1 Mickey Bowers My grand mom Used to always say, Take the bad things Turn them into good things, And enjoy the good things That came out of the bad thing. Some of the truest stories in baseball are never told. When I was a kid, from 1956 to 1960, I lived in Germany with my parents. And over in Germany we didn''t have a television. We had Radio Free Europe, and my mother used to read me stories from the Encyclopedia Britannica that my dad bought for us. So living in that environment, I really didn''t know any of the stuff that was going on in the United States of America, such as the segregation policies down South and Dr. King and people fighting for Black rights. We lived on an army base and it was like we had our own little family there.

If you were in the military, you lived according to your dad''s rank. My dad was a sergeant so we lived with the sergeants. If my dad would have been an officer we would have lived with the officers. When I came back from Germany in 1960 we moved to an army installation at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. And we never had any problems as far as Blacks and whites there. My friends--Imean the guys I grew up with, ate with, slept over their houses, played football and baseball with--we never talked about Black and white. I didn''t really experience segregation until I signed with the Philadelphia Phillies. It was like I was in a protective environment.

In high school, most of the kids were military people. The school was 98 percent white and I never had one problem with anybody. I had about fifteen to twenty college football scholarship offers. Now when I look back on my life, I wish I would''ve gone to college to play football because I would have matured a little bit, understood some of the things that were going on in the world, things I wasn''t privy to prior to signing with the Phillies. Because when I signed with Philadelphia, some of the things that I personally experienced, some of the things that I saw, some of the things that other African American and Hispanic players experienced, were a shock to me. It was really a shock to me. The Phillies, I think, took the whole cake. Had I known that the Philadelphia Phillies were the way they were, there wouldn''t have been enough money in the world for me to play baseball in Philadelphia.

But at the time I was happy I got a shot with the Phillies when they drafted me because my parents were from Pennsylvania. My dad and all my aunts and uncles lived in Oxford, Pennsylvania. The Church of God in Kennett Square, where all the hothouses are, that was my grandfather''s church. He built that church. So, I said, when I get to the big leagues my family can come down and see me play. I played third base in high school. Never, ever played the outfield. But they told me they drafted me as an infielder-outfielder and they wanted me to play the outfield because I had speed.

I was the fastest man in the Phillies organization. People say playing the outfield is easy. It''s not. It''s hard, especially right field because the ball gets a lot of action on it. I did the best I could, but I had my issues out there. I told Dallas Green, the assistant farm director, I said, "You guys drafted me as an outfielder. I never played outfield in my life. I don''t know how to play the outfield.

" But they stuck me in right field and I had problems playing the ball off the bat.