Born August 18, 1923, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Helen Shaffer (pronounced Shay-fer) grew up there and still lives in the same house she lived in as a child. Though she didn’t play much baseball herself, her mother (more than her father) was interested in the sport and took her to major league games. For a long time their favorite team was the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Later, Helen became a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates and liked to go to see them play in Three Rivers Stadium (since torn down), which she says was the most beautiful ballpark she has ever seen. She has also followed the Philadelphia Athletics, when Connie Mack was the manager, and the Philadelphia Phillies.
A writer all her life, she has written and published lots of light verse. It has appeared on greeting cards, in The Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, and in The Wall Street Journal. She writes that “A discarded library copy of The Tale of Genji, which I bought for fifteen cents sparked an interest in Japanese poetry.” In the late 1980s she started writing haiku and soon joined the Haiku Society of America. Her haiku and tanka have been published in a number of journals. Among her favorite poets are Yamaguchi Seishi and Nick Virgilio.
She wrote her first baseball haiku in 1998 when she heard Red Moon Press was doing an anthology of baseball haiku (Past Time, 1999). Her “drooping flag,” accepted for the book, shows one way nature is closely involved with the game: it can signal to a manager how to position his defensive players.
drooping flag…
the visitors’ manager
moves a fielder