Pitchers and Prince Carl

Baseball came to Texas about 1870 and was wildly popular. Every small town could gather up enough guys to have a team and play a neighboring town. Fans loved to congregate around a baseball diamond somewhere and root for their favorite players. Sometimes, an owner of a team would think his plan for winning was better than the manager's, and the results were seldom good. In 1903 Corsicana was to play Texarkana when the Texarkana owner sent his grandson to the manager with the instructions that the manager was to start the grandson  as pitcher. Of course the manager was upset, but he knew he had no choice and put the young, untried pitcher in. It was awful: 53 hits, 21 home runs, and a final score of 51-3. After the first inning another player asked the manager if he was going to take out the terrible pitcher, and he replied that the owner wanted to run the game, so the game would just continue. The Corsicana catcher had 8 times at bat and hit 8 home runs, a record never matched in baseball history. So the owner's idea started on shaky ground and never got better.

When I was teaching at Tech, I had some great students. There were some who stand out for different reasons. At the beginning of a fall semester a girl(I think her name was Nicole)registered for my freshman English class and came with all the others the first day. Then as time went by, she never came back. But I never got a drop slip for her, so there was nothing to do but mark a zero for any assignment/theme. On the day of the final for that class, I looked up to see her getting ready to come inside the classroom. I almost didn't recognize her because I hadn't seen her since August. The conversation went something like this:

"Nicole, why are you here?"

"I thought I'd take the final."

"Nicole, you've missed 8 themes, 2 quizzes, and a group assignment. You couldn't even make 750 on your final and pass."

"Oh."

Then I wondered if she had done the same thing with other classes.

"Nicole, why did you come to Tech?"

short pause--

"I didn't have anyone to marry and didn't have a job, so I figured I'd go to college."

Talk about shaky ground--Nicole must have seen too many movies where college was all parties and food fights.

But ideas that have little foundation for success have always been with us. Take Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels. Does the last part sound familiar? Of course New Braunfels. He was said to be handsome and high spirited, the youngest son in a rich family. But he missed a military assignment and went AWOL for awhile, married a girl that his family said was "beneath him" which meant they wouldn't recognize her and the 3 children they had, and he finally decided to ditch her and the kids to make his family happy. He read a book about Texas in 1844 and fell  in love with the adventure of the new land and the open spaces. He worked with others to form a group , the Adelsverein, that bought a huge chunk of Texas land at cheap prices and did a great advertising campaign to get new families in 1844-45 to make the treacherous journey and land on the coast at Indianola(no longer there). It was  terrible because he had promised wagons that would take them to their new homes, and they had no wagons. So they got sick, were starving, and were wishing they hadn't made the trip. He wasn't there to suffer with them but did come back to lead the first wagon train on the way. He sent word back to his new princess wife to come and join him. Princess Sophie said, "Not going to happen, buster. I'm not going to that strange place that has Indians." And he knew she meant it, so he left with only some rocks laid out for the castle he was going to build her. Other people had to do the planning and sacrificing to make the new settlers into communities and later towns.

A good idea has thought, patience, and preparation behind it, and if it takes time to get those three elements together, then that's the way it should be if there is ever to be the completion of a goal. .