This week while their fans agonize over yet another horrible loss, at least one Farmington resident can recall the last time the Red Sox won the World Series.

Dick Mallett was 10 years old in 1918, and much has changed since. In Farmington, major league baseball was not as closely followed as it is today.

In rural western Maine, “baseball didn’t draw then the way it does now,” Mallett recalls. “There were a selective few compared with now who followed the fortunes of the Red Sox. This extreme fan interest is of recent vintage.”

As Aaron Boone’s homer sailed into the left field stands, disappointment throughout the Red Sox Nation was instantaneous. But in the days before television and even radio, Farmington residents had no way of following the game as it was being played. News of the 1918 World Series victory first reached the town by telegraph. In order to discover the outcome of the final game, baseball fans would have had to make a special trip to the telegraph office, run by an elderly woman out of a house located on Main Street near where Franklin Savings Bank is today.

Despite the lack of real time communication, Mallett was a Red Sox fan in his youth, and he loved Babe Ruth. “Emery, my brother, ridiculed me for worshipping a guy who was so rambunctious and stupid in many ways,” Mallett recalls. He was 12 when Ruth was sold to the Yankees.

“We were aware of what a dreadful thing it was,” he said. “Nobody thought it was a good deal.” But just how “dreadful” was it? What of the Curse? Mallett calls the Curse of the Bambino “nonsense… It brings on attention that doesn’t do them any good.”

In the summers that followed, Mallett spent time with his sister in Boston, taking flute lessons and watching Red Sox games. On his own, he would take the trolley from Belmont to Harvard Square to Park Street to Fenway Park, arriving in the morning to watch batting practice. Often times he would stay for a double header, not leaving the park until evening. There was no other place the young baseball fan wanted to be. “I wouldn’t think of moving,” he recalls.

Cursed or not, those were losing years for the Red Sox who were plagued with money problems. “The Red Sox were poverty stricken,” Mallett recalls. “Harry Frazee gradually traded all his pitchers.” Still, Mallett has wonderful memories of some of baseball’s legends. Watching the lowly home team loose 18 to 5, he saw Ty Cobb do double duty, managing the Detroit Tigers and getting five hits. That same summer he saw former Red Sox star Babe Ruth help send the Sox to defeat with a home run. “I remember the way he minced his steps around the bases,” he says.

Now 95, Mallett avidly followed the Red Sox’ futile attempt at the pennant this year. But last Thursday night he fell asleep in the eighth inning, thinking the outcome well in hand. At one in the morning, he awoke and checked the score. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he recalls.

But then upon reflection, Mallett says that maybe he hadn’t been really – absolutely – completely sure the Red Sox had the game in the bag. “After all,” he says, “I’ve been through quite a lot.”

Additional research for this column by University of Farmington student David Farady.

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