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Shattered Dreams and Broken Bats
HOBART: Author signs book at store about father's baseball passion
by Royal M. Hopper III, Times Correspondent
Sunday, February 11th, 2007
 HOBART | Best-selling author Gary Moore has an unqualified love for the hero of his latest book.
The character is a sympathetic everyman, a teenage baseball prodigy whose promising career is detoured by World War II. The character is like family in very real ways.
"He's my father," Moore said as he signed copies of the book Playing with the Enemy on Saturday at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on U.S. 30 in Hobart.
Joining Moore were authors such as John Etter, who was promoting his book "The Indiana Legion," the story of the Civil War Indiana militia that helped protect the state from Southern sympathizers plotting to hand Indiana to the Confederacy. Debbie Ludwig also was on hand to promote her murder mystery "Innocent of Tribulation."
Playing with the Enemy chronicles the adventures of Gene Moore, a small town, teenage baseball player.
"Sesser (Ill.) had never had a hero, and Gene Moore was the closest they had ever come to putting one of their own on a pedestal," a line from the book reads.
At 15, Gene Moore was so good he was drafted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, Gary Moore said.
When the war began, Gene Moore joined the Navy to serve his country and was assigned to a touring Navy baseball team. Toward the end of the war, the Navy captured the German submarine U-505 and needed men to guard the prisoners.
With Navy and Marine personnel taxed to the limit in combat, Moore and his baseball team were tapped to guard the prisoners.
The team taught the Germans to play baseball, and in the process Moore shattered his ankle, effectively ending his career.
Gary Moore remembers, when he was 12, looking through a drawer and discovering an old yellow envelope with a letter dated after the war. The letter asked his father to report for tryouts with the Pittsburgh Pirates... Read more...
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www.PlayingWithTheEnemy.com
