Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania (15 page)

It's the largest shopping mall on the East Coast and the second largest in the United States. But just how big is the King of Prussia Mall?

The King of Prussia Mall was named after the Montgomery County town it's in, which got
its
name from an 18th-century tavern. The town's first name was Reesville, for the Rees family who
were among the first settlers to the area and who owned the tavern. Most historians agree that the family named their tavern “King of Prussia” for Frederick the Great (Prussia's king from 1740 to 1786), but no one seems sure why. One theory says it was to honor Prussia's support of the colonists before and during the American Revolution. Another claims the name was a way to attract Prussian soldiers (stationed at Valley Forge) to the business. Either way, the town took its name from the tavern, and the post office made it official in 1850.

 

 

Just how well do you know the Liberty Bell?

I
n 1751, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania's constitution, which laid out citizens' rights and freedoms, the Pennsylvania Assembly ordered a 2,000-pound bell from the Whitechapel Foundry in England to hang in the steeple of the State House (now Independence Hall). The assembly had it inscribed with a verse from the Bible's book of Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Over the last 250 years, the Liberty Bell's history has been clouded in myth . . . until now. See if you can decipher fact from legend.

1.
Fact or legend:
The Liberty Bell came to America on a slave ship called the Myrtilla.

2.
Fact or legend:
The Liberty Bell cracked the first time it was rung on the Fourth of July.

3.
Fact or legend:
It took three bells to make the Liberty Bell we know today.

4.
Fact or legend:
The Liberty Bell rang on July 4, 1776, for the reading of the Declaration of Independence.

5.
Fact or legend:
During the Revolutionary War, the Liberty Bell was hidden so the British troops couldn't capture it.

6.
Fact or legend:
The Liberty Bell was rung to signal the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

7.
Fact or legend:
The Liberty Bell was given its name by patriots during the American Revolution.

8.
Fact or legend:
The Liberty Bell has been in a train crash.

9.
Fact or legend:
The Liberty Bell got its famous crack in 1835 when it was rung for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall's funeral.

10.
Fact or legend:
Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell to help reduce the national debt.

Answers on
page 298
.

 

 

This is one of our favorite stories, and it's appeared in Uncle John's Bathroom Reader before. But it's so important to Pennsylvania that we couldn't leave it out. If you've ever played Little League baseball (or cheered on someone who has), you have a Pennsylvanian to thank for the game
.

One afternoon in 1938, Carl Stotz went out into his Williamsport, Pennsylvania, yard to play catch with his two nephews. They would have preferred to swing at some balls, but the yard was too small to use a bat. So they just played catch. On one throw, a nephew tossed the ball so far that Stotz “had to move to the neighbors' side of the yard,” as he recalled years later. “As I stretched to catch the ball, I stepped into the cut-off stems of a lilac bush that were projecting several inches above the ground. A sharp stub tore through my sock and scraped my ankle. The pain was intense.”

As Stotz sat nursing his ankle, he was suddenly reminded that he had played on the same kind of rough turf when he was a kid . . . and he remembered a promise he'd made to himself when he was young. Back then, equipment was scarce—he and his friends hit balls with sticks when they didn't have any bats, and used baseballs until the threads unraveled and the skins came off. Then they patched them up with tape and used them until there wasn't anything left to tape back together. Some of his friends had even played barefoot because they didn't have any shoes. Stotz explained: “I remembered thinking to myself, ‘When I grow up, I'm gonna have a baseball team for boys, complete with uniforms and equipment. They'll play on
a real field like the big guys, with cheering crowds at every game.”

Stotz didn't have any sons of his own, but he decided to fulfill his promise by organizing the neighborhood boys into baseball teams. That way, they could experience the thrill of playing real games on real fields, wearing real uniforms—not just playing stickball in open fields and abandoned lots.

He spent the next few months organizing teams and rounding up sponsors to pay for the equipment. At the same time, he set about “shrinking” the game of baseball so that kids from eight to twelve years old could really play. “When I was nine, nothing was geared to children,” Stotz explained in his book
A Promise Kept
. Take bats, for example: “We'd step up to the plate with a bat that was both too heavy and too long. Choking up on the bat merely changed the problem. The handle would then bang us in the stomach when we lunged at the ball. We didn't have the strength or leverage for a smooth, controlled swing.”

Stotz finally found child-sized bats and equipment for his teams, and at every team practice he adjusted the distances between the bases and between the pitcher's mound and home plate, trying to find the ideal size for a field. The goal was to come up with distances that were fair for the outfielders (how far a child could actually throw), and for the runners—how fast could they realistically run to beat the throw. After much experimentation, he settled on 60 feet between bases (as opposed to 90 feet in the big leagues) and 40 feet between the pitcher's mound and home plate
(60 feet, 6 inches in the bigs). (The distance from mound to plate later changed to 46 feet and remains that today.)

The only thing Stotz didn't change was the baseball itself. That way, he figured, kids could practice with the balls they already had.

Shrinking the game turned out to be a lot easier than finding sponsors willing to pay for uniforms and equipment for the three teams in the league. Two and a half months after he'd started, Stotz had been turned down by 56 companies. But when he made his 57th sales pitch, he finally landed his first sponsor—the Lycoming Dairy Farm chipped in $30.

Stotz used that money to buy uniforms and set the date of the league's first game for June 6, 1939. He also paid a visit to the offices of
Grit
, Williamsport's Sunday paper, and asked them to mention the league's first game in the paper. Sports editor Bill Kehoe asked Stotz what the league was called, but Stotz didn't have a name yet. He'd considered calling it the Junior Baseball League, but that was too similar to a women's group called the Junior League. Also, because he'd modeled his kids' league after the big leagues, he'd considered calling it either the Little Boys' League or the Little League, but he couldn't decide between the two. He didn't like the sound of “Little Boys' League,” but was worried that people would think the “Little League” meant the size of the league, not the size of the boys. In the end, he let Kehoe choose—Little League it was.

For the rest of the story, turn to
page 153
.

The long answers reveal three facts about the early days in the City of Brotherly Love. (Answers on
page 302
.)

1    Worms, frequently

5    Fed G-9 Cut a rug

14  Tone down

15  Broccoli ___ (turnip cousin)

16  Neighborhoods

17  City near Provo

18  The ___
Reader

19  Photographer's word

20  Philadelphia building that hosted the First Continental Congress

23  Longshoreman, e.g.

24  Sawbuck

25  Pact

28  Not kidding

32  Tiff

33  Director Vittorio de ___

35  Meas. of an economy's income

36  Philadelphia's nickname in colonial times, because of its rich cultural life

40  River, in Reynosa

41  Fox's den

42  Rand of fan dancing fame

43  Capitol figure

46  Julia of
The Bourne Ultimatum

47  Director Peckinpah

48  Playwright Fugard

50  On-and-off Philadelphia role in Revolutionary days

56  Big shot

57  Cake decorator

58  When repeated, Mork's phrase

59  “And ___ grow on!”