The Young Pitcher
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Hazing became a regular form of initiation, not just for college fraternities and sororities, but also for sports teams. The latter ranged from relatively benign pranks to more physical and mental âput downs.â Therefore, it wasnât unusual for author Pearl Zane Grey to have such personal confrontations, because he loved the game of baseball and was a good enough player to earn a baseball scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania. He once dropped his surname to preserve his scholarship while playing in lower-level minor league games. His knowledge later led to writing two published books about baseball, including the one youâre about to hear.
Exposed to tales of the Old West, Grey shifted his literary focus and became better known for books about western adventures, leading to a successful writing career that included a total of eighty-nine books. Listen now to the outlandish behavior encountered by youthful Ken Ward as he entered the fictional college baseball arena, so very different from the game of today.
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Zane Grey ÂŽ (1872â1939), born in Ohio, was practicing dentistry in New York when he and his wife published his first novel. Grey presented the West as a moral battleground in which his characters are destroyed because of their inability to change or are redeemed through a final confrontation with their past. The man whose name is synonymous with Westerns made his first trip west in 1907 at age thirty-five. More than 130 films have been based on his work.
John Rayburn is a veteran of over sixty years in broadcasting. He served as a news/sports anchor and show host, and his TV newscast achieved the largest share of audience figures of any major-market TV newscast in the nation. John is a member of the Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame. He is well suited to bring fascinating stories to life concerning the people, places, and things that combine to present lively observations of our day-to-day lives.
