The Beginning of an Idea
Hi, My name is Drew Meisenheimer and I am a senior here at Mary Washington. Before I begin this phase of what has so far been a really incredible journey, there are some things you should know about me. All of this may not make any sense whatsoever at first, but trust me when I say it will all tie together. The biggest thing to know is that I love the idea of the American Road Trip. I love it so much that coming to school at Mary Washington, the First Year Seminar I decided to take was centered around the American Road Trip. An added bonus was that this FSEM was taught in the Department of Historic Preservation, which ended up being my major. I know what you’re thinking, what is a preservation major doing in a fellowship with technology? Don’t we just like old things and new things aren’t our speed? I will get to that, and it is cool how it connects. There are a lot of ways historic places and artifacts can connect to modern systems and ideas. Anyway, in the FSEM I was told one thing on Day 1 that most freshmen overwhelmed with entering college would just let go right over their heads. Not me, I took this one thing to heart as the best advice I could possibly receive and it led me to this project now, as well as many other awesome places. “Life is about the detours, let your curiosity drive you to places you never expected” were the words of wisdom from the professor of the class that influenced me so much. This is something I have always believed, and yet did not quite understand the extent of what it meant until very recently, but that approach to life changed how I look at everything now. Back to the class, the semester project was to design our own Road Trip, so it was my first opportunity to take the advice to heart. I have designed every one of my family road trips since I can remember, and this was my chance to make my dream trip. I picked as many National Parks as I could, and found every baseball related attraction between, and wrote about a trip to all of it. Not only that, but I have now been to some of the places on it, among them Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park where Hinchliffe Stadium is (National Parks and Baseball in One spot!!!!), the site of Forbes Field at the University of Pittsburgh, and the site of Griffith Stadium in Washington DC where the Howard University Hospital now sits. Yes, these places will connect to this story too, buckle in for this ride with me. We are just getting started
Let my curiosity drive me, right? It was a road trip I can only take like this, in fragments not all at once, but it gives an opportunity for literal detours as well as figurative ones, and I know that will make life fun.
Future Assignments
After the FSEM, I did not expect this to grow further, and if it did I did not expect it to be because of the baseball aspect. I tend to seek out all things National Parks more, so that is where I thought it would go. But that is the thing about detours, they take you where you least expect. I did not touch the baseball aspect again for another two years, when in the Fall of 2023 I took a preservation class called Material Culture and was required to do a semester project where I analyzed any physical object of my choosing made or modified by people, and write a paper about the thing itself or how it relates to broader contexts of history. I have a baseball glove from the 1940s, and this is where the idea starts to develop into what I have now. I took this glove and started to think about how I could use it, and found a very clear answer. The 1940s were the height of the Negro Leagues, professional baseball leagues where people were prevented from what was considered the highest level of the game because of the color of their skin. I decided to dive headfirst into that. I put more work into this paper and presentation than any other assignment in my life, and it showed in the final product, which I was super proud of. I learned about people like Rube Foster, the founder of the Negro National League, and Buck O’Neil, a player for the Kansas City Monarchs whose achievements took way too long to be recognized. It opened my eyes to a glimpse of what the experience for them might have been like, and made me think that this is a story that should be told more often than it is.
Now lets jump ahead a semester to the Spring of 2024. I took an archaeology class for the first time, and my professor encouraged me to try to connect the class term project with the one I did for Material Culture. The project was to make a podcast episode about anything relating to American Archaeology of our choosing. I thought it was impossible to connect, until I thought a little outside the box and learned that archaeology is more than just digging in the dirt. It is just as much about resources from the past, and what they can tell us about the way people lived. Baseball stadiums fit perfectly into this, so I was able to make it work. One of the stadiums on my “road trip” from freshman year that I had visited a couple times already seemed to me like the perfect place to start. I decided to look at Hinchliffe Stadium, a Negro League ballpark in Paterson, New Jersey that had just finished a massive restoration project, and see if any archaeological study was done, and if not what could be done to help interpret the site better.
With this project, I looked at a lot of primary resources and resource surveys and reports, as well as reaching out to various preservation professionals in Paterson to see if they knew anything, so the research I did was way different from anything I had done before. The final product is something I was super proud of at the time especially given I hated using technology so recording and editing a podcast episode was unfathomable to me, I actually had a lot of fun. Looking at it now, the podcast episode could have been a lot better, but the enjoyment of that phase and desire to improve upon it is actually the inspiration for the current phase of the project that I am in, which I will get to. It also led to the next phase, which is possibly the coolest thing I have ever done.
Coolest Research Project Ever
After the archaeology podcast project, my professor came to me with an idea, another detour that I was not at all expecting but am so glad I took. She asked if I wanted to do an independent study class where I build on what I have done so far in the FSEM, Material Culture, and the Archeology classes and expand that work, turning it into some kind of interpretive resource. I took the opportunity and ran. After 135 hours in the fall of 2024 working on something that I sometimes could not even envision a final product, but always knew I could make it awesome, I now have a StoryMap on ArcGIS that combines every element and goes deeper. I did not want to stop at Hinchliffe Stadium, so I used that as a starting point and included 12 other former Negro League Ballparks in the StoryMap. Some of these, like Hinchliffe or Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, are still standing. Others, like Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC or Greenlee Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania are gone without a trace. A lot more, like Forbes Field in Pittsburgh or Bush Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana have some of it still standing or have been adaptively reused in some way. Some have higher levels of protection and standards of preservation from being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and others were allowed to be torn down because nobody saw their importance in time. Seeing how sites were and still are similar in spite of all their differences was just as cool to me as reading the stories of players that played in these places and whose lives deserve more recognition, and what better way is there to recognize what they did than tell the story of the place where they did it? The project also gave me an opportunity to reach out to more places and make connections with places that help to tell these stories. The StoryMap might be my single proudest accomplishment so far in an academic sense, but it is still missing something. I found a lot of side tangents and rabbit holes I could go down but did not have time to in the semester I had for it. Some of these are talking about how stadiums are seen in various movies, to talking about how a lot of the spaces were shared by multiple teams and how that worked, and so many other topics. I want to dive deeper into some of that. This brings us to the current phase of this project.
