With A Little Luck

Luck and good timing are a part of this story about collected journals of historic stories of saves and survival that I rediscovered yesterday on New Year’s Eve in the form of a Christmas gift I received 8 years ago. The gift was a collection of vintage Sports Illustrated magazines that my brother gave to me along with a colorful presentation about them at my Christmas Day 50th Birthday Party back on Christmas Day 2016.

At Christmastime back when 2016 was transitioning into 2017, we had just finished building a new home and the times were extra busy with my growing family and, of course, I was also keeping busy filling much of my time and new walls with artwork that I was involved with both as a means of catharsis and as a business. As it went, like lots of my artwork, the gifted collection of historic Sports Illustrated artifacts were put on a shelf at the time awaiting another day’s wall hanging project.

Now, 8 years later, that birthday gift that was put on a shelf brought more than my full one-hundred-percent attention when yesterday, December 31, 2024, upon my return home from our festive 10 day Christmas vacation, a sound pulled me downstairs to a back room of our basement to discover a waterfall exploding on the walls of one of our storage rooms. As I walked into the room it became more than evident that a pipe had burst as a river from it was filling the room fast. It was just gushing! In the end, though the storage room got thoroughly drenched, luckily the timing of my discovery prevented the whole basement of our house from turning into a swimming pool. It must have blown just around the same time I got home alone.  

Thankfully, fortunately, and luckily, due to the synchronization of the timing of my return home and the timing of the pipe busting, no damage was done beyond that storage room which got completely soaked along with just about most every item that was in there.  Again, with thankfulness, good-fortunate, and luck I guess, beyond being extremely stressful, we are having success getting it all cleaned-up and the flooding didn’t turn out to be too bad because most of the stuff in that storage room we could easily replace if we even wanted to like dated exercise equipment and hardly used big outdoor yard games like “Cornhole” and a thoroughly wet wooden jumbo sized “Jenga” tower puzzle.

But the point of this story coming after 8 years in our “new house” isn’t about the lost dated exercise equipment or destroyed yard games. It is about my amazement that though basically everything in that room got soaked to ruins, my collection of historic Sports Illustrated magazines which were not in a box but just literally stacked on a shelf just in front of the pipe that burst and just alongside the splattering river of water erupting from it, somehow managed to survive the flood and remain in perfect shape. Unlike everything else in that storage room, though they were closest to the pipe that happened to blow, the paper periodicals remained fully unaffected by the wide spray of water bursting from the pipe’s pouring stream. - - It was wild. I guess I am going to just tally-up the save in this situation to something called "luck".

Given that the powers that be somehow aligned for the preservation of the periodicals, I am reviewing them once again and can keep my plans to add to my sports artwork on the walls in our basement bar and billiards room and hang some of these magazine artifacts too.  I decided to share a few covers of this gifted collection of historic Sports Illustrated magazines here as well with credits going to my brother, Patrick T. Breslin.  Pat, as he goes by, grew-up the second youngest in my big family and just one year ahead of me. His saved stacks of some of the vintage Sports Illustrated magazines that he managed to gather from our parents' house many years ago are mostly from the 1970’s, the 1980’s, and the 1990’s. The collection was presented to me at my Christmas Day birthday party in 2016 by him in his typical lively fashion of eloquent anecdotes, family memories, and humor for all at the party to enjoy as he showed the magazines that survived through the many decades in his and mine and all our siblings’ childhood home. As my 50th birthday gift, he curated a selection of them being that they coincide with the first 5 decades of my life. 

I will also make note that with his vintage SI magazine collection gift, Pat threw in a Life magazine collector’s edition with Elvis and a Rolling Stones magazine with a Beatle on the cover because we both have rocked ‘n rolled since we could walk which was easy to do as our brothers and sisters brought us ahead of our time being older than us. The Beatles have been a favorite since the days we both were very young and their albums were being newly released. ( …Not to mention Paul McCartney's individual career and the band The Wings that he formed with his wife after the Beatles broke-up and all the other music Paul continues to create. ) For Pat, to this day, his appreciation and knowledge of each of the Beatles still goes above and beyond.

