Dear Editor:

The following is taken from an essay I wrote entitled “What Makes America Great,” and my memories as a nine-year-old in Downey in 1963:

On most Saturdays, Vin Scully painted pictures for us through transistor radios perched atop ladders and front porch steps. We all knew the Dodgers. They were important. They were like neighbors. They weren’t millionaires…not even close…and most needed jobs in the off-season. And back then, many stayed Dodgers for years at a time. Yes, and Vinny told us all about them in poems that hung in the air, as push mowers and edgers and brooms and dust pans cut and swept and chirped out the sounds of life as it was on any Saturday afternoon in August on a street named Bairnsdale.

Jim Shull

Downey