October 16: Zane Grey Museum

Play Ball.
Plein Air.

**Zane Grey Plein Air** Welcomes
**The Zane Grey West Society**
2022 Annual Convention in Lackawaxen PA
Plein Air painting: 9AM to 12PM
at Zane Grey Museum, Lackawaxen PA
Followed by **Vintage Base Ball 1895 Rules**
Mountain Athletic Club versus. Delhi Polecats
Noon. Lackawaxen Field. Free game admission

Baseball club at Penn State University, 1895; Zane Grey (middle row, second from right)

Mark Twain built a baseball scene into A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Thomas Wolfe recalled his boyhood memories of the game in sections of You Can’t Go Home Again; Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and W.P. Kinsella set entire novels in the land of baseball. But in their youth, none of these authors played the game with such intensity and skill that they rose from the sandlots to stardom, in both the collegiate and professional ranks.
— John Thorn, Zane Grey’s “The Short-Stop,” a Neglected Baseball Novel

**The Young Pitcher** (1911) and **The Redheaded Outfield** (1920), a collection of Grey’s baseball stories

“His ballplaying and his dentistry were over; his writing career seemed stillborn; he was broke; and, despite his boyhood passion for outdoor sport, he had never been west of Ohio. Yet only six years later he was nationally famous as a roper of mountain lions, an ardent conservationist, and the author of Riders of the Purple Sage, his most enduring novel. What brought about this transformation? His realization, after a 1907 expedition to the Grand Canyon with Charles J. “Buffalo” Jones, that to tell a compelling story he had to ground it in personal experience. After a second trip to Arizona with the great animal protectionist, Grey wrote The Last of the Plainsmen. Its modest success encouraged him to try, in 1909, a baseball novel that was based on his boyhood involvement in the game he loved: The Short-Stop.”
— John Thorn, Zane Grey’s “The Young Pitcher,” an Odd Baseball Novel

Mountain Athletic Club Vintage Base Ball, a Fleischmanns Tradition since 1895, is fashioned after the original team established in Griffin Corners, NY in 1895 by yeast magnates Julius and Max Fleischmann. The Mountain Athletic Club connects generations to the National pastime through authentic play according to the rules and customs of nineteenth-century base ball.

The M.A.C. Grounds at Fleischmanns Park is listed on the New York State & National Register of Historic Places.