.  

If the information gets big enough it will justify its own website, as if I really want to be taking on other projects in addition to what I have going now.  This blog started out mainly as a chronicle of my random thoughts and life experiences, and now side pages are popping up.  I'd like to do a side page of my foreign banknote collection, alongside the "Ugly Money" page, which also needs updating.  

I probably shouldn't be doing this until I retire, and the problem with retirement right now is that I'm having so much fun in my job to where I don't want to give it up.  I am nearing the end of my career, I am in my groove as a Senior Product Test Engineer, and it's giving me plenty of satisfaction.  Yes, I sometimes miss being a satellite engineer, where I learned a great deal about orbiting satellites, and got to go to Japan three times and Italy once in that capacity.  

As for retirement, I have picked out a date, but am not making it public.  I may delay it a few months.  I can see pulling it ahead if the company re-organizes into a structure that I don't like.  Management changes at the very top of the corporate structure have taken place, and some have taken place at lower levels.  I am concerned with business units becoming too big to manage unless they are broken down into more manageable segments, which defeats the purpose of consolidating them into larger units which they say we need in order to meet our corporate goals.

OK, I just looked at the clock, and I've decided that I should shut up and call it a night.  This transmission is now officially coming to an end.