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Don Zimmer Married At Home Plate

By Joe Guzzardi

During Don Zimmer’s 66-year career in professional baseball, the scrappy infielder shook Babe Ruth’s hand, posed for pictures with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, played with Brooklyn Dodgers’ Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, played as a New York Mets for Casey Stengel, managed the Boston Red Sox when Carlton Fisk hit his 1975 12^th inning World Series home run to defeat the Cincinnati Reds, and coached the 1978 New York Yankees when Bucky Dent broke bean towners’ hearts his with game winning, American League East clinching four-bagger. Zimmer played and managed winter baseball in Japan, Cuba and Puerto Rico where he managed Roberto Clemente and Willie Mays. In all, Zimmer played for six major league teams, managed four and coached 11. Except for a single Social Security check he cashed between gigs, Zimmer never earned a penny outside of baseball.

But despite Zimmer’s Hollywood experiences and his baseball achievements – he was a two-time All-Star and a six-time World Series champion – he was most proud of his 1951 home plate marriage to Carol Jean Bauerle before a night game in Elmira, New York, where, as a top Brooklyn Dodgers’ prospect, he had worked his way up to the Class A Pioneers. Zimmer and Carol Jean, nicknamed “Soot” by her German grandmother, had been sweethearts since the 10^th grade at Cincinnati’s Western Hills High School when the couple were on a girl-asks-boy hayride. A star quarterback, the basketball team’s starting guard and shortstop on the Ohio state championship baseball nine, Zimmer was the state’s most widely recognized high school athlete. As Soot recalled the hayride, “We were 16, and were together from then on.”

Soot attended and documented every Opening Day for each of the teams that her husband played in, managed or coached during Zimmer’s 66 years in baseball. In 2015, about 18 months after Zimmer’s death, Tampa Bay Times reporter Lane DeGregory visited Soot at her Seminole, Fla., condo where she shared the contents of more than 70 scrapbooks and photo albums she had lovingly compiled.

Soot’s cabinets were filled with “Zim” bobbleheads and baseballs that Ronald Reagan, Robert Redford, Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson had signed. Also, the shelves contained the scrapbooks Soot meticulously stacked in chronological order. With loving dedication, Soot collected everything printed about Don, including team bios, photos, stories, programs and baseball cards, and tiny print box scores. She cut out each entry, underlined Zim’s name with a blue pen, and then gently pasted the clipping into the pages of her scrapbooks.

In her senior year, Soot went to the local dime store, bought a scrapbook, and the cardboard corners used long-ago to secure pictures in place. The first scrapbook was conceived, intended as a gift to her boyfriend, and compiled evenings after she completed her homework assignments. Soot subscribed to every Ohio newspaper whose city had a ball park. Outside of Ohio, Soot asked friends to mail her newspapers. As Zim’s baseball skills improved, stories about him started appearing in more widely distributed newspapers, eventually landing him on the front page of The New York Times. Soot’s albums had clippings from more than 10,500 games played in hundreds of ballparks.

From 2004 to 2014, Zimmer worked for the Tampa Rays as a senior advisor, his last baseball job. On Opening Day 2014, Zimmer, wearing number 66 to honor his years spent in professional baseball, rode across the diamond in a golf cart, too weak to walk. Fans gave him a standing ovation. Two months before their 63^rd anniversary, Zimmer died from heart and kidney failure. But Soot had one more event to chronicle. A Rays’ representative called to tell Soot that the team would honor Zim on Opening Day 2015, hang his jersey from the Tropicana Field rafters and retire number 66. Then age 84, Soot had a few empty pages in one of her volumes to add the latest Zim stories. “Good thing there’s still room in here,” Soot joked, “Too old to start a new scrapbook.” Soot, now 92, treasures her memories of life with Zim, on and off the field.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers Association member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Don Zimmer Married At Home Plate

Population Growth Would Slow With Low Immigration

By Joe Guzzardi

The United States Forest Service (USFS), a Department of Agriculture agency that administers the nation’s 154 forests and manages 194 million acres of land, released an analysis which estimated that, every day, the nation loses 6 million acres of open space. USFS defines open space as publicly or privately owned, protected or unprotected areas that include forests, grasslands, farms, ranches, streams, rivers and parks. The 6 million acres lost to development at what USFS called “an alarming rate” hampers a functioning ecosystem, agriculture, forest health and recreational pleasures.

Although the USFS developed its “Forests on the Edge” program to emphasize preserving open space, no educational campaign can keep up with U.S. population growth and the urban sprawl that it generates. A NumbersUSA study, “Vanishing Open Spaces, Population Growth and Sprawl in America,” analyzed the projected long-term decline in per capita farmland. Using the projected cropland losses based on 1982-2010 data, and U.S. Census Bureau population estimates, the study found as follows: available cropland will have declined from 1.9 acres per person in 1982 to 0.3 acre per person in 2100, an 84 percent cropland loss decrease. After two centuries of nonstop development, little of the remaining acreage would be in pristine condition.

Assuming the Census Bureau 2050 and 2100 population projections prove accurate, population of 404 million and 571 million, respectively, and available cropland per person declines to a corresponding 0.7 and 0.3 acre per person, government officials should be gravely concerned. Available food production will be drastically slashed – too many mouths to feed and not enough farmland to produce the food. 

Selling farmland to developers is lucrative and often too good a deal for farmers to decline. Farming is a tough, often uncertain business. Crops can be hit with blight; bad weather can impact yield, and crop prices may decline. The land is more valuable to developers than to the farmer-owner. Farmland might be worth $10,000 or $20,000 per acre, but as residential or commercial land, rezoned, it might be valued at $100,000 or more per acre.

The core issue is the federal government’s inability – some say refusal – to adopt sustainable population policies. The Census Bureau has identified immigration and births to immigrants as the population growth’s primary driver. In February 2020, the Census Bureau published “A Changing Nation: Population Projections Under Alternative Immigration Scenarios.” It showed that between 2020 and 2060 different legal immigration levels – zero, low and high – could change the population in those years by as much as 127 million people, with estimates ranging anywhere from 330 million to a high of 447 million total U.S. residents. 

In the zero-immigration scenario that also accounts for out-emigration, natural increases – births minus deaths – are the only way population can increase. Negative natural increases will, in the zero-immigration scenario, create a shrinking population with annual declines starting in 2035 and continuing at an accelerated pace through 2060.

The Census Bureau is the ultimate Washington, D.C. nonpartisan agency. Many wonder, then, why the Biden administration, and the many Republican and Democratic administrations that preceded the current one, have ignored, or merely paid lip service to, the population conclusions. The Census Bureau acknowledges that its zero immigration calculations are hypothetical, but low immigration, generally considered about 500,000 or about half the current admission level, would be an overdue step in the right direction. Under the high immigration estimate, the 2060 population will increase 124 million to 447 million. The 5 million-plus ongoing border surge, which grows numerically every day, is excluded from the Census Bureau’s data, but if included would increase the 2060 population increase well beyond the 124 million.

Even if legal immigration is reduced to the Census Bureau’s low-level, the U.S. will still remain the world’s most welcoming nation, open to refugees, asylees and others. At the same time, reduced immigration will help protect the natural resources that make the U.S. the preferred destination of immigrants.

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Project for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc  dot com.

Population Growth Would Slow With Low Immigration