In This Issue

There are only two joys as succinctly wondrous as sitting beside an appreciative young lady and upstaging, for an instant, the infinite grace of Maya Plisetskaya," says Robert Mayer in Baseball and Men's Lives. "One is watching the turning of an exquisite double play. The other, longer lasting, is turning one yourself."

For most people, watching has had to be wondrous enough But for countless numbers of young men through most of the twentieth century local baseball leagues have provided the opportunity to put aside their workday tools and worries, grab their gloves, bats, balls, and cleats and seek some weekend wonder at the municipal ballpark It has been a defining slice of Americana—one that began with neighborhood Knickerbockers in the 1840s and then spread across the land just as fast as leisure time, population, and recreational dollars would allow Taking its inspiration from the rise of big-time professional sports in the 1920s, community baseball blossomed as part of the national pastime.

Nowhere did the summer game thrive more vigorously than in our own Cache Valley. By the 1950s, when drive-in movies, tourism, and other leisure-time activities began to challenge baseball, hundreds of young men were still meeting on the diamonds of Smithfield, Cornish, Trenton, Newton, and other northern Utah and southern Idaho towns to match skills and win bragging rights. The players and fans, the atmosphere, lore, and color of this social phenomenon have escaped the notice of historians far too long Our first article in this issue takes a giant stride toward rectifying that oversight.

The mood then turns toward the somber as our next two articles deal with one of Utah's greatest tragedies, the Winter Quarters mine explosion of May 1, 1900.The first analysis takes an ethnic twist, focusing on the Finnish victims and survivors This stalwart group had a particularly heavy burden to bear; not only did they sustain heavy losses in lives but they also were forced to deal with lingering resentment within a community that held Finnish miners responsible for causing the lethal blast. By spotlighting particular families and individuals, the author helps us see the importance of cultural conditioning in providing strength and determination in facing such travail. The second Winter Quarters article looks at individuals as -well—this time safety inspectors who also came in for some hard questions and finger pointing In the process, it illuminates many of the technical problems inherent in coal mining and confirms our suspicions that paradigm changes -within that industry were long overdue

Our issue concludes with a look at infant mortality in Utah. Primarily a statistical analysis, it nevertheless offers sufficient anecdotal evidence to create a humanistic context. It is an article that can be read and appreciated on more than one level, and its conclusions will almost certainly offer a surprise or two. But however read and interpreted, it is sure to leave the readers quietly shaking their heads as they ponder the hazards and heartaches of life before our easy access to modern health care.

One of the nifty facets to history, however, is that triumph can always be found among sadness and personal loss. It is just a matter of panning back our contextual cameras a bit There is something innately reassuring about the big picture. Little wonder that history remains America's best-selling nonfiction subject

OPPOSITE: Young women playing baseball, c. 1900, probably in Cache County.