Prickly Fall: Tom and the Baseball Photos

Prickly Fall: Two Baseball Teams
Was it Twilight League or Hilltop?

My Father, 1938 Hilltop Baseball Uniform

Tom Broadfoot, my father died on this day, twenty years ago. With every passing day it seems so fresh in my mind yet so long ago. For many years, this photo remained a mystery. Stay with me as I show you how solving this took a lot of time.

My father, loved sports like cross county, track and golf. He envisioned a retirement where his days were spent playing golf with his friends. That's not what happened because many of his friends moved to Florida and my mother, who didn't drive was demanding of his time because my maternal grandmother came to live with them. He did organize a senior golf tournament and it was called the Twilight League. 

This photo of my father is dated by the car license plate as 1938. Probably it was taken the summer before the Hurricane of 1938 in the town of Bradford, RI where he lived with his sister Ada and his brother Bill all who worked for the Bradford Dye. 

I appealed to my friend Barbara Fallon to help me solve the mystery of why this uniform says Hilltop. You see, we lived on a street called Hilltop but that was years later and my dad thought that was funny.

I assumed that my dad played for a local team sponsored by the company that he worked for and I wasn't wrong but it must have taken her a long time to find it in the microfilm of the Westerly Sun, a widely read newspaper of southern Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. 

The prickly thing is that there is a bar in Westerly called Hilltop so on this twentieth year, everyone should have a beer to salute my father.