Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick is about as effervescent and optimistic as a person can be — not to mention passionately dedicated to feeling a calling to be more like Buck O’Neil, the poet laureate of the Negro Leagues, ambassador for baseball and a founding force of the NLBM.
But sometimes even Kendrick labors to reconcile what the world serves up. Vandals on Friday cut a water pipe on the second floor of the Buck O’Neil Research and Education Center in the former Paseo YMCA building that let loose flooding through two floors.
Most likely, the $100,000 parquet floor of what is now a ballroom will have to be replaced, and who knows how much more it will cost to fix the drywall and other damage, and to what degree insurance will cover this.