Mother’s Day will find me at a graveyard in Dundalk before heading to Camden Yards to watch the Orioles take on a team without a city, a migratory club known early in the last century as the Philadelphia Athletics.
I will take Mom (who loved watching the O’s in her nightgown and rocking chair and had a crush on Buck Showalter) to Oak Lawn Cemetery to visit her mother. Except that Mom isn’t really around anymore, passing in 2023 just before Christmas.
I have a few pinches of her ashes in a small glass jar and will sprinkle them over the grave of her parents: the former Anna Potter and Willie Zaminski Jones, working people from Dillon Street with deep Polish roots in old Canton.
Then I’ll tell Mom that I’m headed to the afternoon game (crab cap giveaway!) and hear her spirit raise the battle cry in an accent I seem to have inherited: “Goooo Oooooos!”
When we watched together and they were losing badly she’d get up, say goodnight and predict from the hallway: “We’ll get’em!” In the last years of her life, when watching baseball was one of Mom’s few remaining pleasures, “we” seldom did.
Whenever we questioned my mother – Gloria Jones Alvarez (1934-2023) – about why we had to do what she told us, no matter how absurd, the answer was swift: “Because I’m your mother!”
As if we could forget.
There was no pushback from the first-generation kids at the house on Stiles Street in Little Italy in the days of the Great Depression and World War II, back when Eleanor Cucco Stein was growing up.
“My mother was very strict and we did what she said,” said Eleanor, a widow and long retired Baltimore City employee. “A lot of mothers in the neighborhood were that way. They were all foreigners and they were all the same.”
“Aunt El” was the youngest of four children born at 915 Stiles Street to an immigrant tailor and clarinet player from Salerno named Vincent and his wife the former Antoinette Maneta, the daughter of an old country cobbler. At 92, she is the only surviving sibling.
“My mother was a great baker,” said Eleanor, who not long ago left the longtime family home to live with a daughter in Kingsville. “She made pies, cakes, cookies and my sisters and I learned from her.”
While Antoinette was cooking up a storm in the kitchen at the back of the wide rowhouse, Vincent was mending pants and making suits in the front window. At the end of his career he worked for the London Fog company in Woodberry. When the Cuccos first moved into the house the first floor middle room was used as a chicken coop by the previous owner.
“My sisters and I cried when we saw [the chickens],” said Eleanor. We didn’t want to live there. My mother said we were ingrates.”
The sisters – who followed a brother named Frederick born in Italy – were Philomena Scalia and Giovanna “Jennie” Scaffidi. “My mother would tell us how to make different dishes and we would write it down in English,” said Eleanor. One of Antoinette’s specialities was a New Year’s Eve rum sponge cake fit for a president.
“My mother made it for Jimmy Carter when he visited Chiapparelli’s” on the campaign trail in 1979, said Philomena’s daughter Rosalia, who remembered her grandmother as one of the best cooks in a neighborhood where competition for the title was fierce.
It is not known if the Secret Service tasted it before Jimmy and Rosalynn took a bite.
Moms at ballparks
Back to baseball where, on Mother’s Day, major league teams play with baseballs stitched with pink thread and for the past 20 years players have used pink bats to promote breast cancer research.
On Mother’s Day in 2010, Dallas Braden of the Oakland Athletics threw a perfect game, one of only 23 recorded since 1880. The fabled team, an original member of the American League, moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City to the Bay Area to a rented stadium in West Sacramento this year while waiting for their Las Vegas stadium to open in 2028.
The ballpark is a great place to celebrate mom each year on the second Sunday in May and in 1985 then 20-year-old Charlie Vascellaro took advantage of a layover on a flight to take his mother to a Mets game.
A widely published Baltimore-based baseball writer, Vascellaro and his mother Vivian were at JFK airport waiting to fly to Spain on holiday. Mom (now 82 and living in Tucson) wasn’t much of a baseball fan but her son was and is nuts for the sport. When they missed their connection he realized that his beloved Mets – the great mid-80s teams of Hernandez, Gooden, Carter and Strawberry – were set to play the Phillies at Shea Stadium. It was just 10 miles away.
“We brought out luggage to the stadium and put it in lockers. All the moms got a little kit of Jhirmack [beauty] stuff,” said Vascellaro, remembering that Victoria Principal was the spokesmodel for the product as vividly as he recalls pitcher Ron Darling leading the Amazins to a 3-to-1 win over Philadelphia.
“What a time to be a Mets fan,” said Vascellaro of the team that would win the World Series the following year. “That year had all the things I love. I felt grown up enough to take my mom out to the ballgame and then we had a great vacation together. It was a great Mother’s Day treat and a good time in our life.”
Baltimore radio and TV broadcaster Bruce Cunningham has covered many Mother’s Day games at Camden Yards and says that – win or lose – it’s always a good day as long as it doesn’t rain.
“The moms always looked so happy even though they might prefer to be somewhere else to celebrate,” said Cunningham. “It’s usually sunny, not too hot and the family is doing something together. That’s why they smile.”
We’ll get’em Mom.
Rafael Alvarez attended the only game the Orioles won against the Mets in the 1969 World Series. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
