Hi. I’m Gerry Hamilton, Gen’l Mgr of the Trinidad Dragons. This is my eighth season with the Dragons in the United Leagues.

I was born and raised in Upstate New York. I enlisted in the Navy right after I graduated from high school. Following the Navy I spent a year at Michigan State at East Lansing and finished up at Cal Poly Pomona in Southern California.

I first met my wife, Melody, in Big Sur in 1960 and we have been married for 47 years.

We have one son, Stephen, and two teenage granddaughters. We all live in a redwood forest here in Trinidad on the North Coast of California. 

A footnote here: The Dragons are really the Trinidad School Dragons, named for the local elementary school where each of our granddaughters spent nine years and graduated at the top of their respective classes. I will not bore you with the details but none of us would be here today if I had not been at Michigan State fifty years ago.

I spent nearly all of my working life, about 30 years, working in Southern California and at Vandenberg AFB on the Central Coast in the aerospace industry. I was quite fortunate to spend all of that time with the prime NASA contractor for the Apollo/Saturn and the Space Shuttle Programs. It was an exciting time to be alive.

I have been a baseball fan for a looong time and I was a Dodger fan before I knew where Brooklyn was. My earliest baseball memories were listening to baseball on the radio. From where we lived I could hear broadcasts from 8 different major league teams. My dad took me to my first ML game, a double header in Philadelphia in 1953. Six years later we saw our first Dodger games at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

I have three unforgettable baseball memories and another that I have tried and failed to forget. In October of 1951 a friend of mine and I were working as managers of our high school football team. At the time, we were cleaning the team uniforms and since there was a very important baseball game on the radio, we had positioned ourselves right outside the the window of our athletic director’s office window. Our AD, Mr. Jacoby, was a Giants fan so, naturally, he was listening to the Giants broadcast. It was a great game until the bottom of the 9th when Bobby Thomson stepped in against Ralph Branca and we heard the “Shot heard ‘round the world!”. I hated Russ Hodges for a long time, but he was just being a Giants fan.

In May of 1959 I was in my room at MSU, studying, when I tuned in to a Pirate broadcast from Milwaukee. The game was in the early innings and there was no score so I thought I’d stay with it until someone scored. It took a while. The Braves won 1-0 in 13 innings and Lew Burdette went all the way for the Braves and pitched a 12 hitter. The Pirate pitcher also went all 13 innings and was perfect for the first 12. It wasn’t enough. I think his name was Harvey something.

The last two games that Melody and I actually attended were also memorable. In 1986 we saw game 5 of the Boston/California ALCS. The Angels had a three games to one lead and were up 5-2 in the 9th inning of game 5. Boston rallied to win 7-6 in 11 innings and of course won it in seven games. That set up the ‘86 series between the Mets and Redsox. Had the Angels managed to hold on some part of their 9th inning lead, Billy Buckner might still be welcome in Boston.

In 1988 we attended the game following the Kirk Gibson Home Run. Orel Hershiser tossed a neat three hitter and had three hits of his own and the Dodgers beat the A’s 6-0.

Interestingly, I grew up not too far from Cooperstown and the BB Hall of Fame. It was relatively new then and not that big a deal. I never thought about going there. In 2004 Melody and I returned to New York for my 50th HS reunion. While there we spent a day in Cooperstown and now my life is complete.

I also have my own annual baseball prediction game, also hosted by the United Leagues. There are about 200 annual participants including about 20-25 United League players and family members. Three of our past winners are included in that group.

We are a long way from Major League Baseball now so I must be content to follow the local Division II softball team from Humboldt State Uni. That’s fine with me as I played the game for over 40 years and it has always been my first love and this year I’ll get to watch the defending Div II National Champs.