A stadium full of memories

Bill Adams only makes a handful of trips to Busch Stadium each year to watch the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.

But those trips to downtown St. Louis have resulted in a number of unforgettable moments, beginning with the first regular-season game in 1966.

Adams will have the chance to add one more memory Sunday when he attends the final regular-season game at Busch Stadium. The home of the Cardinals will be torn down after this season to make room for a new stadium.

He will sit in seat 11 of row 22 of section 338 -- the nose-bleed area -- but it will be a special seat. As a 16-year-old boy, Adams sat in the same place when the Cardinals beat Atlanta 4-3 in 12 innings on May 12, 1966, in the first game at Busch.

"I don't know if you can figure out the odds of how many people will be sitting in the same seats for the first and last regular-season games," said Adams, 56, a Cape Girardeau resident and a U.S. Postal Service employee. "That's got to be a pretty rare thing.

"It's next to the last row at the top. The view is from first base looking to second base."

Adams went to the game in 1966 with Alvin Ferrenburg of Morley, whom he said was "a big brother" to him in his youth. Adams still has the first-night certificate handed out at the game and the ticket stub that led to him having the same seat this weekend.

Ferrenburg, who still lives in Morley, will accompany Adams to the game Sunday. "I called the guy to return the favor and told him we were sitting in the same seats," Adams said.

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Raised in Morley, Mo., Adams made his first trip to see a Cardinals game at the old Sportsman's Park on the north side of St. Louis in 1963. Even that game was memorable -- a televised Game of the Week early in the season with Hall of Famer Juan Marichal pitching and Willie Mays hitting three home runs for the Giants.

Adams also had gone to St. Louis to participate in camps directed by the Cardinals while he was a member of the Scott County Central baseball program.

"I played," Adams said, "but I wasn't very good."

He became an autograph hound.

He has mementos -- balls, bats, scorecards, ticket stubs -- that serve as tabs for his collection of memories.

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Sept. 6, 1968, ranks as one of the greatest days of Adams' life -- aside from his marriage to his wife, Kay, and the birth of his daughters, Jennifer, Amy and Sarah. On that late summer day with the Cardinals in the pennant race, Adams obtained the autograph of Giants great Willie Mays. He also caught a foul ball hit by Tim McCarver, which resulted in an "honorary player contract" the Cardinals gave to each person who caught a foul ball. Adams still has that certificate on display at his home.

"I never got another foul ball," Adams said. "I don't know if I would want a foul ball from a player people didn't know. Lou Brock is my favorite Cardinal, but McCarver is right up there, I must say. That led to No. 15 being my favorite number."

Also that day, Adams was hired as an usher to work in the left-center field bleachers for the 1968 World Series, in which the Cardinals played the Tigers.

"I figured at that time of year, with people going back to school, I had a chance [to get an ushers job]," Adams said. "The funny thing was we didn't have a car so I had to flag down a Greyhound bus on the highway."

Adams worked Games 1, 2, 6 and 7, staying in St. Louis for the back-to-back games. He witnessed Gibson's 17-strikeout performance in Game 1 and the Tigers' 4-1 clincher in Game 7.

Adams stayed on as an usher for part of the 1968 football season. That year, he had the opportunity to meet and obtain the autograph of Charlton Heston, who was filming a movie role as an aging quarterback.

"I wasn't making any money because of the bus fare going up and spending the day up there," Adams recalled. "But I wasn't doing it for the money. I was just doing it for the fun of it."

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On July 31, 1971, Adams and his wife were on their honeymoon and attended a game at Busch Stadium.

(It became part of a family theme. "We would always try to work in a trip to the ballpark" on vacations, Adams said. His three daughters all are Cardinals fans, though Seattle resident Jennifer also supports the Mariners.)

During that honeymoon visit, a Cardinals player gave Adams a broken bat that was lying on the ground. It belonged to Joe Torre, who was the MVP that season.

"Joe Torre came down for the Cardinals caravan in 1993, and I brought the bat for him to autograph," Adams said. "He recognized it right off the bat as one of his. He signed it 'To Bill and Kay, Happy honeymoon, 1971.'"

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Adams attended Game 7 of the 1982 World Series with his daughter, Jennifer, who was then 9. They watched the Cardinals beat the Milwaukee Brewers for their most recent world championship.

"We got to go down on the field after it was over," Adams said. "It was a tremendous father-daughter memory."

In 2001, Adams attended the All-Star Game with his daughter in Seattle. "She returned the favor," Adams said. "She knew how much it would mean to me."

Adams had a streak of attending every World Series game at Busch from his days as an usher from 1968 through 1987.

"To be in the ballpark when your team wins the seventh game of the World Series is special feeling, and it's also a heartbreaker when you lose."

Adams' streak of World Series appearances ended last year. He had camped out for tickets in the 1980s and spent six hours trying to get tickets last year.

"It was total chaos," he said. "We waited for six hours but didn't get a line pass [for the chance to buy tickets]. Other times it had been wonderful. It's a long night but you're talking baseball half the time."

The Cardinals so far have eliminated the line passes this year, using telephone and Internet to sell postseason tickets for the first two postseason series. Adams has been unable to secure a postseason ticket yet, though not without effort.

"Even for the World Series, that's not an impossible ticket to get," Adams said in reference to his nose-bleed seat. "I would like to go to the World Series, but I may have to be satisfied with being at the first regular-season game and the last regular-season game at Busch Stadium."

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Even getting a seat for Sunday's finale wasn't easy.

Adams' oldest daughter, Jennifer, made her case to the Cardinals and bought a partial season-ticket plan that put her father in the same seat for the last game.

The face value on Sunday's ticket is $22.25. In 1966, the same seat was $1.50. The Adamses will vouch for the priceless part of the memories created.

"She's persistent," Adams said of his daughter. "I think she talked to nine different people and she had the seat number from my [1966] ticket. If it was the box seats or something like that, it would have been impossible to fulfill her wish."

Busch has been a field of dreams for Adams. A place where he witnessed memorable moments -- Gibson's 3,000th strikeout, a home run by Mark McGwire during his 2001 season of 70 homers that beat the Astros in extra innings -- and had brushes with fame, such as buying a ticket (at face value) from Cardinals outfielder Andy Van Slyke.

"There have been some wonderful times," Adams said. "I'm going to miss that goofy ballpark.

"It seems like the lifespan of a ballpark should be more than 39 years. I really don't want to see it go, but we can't stand in the way of progress. It'll be tough."

Bill Adams has a lot of good memories associated with Busch Stadium, but he also has one source of irritation.

"One of the biggest disappointments I've had is that when it first opened in '66, they hosted the All-Star Game, and they never had it since," Adams said. "It's widely accepted that St. Louis has the best baseball fans, yet we never got the All-Star Game back. I always resented that."

Adams hasn't decided yet about when he might go to the new ballpark, which is being built just to the south of the current Busch Stadium.

"There are going to be less seats," he said, "so it's going to be harder to get seats."