My mother, Leah Lomke, nee Rosalia Polizzotti, ca. 1947. Leah was unusually agile and a natural athlete: baseball player, cart-wheeler, Duncan Yo-Yo champion. She would listen to Yankees games on the radio, even keeping score. Unfortunately, these scorecards are long lost. Her favorite players were Lou Gehrig, Red Ruffing, and Tommy Henrich (all of the New York Yankees). One of her best memories was attending a 1947 World Series game at Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn, against the hated (for Brooklyn natives and her father, Giovanni) Yankees. To give some idea of New York baseball fanaticism in the 1930s through the mid-1950s, one of Leah’s brothers, John (Gianni), was (and is, at 93), a Giants fan (from their days as “the overlords” of New York City); another, Frank (Francesco, long deceased), a Yankees fan; and I’m not sure about her third brother, Mario Amerigo (he was the only one born in the USA), who is a Washington Redskins (American football) fanatic, a team he fell in love with after he bought his first black-and-white television. Leah’s father, Giovanni, at first took to basketball before falling in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers.