Taking a baseball to the nose is difficult for anyone.
But little did Dorothy Strack know that more than six decades after she was struck in the face by a baseball while playing a grade-school game of catch on the playground at recess with Jean Lovell in 1937, the memory would come flooding back.
“(In 1999), I consulted an ear, eyes and throat doctor because of difficulty breathing through my nose,” she said. “The first thing the doctor asked was, ‘When did you break your nose?’”
Dorothy, now 81, and who has just returned with her husband, Bill, from their winter home in Florida, said she was instantly transported back to that
fateful day and recess on the playground at Amboy Elementary School.
“I knew immediately,” she said with a laugh. “It had never been diagnosed as I didn’t go to the doctor at the time, but the memory was still vivid.
“An ensuing operation helped to undue the damage.”
Dorothy, whose husband still owns and operates Strack Insurance in Conneaut, said reading a note in a Star Beacon column asking if anyone knew of Jean Lovell’s days here in Ashtabula County compelled her to answer.
“I had lost track of Jean,” she said. “Although I had known she had gone on to become a professional ballplayer, I hasn’t known of her death.
“But knowing her, even though it was while we were just kids, I’m sure she loved playing professional baseball and loved living her life.”
— Don McCormack