Podcast Time
In trying to figure out the best way to tell these stories, I realize that I have an opportunity to improve a skill that I started to build about a year ago: Podcasting. The professor I worked with on the StoryMap had the same idea, and recommended I apply for this Digital Knowledge Center Fellowship to have some more support in doing that, and build on other skills as well. I am going to create some podcast episodes, the plan currently being to publish one and have two more ready to either record or edit into a finished product. I am also going to have a domain of one’s own, or a website, to house all of this and the StoryMap in a more accessible place. While my skills for all of this are currently very slim if they exist at all, I am excited to learn about how it all works and expand what I can do. Telling these stories in the process seems like a fun way to go about that, and so begins this phase.
The first step to making this Podcast was to determine the topic of the first few episodes, of which I currently have three. Since the main ideas of the project are Historic Preservation and Baseball, I figured the opening episodes should explain what those two things are. I am planning a two part opener talking about Historic Preservation and all it entails in one, with the help of fellow preservation major Michael Murphy to add more insight, and in the other talking about the history of baseball and how it has changed, as well as implications of those changes either in the game or the world around it. The last episode is going to be about how baseball movies show stadiums, specifically the ones in my StoryMap, and how that does or does not impact how these places are preserved or how their stories are told.
The next step was to outline everything in these episodes. For the Historic Preservation one, I consulted Michael for advice, since he is helping me tell about it on the episode. He liked my ideas of a broad overview of key terms and legislation in a style that someone who knows nothing about Preservation will understand, since the target audience is baseball fans who may not know anything about it. For this one I am thinking we will just use the outline to have a conversation about it with a more laid back vibe than lecture format, but that could change based on whether it seems to be working or not. For the baseball history overview, I am digging deeper into significant periods of time, and telling about things that occurred to change the game. Of course I will emphasize the periods of social progress, and throughout the episode I will connect it to preservation and why that should exist too. For the movies episode, I found the movies that feature the ballparks in my StoryMap and those are the movies I plan to focus on. Some of the parks have been torn down, others still stand and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and others have some sort of repurposing done to part or all of it. It is fascinating, and I plan to dive into whether them being featured in these movies effects the methods of preservation, or lack thereof. Based on what I have found so far, I am hypothesizing that the two things are not connected, but more may tell me something different so we will see.
This seems to be a good start to a series, and I am formulating other ideas as I go too, so I may outline some more in the future this semester, or at the very least have a running list of ideas to go back to later.
But Wait… There’s More!
Of course, the Podcast is not the only part of this stage of the project. I am also going to make a website to house my StoryMap as well as the Podcast series. On it I am thinking in addition to the episodes, I will put transcripts on the page for each episode. This is not only for accessibility, but also because some people prefer to read and that allows them to get the content too. It will definitely take more time to make this possible, but it is a necessary commitment in my view, and I find doing transcripts fun because I can use that to reflect on how I can improve. This makes me better at public speaking, and for these purposes it makes me better at podcasting, which I consider a win. In terms of a podcast name, a website name, and a domain name, I have had some ideas. The domain name can basically be the same as the website name so that makes it a little easier. Obviously I need it to connect to Baseball and Preservation, and there are a lot of ways to go with that. I called the StoryMap “Preserving in Place: National Register & the Negro Leagues” which might be a good starting place. It feels too academic for this type of thing, and it does not encompass everything that will be in the podcast and website, so I would need to refine it a little.
For the Podcast, I think a simple title that covers everything is all I need. For now I like how “Preserving Our Pastime” sounds. Preservation is clearly there, and baseball being considered by many the National Pastime, it makes sense. This could change before I release my first episode, but for now anyway that is what I think I am going with.
For the Website and Domain, I want it to be catchy, and honestly for the domain I think preservingourpastime.com is easy to remember, and connects to the podcast in people’s heads. So I may go with that, but for the website I am not sure. I want to make it something catchy that may connect to something people know too. For a while “People Will Stay” as a reference to the famous Field of Dreams “People Will Come” speech, but it does not really stand out or feel original. At the end of the day, I think “Preserving Our Pastime” works for all three things, it is simple, to the point, and hopefully will catch some interest from people.
Next Steps
Now that episodes are outlined and a name for everything has at least been thought about, I need to make a plan for the next couple weeks until the next update. I think the biggest thing will be meeting with Michael Murphy to talk more about the first episode, and come up with a plan together for how it is going to work and when to record. If we are both able with our own time restraints, I think actually recording the audio is possible too. In addition, I think finding out how websites work and setting that up with the structure for everything to go on it also makes sense as a next step. These seem like logical next steps for now, and I feel like I am going to find more to refine as I go so I will include all of that in the next update. I hope this stage of the detour is as fun as the last, it has been so far, and I hope everyone reading about it finds as much enjoyment in it as I have. Farewell for now, its time for some fun!