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Durand's Marvelous Merchants: A Tale of Small-Town Life and Big-Time Softball
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About Durand's Marvelous Merchants: A Tale Of Small-Town
In the middle of the 20th century, a tiny Illinois farming town cleared land for a new softball field, put up bleachers and lights and trotted out a team that turned back all comers. The Durand Merchants were farmers and ranchers, retailers, electric linemen and manufacturing workers — many of them veterans of World War II — who came together to play fast-pitch softball. In a small Midwestern town, the sport was the main recreation of the postwar era and a prime entertainment before television.The team, possibly the region’s greatest, feasted on competition from bigger cities all around.The story of those glory years is captured in Durand’s Marvelous Merchants. Author Mike Waller as a boy fielded foul balls from Merchants’ games and returned them to the concession stand for a nickel apiece. Now, after a successful career as a newspaper editor and publisher, Waller has assembled the story of the Merchants players, their families, their town and their times.
