Father’s Day, 2024: Amid Our Differences It Was Baseball That Brought Us Together On Common Ground
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
He applied a wicked spin on his ping-pong serves whenever we played table tennis in our musty basement, ruled the chessboard with such a ferocious style that he beat me every single time and hit fungos to me with a one-armed swing that would help me make Little League All-Star teams.
And later in life, Julius Snel drove from his former condo in Boca Raton, Fla. to meet me at Florida State League minor league games in Jupiter in north Palm Beach County and Port St. Lucie in St. Lucie County where we ate turkey sandwiches at the sparsely-attended games in the muggy South Florida evenings.
My dad turns 87 years old in August and it has not been the easiest year for the guy.
Last August, I helped move him from his condo in Boca Raton to an independent living center in Hollywood, Florida. It took a while for my two sisters and myself to budge him from his condo. The truth was he could no longer completely take care of himself in a solo way. Dad didn’t need a nursing home. Just a little built-in help.
On a hot and muggy August day in South Florida, we moved Julius 30 miles south along the I-95 corridor.
And his latest chapter began.
He wore an old Las Vegas 51s baseball hat for the occasion.
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Julius’ early life was hard. My dad was born in a small village outside Warsaw, Poland in August 1937.
He and his family fled Poland for Siberia to escape the Nazis when he was a little kid.
And then tragedy. My father’s dad died when Julius was seven years old in Siberia.
Young Julius survived the Holocaust then lived with his family in displaced person camps following World War II before coming to the U.S. at age 14.
About 20 years ago I sat down with my dad and interviewed him about his life in Europe. I tape-recorded our session and had a court reporter transcribe our chat. Highlights:
“I remember that we were in Siberia and, of course, there was no food and the winters were long and cold and it was very hard times. That’s when I lost my father.’
“We did not stay after the war because after in 1945 when the war did end we were Polish citizens so they told us every Polish citizen, if he wants to, could go back to Poland. So we packed into the trains, cattle trains, freight trains, and we crossed the border into Poland.”
“From Poland then we went to Germany as displaced persons. They set up camps . . . In the beginning, of course, there was a lot of people and they set up camps all over Germany. I remember the first camp. We stayed there a couple of years, maybe three years, and they kept moving us from camp to camp because people from the camps didn’t stay because they had family in the United States so they immigrated to the United States and a lot of them went to Canada and we stayed until we were able to get to the United States.”
His family immigrated to the U.S. Then, Julius went to junior high before attending a high school for the clothing fashion industry, commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan to learn the garment business.
“Somebody (in junior high school) recommended me to go and become a ‘cutter’ because in those days being a cutter was, you could make a living and it was a respectable trade I would say,” Julius said.
Ah, cutters.
You remember the coming-of-age, set-in-Indiana movie, Breaking Away, where the locals in Bloomington, Indiana were called, “The Cutters,” for cutting the limestone in the quarries outside of town? Different working-class cutters, of course. But you get my drift.
Breaking Away is my all-time favorite movie.
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I saw my father’s work ethic up close when I worked with him for three and a half summers from 8 AM to 6 PM at the Liz Claiborne production plant in the swamps of New Jersey. It was near Giants Stadium and Teterboro Airport. Those summers were after my high school junior and senior years and my freshman and sophomore years at Hobart College in Geneva, NY in the Finger Lakes region of New York state.
My dad worked as a grader at Liz Claiborne, not a cutter. In fact, he was the second production plant worker hired by clothing designer Liz Claiborne. It was his job to take the garment pattern created by the patternmaker and create the patterns for the clothing item’s different sizes. The hard-paper patterns were then given to me to cut with a big scissors.
I then created the sets of patterns.
We left our suburban New York City house at 6:50 AM and it took 50 to 60 minutes to follow a series of connecting roads and highways in north New Jersey to reach the Liz Claiborne plant. We returned home in Rockland County north of NYC at about ten minutes before seven in the evening.
That’s a 12-hour day.
My dad worked that routine for 30 years.
Now you know where I got this crazy work ethic.
Recently, I asked my dad what were his goals and wants when he married my mother.
“My goal was to support my family,” my dad said. And his answer did not extend beyond that.
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Sports are imperfect.
But it was the one area where my dad and I connected.
When I was growing up, we never talked about girls, schools or current events.
But we could talk baseball.
He came right from work to Ramapo High School games to catch the last few innings of my high school baseball games.
When I lived in Florida, we went to a Marlins-Cubs National Championship Series game in South Florida in 2003.
I never saw my dad laugh so hard as he did at these two Cubs fans in clown outfits at the game.
In 2016 and 2017, when I lived in Vero Beach, Florida, my dad and I found the perfect common ground.
It was a minor league baseball park in Port St. Lucie, where the New York Mets held spring training, and a ballpark in Jupiter, where the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals held their training camp.
My dad and I typically didn’t hold long or deep conversations — except at these minor league baseball games.
There were only a few hundred people at these Florida State League Single A games. We sat wherever we wanted and my dad loved the $6 senior citizen ticket prices.
The games moved swiftly, as the pitchers were ahead of the hitters and the score was usually, 3-2, with the game ending after two and a half hours.
The pastoral baseball setting relaxed my dad. There were no loud promotions, no loud music and no crowd.
I wish I could tell you the actual anecdotal stories we shared. I do recall the topics. We talked family, baseball and his tennis game at his condo village.
But most importantly I remember the feeling I felt when we hugged and said our goodbyes after the baseball game right before Julius drove south on I-95 to Boca Raton and I went north on the interstate to Vero Beach.
With my dad in Florida and me here in Las Vegas, I clutch on to that precious feeling — a feeling of connection cultivated at a simple ballgame.
