75 years apart, women’s baseball ties wow

CHARLOTTE — You don’t often get the chance to watch 75 years melt away. But there they are, Mildred Meacham (“Meach,” they called her in her playing days) and Alex Fulmer (everyone calls her “Lulu”), and they are surrounded by Christmas trees and multi-colored lights and the bustle before dinner time at the Brookdale Cotswold Senior Living Center.

“What did you like better,” Lulu is asking, “baseball or softball?”

“Baseball,” Meach says quietly. “In softball, the ball goes slower. … What do you like better?”

“Baseball,” Lulu says. “It’s what I know.”

Meach is 92. Lulu is 17. That’s 75 years of life between them, and yet the stuff that connects them beats time. Mildred Meacham played ball in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) just after World War II ended. Alex Fulmer is the youngest player on Team USA, and five years ago, she became the first girl to start a Little League Southeast Regional clinching game.

They are together because of a wish. A couple of years ago, Lynn Schlierf, the program coordinator at Brookdale Cotswold, met Meacham for the first time. They talked baseball. Meach played for the Fort Wayne Daisies and Racine Belles in 1947 and for the Springfield Sallies in ’48. She was a first baseman with speed.

“What did you love about baseball?” Schlierf asked.

“I loved every blade of grass,” Meacham told her. “Every speck of dirt. The crowd. The sound. I even loved the smell of baseball.”

And, with that, Schlierf knew that she needed to give Meach one more day of baseball. That was the wish.

So Schlierf and Brookdale director of business development Chanel Jackson wrote to Wish of a Lifetime, founded by former NFL receiver and Olympic skier Jeremy Bloom. This is some …

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