Why should anybody care about baseball players from the 1950s like Steve Bilko, Handsome Ransom Jackson, Artie Wilson, Joe Bauman, Carlos Bernier, Joe Brovia, Steve Dalkowski, Ron Necciai and Conklyn Meriwether?

Brothers Joe and Jack Hannah along with Joe's son, Lon, make up the Sons of the San Joaquin, honored eight times as the best traditional singing group by the Western Music Association. Jack has been selected best songwriter in the cowboy music category six times.

Jack was a promising pitcher in the Milwaukee Braves organization before he injured his throwing arm. Joe, a catcher for the 1956 Los Angeles Angels, played 13 seasons in the minors.

"You play the game to make the major leagues," Joe says, summing up the feelings of everyone who has played pro baseball.

Joe and Jack never made it to the majors. But they have wonderful memories of their years in the minors.

"What would life be if it weren't for the remembrances?" Jack wrote in a letter to author Gaylon White. "We have the future of which we know nothing, we have the present, which is so close and moving so swiftly by that we can't make much of it, but the past is as clear as our memories will allow. It's the memories of the past that convince me how important what I am doing is in the present."

White is the author of four baseball books and coauthor of another -- The Best Little Baseball Town in the World: The Crowley Millers and Minor League Baseball in the 1950s (2021); Left On Base in the Bush Leagues: Legends, Near Greats and Unknowns in the Minors (2019); Singles and Smiles: How Artie Wilson Broke Baseball's Color Barrier (2018), The Bilko Athletic Club (2014) and Handsome Ransom Jackson: Accidental Big Leaguer, a 2016 book written with Ransom Jackson, two-time National League All-Star for the Chicago Cubs and the last Brooklyn Dodger to hit a home run.

White read Jack Hannah's quote to his mother in 2014 when he gave her a copy of The Bilko Athletic Club. She was 93 at the time. The past was much clearer in her mind than the present. In fact, only memories of her past gave any meaning to the present.

"The very best era of baseball is when you were a kid," says Bill Swank, a baseball historian and good friend. Bill isn't the only one that feels this way.

The worst part about being a kid is growing up. Few of our childhood dreams make it past grade school. They often are pooh-poohed by parents and teachers and eventually abandoned to cope with the harsh realities of adult life.

Syd Mead is a futurist designer, best known for his work on science fiction films such as Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron. He says, "I can think of no greater gift to oneself than to retain and add the wonder of childhood to the gathering of the adult experience."

In writing books about baseball in the late 1940s and 1950s, I tried to recapture the wonder of childhood I lost from 40 years of guerilla warfare in the corporate jungle.

Fortunately, my mother saved a large collection of baseball cards, yearbooks, scrapbooks and odds and ends like a note written in 1955 when I was nine years old. "It's nice to be a baseball fan," I scribbled. "If you want to know some baseball players names, here they are…."

I listed names of some of the biggest stars of the '50s: Ray Boone, Duke Snider, Eddie Mathews, Carl Furillo, Mickey Mantle and Hank Sauer. And, then, obviously dreaming, I added Davy Crockett, Gaylon White and Don White.

In 1955, Davy Crockett was big stuff. He was "King of the Wild Frontier," the name of a Walt Disney movie starring actor Fess Parker as Davy. I wore a coonskin cap when I didn't have my L.A. Angels baseball cap on.

Don, 15 years old when the note was written, was more than a big brother. He was my first sports hero.

In 1953, Don scored 48 points for his basketball team, the White Sidewalls. That same year, 6-foot-9 Clarence "Bevo" Francis, averaged a record 48.3 points a game to put tiny Rio Grande College on the map. The newspaper in our hometown of Santa Paula, California, reported: "Although somewhat shorter than Bevo Francis, Donnie White scored 48 points in an eighth grade basketball game Saturday, giving him a total of 64 points for the season so far and the scoring lead in the league."

Don was a star in my eyes, destined for greatness in basketball and baseball. He had quick hands, ran fast, and threw hard. He consistently hit balls onto the roof of a building near the field where he played pick-up games. When Don went to Angel games at Wrigley Field in L.A., he out-hustled other kids for baseballs fouled into the stands. He supplied all the baseballs needed at home.

Don played high school and college basketball but he didn't make it to the pros. I soon found out that I could turn a phrase better than a double play.

It doesn't matter now. We still have our childhood memories of Steve Bilko, Handsome Ransom Jackson, Artie Wilson, Joe Bauman and all the other players White covers in books that give the present meaning.