[JimStinson]

The picture was taken around 1987. Terry and I talked about alot of things but some that stand out in my mind., he had huge hands and one heck of a handshake, physically very strong despite his age.
We talked alot about his career. he told me "I played my entire career on one leg" I asked him what he meant and he said that prior to his being called up to the majors he was chasing a pop up at first and stepped on a piece of line chalk the size of a golfball and twisted and injured his knee. he said it never healed correctly and hurt almost all the time, he was proud of having been the last National Leaguer to hit over .400 in a season. He hated John McGraw and said that he and Mrs Terry used to talk evening walks and would cross paths with Mrs McGraw and her husband doing the same thing , and the ladies would exchange greetings , He would say hello to Mrs McGraw and McGraw would say hello to Mrs Terry both neither of them would exchange a word (smile). He loved Mel Ott like a son and said he was one of the finest human beings you could ever meet on or off the baseball field. Hubbell too. He liked Lou Gehrig and said that Gehrig was a big strong 225 pounder most of his career and when he saw him right before he died he weighed less than 150 pounds. Said that Babe Ruth was a like a "big overgrown kid" , he hated sportwriters and said most of what they wrote was "bunk". He used to say he liked talking about baseball with me because "I knew what I was talking about" which to me was pretty flattering. His house was always filled with hundreds of sharpie pens and he would laugh that when collectors sent him mail for his autograph they would send pens too, he would ask me "Do you think I need anymore pens?". As a joke for his birthday I bought him a gold pen with his name engraved on it and told him "just in case you run out". Right before he died we spoke on the phone and I had just seen the movie "Eight Men out" , which was in the theatres I asked him if he wanted me to take him to see it when I was in Jacksonville (he didn;t drive much he had a 10 year old car in the garage with 5,000 miles on it...hahaha) he said all those baseball movies are "bunk", that they make up based on the lies the sportwriters told over and over. I told him that it appeared mostly factual about the series and he said "If they say Jackson wasn't in on it, its bunk", he said "Being too stupid to know right from wrong is no excuse" We talked about other stuff too of course but alot of it would not be appropriate for this board.