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Bailey Park wasting away

4 min read

Normally, I am not a cynical person: I’m a naively optimistic type, I’m afraid. People talk, I listen, and believe.

But let me be clear: all the talk about rehabilitating Bailey Park has been just that: talk. Junk talk, at that, apparently.

At the recent Fayette County Sports Hall of Fame banquet at Penn State-Fayette, I was approached by a well-known local sports figure who decried the condition of Bailey Park, which he called a jewel. I agreed on both counts.

Then he said city officials charged with bringing the park back from the dead were certainly trying their best.

Astounding.

Bailey Park is a wreck. The infield of the big diamond is overgrown with weeds. The smaller diamond, played on in the spring by the high school softball team, was, until recently at least, sprouting its own weeds.

No one visiting Bailey Park’s teener league field with the intent of playing there can actually play there. No one does play there because (a) the field is unplayable and (b) no one has taken the time and trouble to organize leagues.

Pity the children of Uniontown who live in a community so bereft of leadership that city fathers are unable to put together the most rudimentary activity known to civilized man: youth league baseball teams.

Even if they don’t want to organize teams themselves, city leaders are incapable, apparently, of picking up a telephone or sitting down over lunch with potential partners in the endeavor. Like the men and women who operate the Eberly fields in Oliver. Or the folks in charge of the Hutchinson ballfields. All of whom seem to know what they’re doing.

We’re talking inefficient, ineffective, and gross incompetence on the part of the city. There’s a case to be made for dereliction of duty.

Early last fall, the mayor of Uniontown, Bernie Kasievich, emailed me that the city was continuing its attempts to get Bailey Park in shape. He wrote: “I … know lots needs to be done yet and I’m trying. I just wish someone would notice the positive of what’s taken place.”

Notice taken.

What’s wrong with the city, any way? Yes, of course, Uniontown is hard up for cash. With money, anything is possible. A guy down Bridgeport, W.Va., way tells me the city coffers there are evidently overflowing with greenbacks. So much so that the city of Bridgeport sprouts a new sports complex every few months, or so it seems to my brother.

Bridgeport has been the beneficiary in the past quarter century of tons of federal dollars: the FBI maintains, on a thousand acres of land just off an I-79 exit, its fingerprinting and firearms background check headquarters in Bridgeport.

The Criminal Justice Information Services Division — whew, that’s a mouthful – recently hired another 300 workers to staff what the FBI calls its Public Access Line, a central clearinghouse for phone and email messages about potential terrorists and terrorism nationwide.

As a result of the FBI and ancillary economic activity, Harrison County, which is where Bridgeport is located, is booming: the county’s average wage is 11 percent higher than the rest of West Virginia and unemployment is under five percent.

In the course of things, Bridgeport has become a cradle of diamond development: evidently, the FBI knows how to knock one out of the park. (And while I’m at it, hats off to the late, great U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, for seizing the opportunity to help build a robust local economy, the critics of pork barrel politics and Congressional log rolling be damned. Bridgeport is not your grandfather’s West Virginia, thanks to Sen. Byrd.)

So Uniontown, which had the equally late and equally great U.S. Rep. Jack Murtha as congressman for only a few years, is down-on-its-luck poor. So what does that mean? Plenty, but even more crucially, the city lacks vision.

In the absence of anyone in official authority saying “This what Uniontown could become, with hard work and dedication,” Uniontown will remain mired, knee deep in the weeds of indirection.

Revival can’t begin, and it certainly can’t end, with Bailey Park. It depends on the galvanizing quality of minds focused and alive. It depends on a compelling idea, or set of ideas. It depends on the conviction that the future matters.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.

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