What a week it was! Me, 83 men and baseball. They don’t call it a Dream Week for nothing. – The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, March 18, 1990.
That spring a childhood baseball fanatic, former newspaper reporter and indominable New Yorker named Ellen Karasik followed the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team to Clearwater, Florida, for the chance to play ball with former greats and not-so-great wannabes. “It started when I heard an ad on the radio for Phillies Dream Week – play baseball with the pros – and at the end the announcer whispered, ‘Women are welcome.’ This is something I want to write a story about.”
A few calls later the Inquirer Magazine agreed to run the story, pay $3,400 for the experience and buy Ellen’s equipment. She immediately went out and bought her first real baseball glove.
Ellen grew up in the projects in East New York and, from ages seven to 11, her life was defined by baseball. “All the girls were playing hopscotch and jump rope and it was boring,” she recalls. The baseball field was a big, flat turning area for trucks with a garage at one end. “My parents refused to get me a baseball glove. I asked and asked. So, I borrowed the guys’ gloves, and because I was lefthanded, I would either put it on backwards or flip it off so I could throw.”
Once she thought her father was finally getting her a glove. “I got you something special for your 11th birthday,” he told her. “A baseball glove,” Ellen imagined. “Finally, it came my birthday and, you know what? He gave me a deep-sea fishing rod. No one in our family had ever been deep sea fishing or even on a boat. I just kept it in the corner of my room.”
“My happiest days as a kid were playing ball with the boys. There was something magical about it. It was just us. We made the rules. There was something lovely and fair. Anyone who could play was allowed. I don’t remember one argument. No parents. I don’t even think they knew where we were,” she recalls fondly.
When she was 13 her parents moved to North Miami and she didn’t like it. “My goal, although I had loads of friends from high school, was not to stay in Florida.” After a degree in journalism from Michigan State she went to work for Scope magazine and then, when the magazine closed, the Action Line section of The Detroit Free Press. It was at the time of the 1967-1968 Detroit newspaper strike and when the newspaper went back to work, many of the start-up publications closed. She had been at The Free Press for a year – “Hated it!” – when my editor asked if I wanted to go to Philadelphia. “I said, ‘Yes. Get me out of here.’”
Ellen spent 11 years at the Inquirer, eventually getting her chance to move to the city side, covering the news of Delaware County and being part of an Inquirer team reporting on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Her certificate has a place of honor in the study of her Village of Buttonwood home.
To better understand the business world, she took the position of associate editor with the Philadelphia Business Journal, and from there, to several PR firms, ending up specializing in hospital marketing. That led her to become associate vice president at New York University Downtown Hospital handling public relations and communications.
A later move to Miami didn’t work out, so Ellen moved back to familiar Philadelphia.
“I didn’t feel connected in Miami,” she says. “I decided I would go back because I could play tennis at the Philadelphia Cricket Club – it was the most wonderful place. They let in women, African Americans. Everyone had an equal vote. People just played tennis from nine in the morning until the sun went down.”
“But,” she continues, “There was no way that I was going to stay there during the winter.”
Ellen called friends in The Villages and asked if she could visit on her next trip to Miami.
Labor Day weekend. The humidity was down and it was spectacular. I decided I would rent out my condo in Miami and rent here for a year to test out the four seasons.”
She sold the condo and bought in The Villages the following year.
Ellen’s card reads: Tennis, Golf, Pickle Ball, etc. – I’m here to play. “She tried out for the softball team, then I realized that I’m just going to kill my arm. So, I play pickleball, tennis and water volleyball six or seven days a week.” She’s also a trivia buff and international traveler.
“Two years ago, when I was turning 70, I’d been talking to a bunch of friends about going to Africa.” Then the friends dropped off for one reason or another. She decided to go anyway. “When I called up the travel company in May to confirm the reservation, they asked it was for May 2020? No,” Ellen told them “It’s for this month. Apparently, people plan these trips two and three years in advance,” she laughs.
Among her other travel adventures was a trip to Egypt – “I thought that was spectacular” – and following the route of Charles Darwin through the Galapagos on a sailing vessel.
Ellen shares her house sign with “Junior,” her white, fluffy rescue dog who faithfully follows her everywhere without a leash. She says that her future plans do not include writing a book. “I’m not a journal writer,” she insists. “I never felt like a great writer. If I felt something I really felt compelled to share, I would do it because that’s what I felt.”
The ball comes barreling toward me. I know at that moment that I am going to nail that sucker.
That’s how Ellen Karasik felt during that 1990 Phillies Dream Week as 18-year big league veteran Grant Jackson let loose with the pitch. She just felt she had to share her feelings with the world.
John W Prince is a writer and Villages resident. Learn more at www.GoMyStory.com.
