History
A "Tee Ball" trademark was registered with the United States government by Dayton Hobbs in the early 1970s, but the game's origins date back to at least the 1940s and 50s with several people claiming to be the father of the game. Claude Lewis, director of the Warner Robins, Georgia Recreation Department, formed a tee-ball league in March 1958. 20 children played the first year. Lewis designed rules for the new game and mailed the rule books out to rec departments all over the country and overseas.
Albion, Michigan claims to be the place of invention for the sport in 1956, though Starkville, Mississippi makes a similar claim that t-ball was invented in their town in 1961. According to the Starkville Rotary Club's website: "In 1961, when it was apparent that younger children needed some way to participate in the program, Rotarians Dr. Clyde Muse and W. W. Littlejohn devised the game of t-ball and added it to the summer baseball program." Dr. Hobbs has credited the United States Navy with spreading the game overseas. U.S. presidents since Ronald Reagan have hosted t-ball games on the South Lawn of the White House.
Read more about this topic: Tee Ball
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)