“Burnout” is a game for two players who throw a baseball to each other at a given distance and then, advancing on each other, throw the ball as hard as they can until one of them backs away.  When I was a young boy my dad and I often would have a game of catch in our big front yard on a warm summer night.  It always started out quite innocently, but usually evolved into a fiery game of burnout.  My dad loved it, me, not so much.

My dad grew up on a farm in central Clay County, South Dakota. It was the homestead farm of my great-grandparents, Swedish immigrants, Olaf and Brita Lingberg.  They came to America in 1868 and staked their claim the next year.  The northwest corner of the property is the intersection of 306^th Street and University Road.  It sits approximately 14 miles from the towns of Vermillion, Wakonda, Centerville, Beresford and Alcester.  On that intersection in 1925 William Inberg and Arvid Johnson opened a newly built gas station and repair-business. The name Hub City was suggested on opening day because the site is equidistant from the surrounding towns. 

The name stuck.

Hub City would eventually consist of a gas station-repair business, icehouse, grocery-feed store, cafe, barbershop, a county highway shed, church, parsonage and several homes and other businesses…and a baseball diamond.

Hub City was a social gathering spot. During the 1930’s and 1940’s area businessmen promoted the  baseball teams. Hub City played some of the top teams in the three-state area.  My dad played on both the Junior Legion and “Town” teams.  Sometimes first base, but he most enjoyed third base, the “hot corner” of baseball’s infield and as you can imagine developed quite an arm for that long, hard throw to first and the love for a good game of “burnout”.

However, in the early fifties Uncle Sam came a-calling and farm boy Rich Lingberg went off to serve his country.  He met my mother, Corrine Scheuring (a Beresford girl), a pretty little waitress at the Green Globe Café.  They got married and a year later started their family…beginning with me.  That  pretty much ended his baseball career, but not his love for a hot game of “burnout”.

It probably took about ten years until I was old enough for an “innocent game of catch” which was merely a ruse to get to the real game…burnout.  Imagine yourself, a skinny little ten-year-old standing 90 feet away from a full grown man, arm cocked with baseball in hand who believes he would have been the next Brooks Robinson had Uncle Sam, not Major League Baseball, drafted him.  What do you do?  Run like hell or hold up that Reggie Jackson enscribed glove in front of your face and hope to God it’s not the last day of your life?

As much as dad loved “burnout”, I believe he felt it was more important that I learned that sometimes you may feel you are faced with an overwhelming force, challenges that you have never encountered, outcomes that you can’t imagine and you ask yourself, “What am I going to do?” 

His advice, “Don’t make a big deal out of it, just catch the damn ball.”

That’s all I’ve tried to do for the last 61 years. 

Thanks Dad.