What economic slowdown?

I sat in the bleachers in old Busch Stadium on Grand Avenue in St. Louis and the ticket cost one dollar. Stan Musial and Ted Williams were the highest paid baseball players in 1958 and they made a stupendous salary of $100,000 annually.

A player who got winner's share check for the World Series in the fifties got about three or four thousand dollars. Major league baseball players used to have to work in the off season in order to make a living. They used to do what was called "barnstorming." A group of major leaguers would travel to small towns and play local teams in order to make a little spare change. I saw some of these games at Burnham Field when the "barnstormers" played the team sponsored by the cotton mill. The cotton mill team always had the best players in Dyer County because they would give them a job at the mill and they would practice on company time. The DCP Panthers were actually what was called a semi-pro baseball team. There are some old-timers around Dyersburg still alive who played on the Dyersburg Cotton Products Panthers in the forties.