It’s been cool to finally get a break from the overwhelming stress of the flood and take a closer look through this collection of historic artifacts 8 years after they were lovingly and thoughtfully gifted to me then stored away. In the past 8 years, I have added to my sports artwork including historic Reds baseball with players like Pete Rose that is linked below.  I also still find all the music of the Beatles members interesting, and beautiful, and inspiring like I find a good deal of the figures in this illustrated collection with their stories of masterful skill, endurance, perseverance, survival, and enduring achievement against all odds or fomented opposition against them as the game is often known to go. The Beatles are known for their famous lyrics saying, “All You Need Is Love”, but maybe sometimes and in the case of the lasting power of this gifted collection of paper periodicals from the past perched parallel to the profuse pouring from the broken plumbing of a blown-out pipe, a little old-fashioned Irish Luck from the powers that be may help too.​

​“The Irish Wake The Echos”

​“The Irish Ran Wild”

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Pat’s pride in his alma mater, Boston College, appears more than once in his curated collection. I have another older brother that went to Norte Dame. Nevertheless, no matter the discipline, team, or craft, appreciation for the Irish is inherent in all my family members I grew-up with and lives in our DNA.
​{ I have noted our Irish ancestry in “Another American Dreamer with Irish Roots” which has links to more of my artwork and shines a little light on the life of our Irish family tree. } 

…Speaking of American Dreamers: If you were alive in 1980, you may well know how the ecstatic excitement that united the US with perpetual pride in those days was inescapable then when the dream of the USA Men’s Hockey Team to become the victors of one of history’s most intense rivalries and beat the Russians became a reality in the 1980 Winter Olympics.

“The U.S. Epic Hockey Team” on Sports Illustrated cover from December 1980:

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​The sportsmanship of sports was something that my parents and family members loved to follow when I was growing-up.  My parents’ love of horses was also something that made them regular followers of horse racing as they often made the short trip across the river from Cincinnati into Kentucky where horse racing rules. They even invested in their own race horse at one point. I remember my Dad and Mom taking just me ( I guess all my brothers and sisters were busy with other activities at the time ) to see that horse being born.

The red-hot season of the 1990 Cincinnati Reds marked a winning year in my life as my first official date with my husband of 33 years this coming Valentine’s Day was to their first game in the spring of that first year of the 1990’s.  I wrote some about that Wire-to-Wire World Series Winning Season and created some artwork of those 1990 Baseball Champs found in the blog linked below:

"My Wire-to-Wire Summer with Twelve Stars and A Piece of American History"

An SI cover with a slice of the career of Pete Rose who sadly passed away in late September of “last year” I will say as of now since I am writing this on New Year’s Day 2025.  I did some artwork and a video and a blog about him. I call all those creations of mine: “The Timeless Charlie Hustle and The Geometry of a Rose.” I created the artwork in March of 2017: 
"The Timeless Charlie Hustle and The Geometry of a Rose"
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I see Rose has a Phillies uniform on in this cover which isn’t a team I know much about, but some of my family members at that birthday party presentation that have resided on the East Coast for decades are Red Sox fans. 

​​“The Magnificent Masters” …Golf !  I was pretty good at golf when I was younger. I’m not much into the scene these days where I prefer to spend my free time shuffling around my paintbrushes rather than my clubs.

Props to the females… They are Champions as a matter of course! 

With the first cover of the next 3, I remember my brother making mention of how legendary tennis champion “Chrissy” Evert and I share the same nickname.

...I will also add the color commentary that I really like the original red ribboned hat that Chrissy is sporting as well as Tracy’s and Nadia’s rainbow stripes.

​The next 2 magazines share notes about our love of music which I wrote about above. The 1995 Life magazine gift includes an appreciation for Elvis, for the celebration of birthdays, and for the beauty of it all colored in Christmas red.

This Rolling Stone magazine that Pat included in his 2016 birthday gift was published in March of 2012 and says, “Paul’s Fresh Start”. ~ Today is New Year’s Day and I too am ready for a Fresh Start.

Here's to all the wishes that we discover The New Year of 2025 to be wonderful and awesome, successful and peaceful, and most of all full of love as we all live our days, as Paul McCartney and his band The Wings sing, “With A Little Luck”.

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