So, I found myself going down a bit of a rabbit hole the other day, trying to find out about a fellow named Lenny Alexander and his connection to baseball in Reedsburg. It wasn’t for any grand project, mind you, more like a personal itch I needed to scratch. You know how it is, a name pops into your head, or you hear a snippet of a story, and you just have to see what’s out there.
My journey started, as most things do these days, with a simple internet search. I typed in “Lenny Alexander baseball Reedsburg” and hit enter, hoping for some quick answers. Well, let me tell you, it wasn’t exactly a flood of information. A few mentions here and there, maybe a name in an old forum post, but nothing substantial. It’s funny, you expect everything to be digitized and easy to find, but local history, especially older sports stuff, can be pretty elusive.
Digging a Little Deeper
I didn’t give up there, though. I figured, okay, maybe the online trail is cold, but what about other avenues? I started thinking about how folks used to find information before everything was a click away. My process went something like this:
- Newspaper Archives (Digital): I tried searching through some online archives of older local papers, hoping a box score or a team photo might pop up. This took a while, sifting through scanned pages. It’s not like searching a modern website, that’s for sure. You’re looking for needles in haystacks.
- Local Historical Societies: I poked around online to see if the Reedsburg historical society had any digital resources or mentions. Sometimes they have gems, but it’s hit or miss if their collections are easily searchable from afar.
- General Baseball History Sites: I even tried some broader baseball history sites, hoping for a mention in some regional league summary. That was a long shot, I’ll admit.
What I found, or rather, what I didn’t find in abundance, was a real eye-opener. It’s just not like looking up a major league player, or even a well-documented minor leaguer. For local heroes, for the guys who played for the love of the game in smaller towns, the records are often thin, scattered, or just plain gone. It’s a bit sad, really. All those games, those moments, just fading away unless someone took the time to write them down and preserve them.
I did come across a few mentions, a name that matched, “L. Alexander,” in connection with some Reedsburg teams from what looked like the mid-20th century. Could that be him? Maybe. It’s hard to say for sure without more context. But it was something. It showed that someone with that name, or a similar one, was indeed part of the baseball scene there.
This whole exercise, this “practice” of digging into a hyper-local piece of sports history, really hammered home how fragile these stories are. We’re so used to instant information, but the past, especially the everyday past of ordinary people doing things they loved, isn’t always neatly packaged for us. It takes effort, sometimes a lot of it, to piece things together. And even then, you might only get a blurry picture.
So, did I find a detailed biography of Lenny Alexander, the Reedsburg baseball star? Nope. Not even close. But I spent some time thinking about how local sports history is kept (or not kept), and it made me appreciate the efforts of local librarians, historians, and dedicated fans who do try to preserve these things. It’s important work. Otherwise, names like Lenny Alexander and their contributions to their communities just vanish into the ether. It’s a good reminder that there’s a lot of history that’s not in the main textbooks, but it’s history nonetheless.
