| Page 3 of 5 < > |
Safe at Home
What some have done with the lifetime pass to Major League Baseball says plenty about the game's healing powers.
(Ricky Carioti - The Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Only it never came. After a few minutes the guards told him to put on his clothes and go back to his room.
And while shots weren't fired, something died in him, in each of them that night.
"How does someone ever forget that?" Sickmann, now the director of military sales for Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, said all these years later. "Life was uncertain after that. You didn't know if you would live or die."
* * *
In the garage of his home outside Jacksonville, Fla., Alan Golacinski, an embassy security officer, keeps three boxes of things that were sent to him after his return from Iran. In the containers are football jerseys, sports memorabilia and letters. He hasn't opened them in years. His wife keeps after him about throwing away the cartons and one of these days he is sure he will.
"I don't want to sound ungrateful," he said. "I just don't remember all" the gifts.
But still they kept coming: a box of Idaho potatoes, tickets to a Broadway show, a VCR back when VCRs were cutting-edge technology.
Another Marine guard, Kevin Hermening, was given a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, though he later turned down the offer to study journalism at UW-Oshkosh. The Ducane grill he received was stolen off his porch several years ago.
What is the reward for suffering? Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn discussed the topic one day in the middle of the hostage crisis with Jeremiah Denton, a Navy admiral who had been held captive in Vietnam and later became a senator from Alabama, as they sat at a baseball game in Cincinnati. Sometime that afternoon, Kuhn is convinced, the idea of a lifetime baseball pass was discussed, though he can't remember the actual conversation. What he does know is that the gift is unique.
"You know, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you that we gave out passes to anyone other than them," Kuhn, who retired in 1984, said recently.
Charles Scott, an Army colonel who was the embassy military attache, often found himself face-to-face at Atlanta Braves games with the man most responsible for his captivity and ultimately his release -- Jimmy Carter. To this day, Scott, now a public speaker, can't forgive the former president for allowing the shah into the country.
Still, whenever he would run into Carter, he'd eschew the traditional handshake and bury the former president in a giant hug.
