Reading the thread below about Kearns got me to thinking about the few times I have met players in situations outside of the ballpark and the impressions I had of those players. I have a few stories, and no doubt some of you have some as well. In the summer of 1994, when I was a young right hander, I was working at a United Dairy Farmers store in Florence, that one on the corner of Dixie Hwy and Turfway Rd. for those familiar with that area. There were a few Reds players who lived in that area and some of them made it into the store to buy milk or ice cream on occasion. I was pretty used to seeing some of them, especially after the strike in August of that year. Joe Oliver and Tim Pugh were fairly regular in the store and Pugh used to come in about once a week with a really short girl I took to be his girlfriend at the time. They would get milkshakes or ice cream cones and sometimes stay and chat for a while if business was slow. During that summer, we hired a young high schooler about 16 years old or thereabouts and he was a huge Reds fan. School started back up that September and he came into work after school one day when Tim Pugh was standing at the counter waiting for me to make his shake. His eyes got kind of wide and he came back from the back room pretty fast with one of his school notebooks opened to a blank page and proceeded to hand the notebook and a pen over the counter for an autograph. Pugh looked pretty embarassed about the whole thing and when the kid went back to the back room all smiles, he said to me, "I didn't think we were that popular right now." We just had a good laugh about it and some of the other times he came in he would ask me if there were any more autograph seekers hiding in the back room. He also had some interesting things to say about the strike, how there were quite a few players who didn't like it and didn't support the union, but that's a whole different story. I have other stories, but for the sake of keeping this post from getting any longer, and to give some others a chance to relate any stories they may have, I will stop with that one account for now. Anyone else have any interesting encounters?
