D&R G releases new video, Fields of Dreams, with Babe Ruth's Granddaughter
Fields of Dreams
Grandparents and parents seeking holiday gifts for their Little Leaguers will be inspired by watching D&R Greenway’s latest video, Fields of Dreams, featuring sports and the outdoors in the starring role.
Linda Ruth Tosetti (left), granddaughter of legendary home-run hitter Babe Ruth, tells personal stories about the Babe’s early life and how he became motivated to become a baseball player.
“My grandfather looked up to Father Mathais, a mountain of a man, and Babe stood head and shoulders over the other kids,” says Linda Ruth Tosetti about her grandfather’s mentor at a Catholic school. Viewers are treated to historic photos of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor from Babe Ruth’s youth. Sports fans will be fascinated to hear the story of how he learned to throw.
The video begins with D&R Greenway trustee James
Fiorentino (right), an artist who has painted many of baseball’s legendary
players. Fiorentino was the youngest artist
ever to have his art featured in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in
Cooperstown, NY, when he was only 15 years of age. Having begun his sports art
career with Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, James became a college baseball
player himself. He talks about the
connection he feels to the land while outdoors in the field, and how important
this is in forming a lifelong love of nature.
Since 1989, D&R Greenway has permanently protected over 21,000 acres of land in central New Jersey. Fiorentino became Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the land trust in 2019. He generously shares his talents, connections and love of the outdoors to ensure it is accessible to all.
Farm View Fields and Greenway Meadows parks in Princeton were both saved from housing developments and preserved in 2001 through the leadership of D&R Greenway. These parks provide baseball and soccer fields, as well as places to walk and experience the outdoors. In the video, D&R Greenway’s President and CEO Linda Mead shares that being outdoors in nature cultivates creativity and calm in children who are known to have ADHD. The viewer learns that, in fact, Babe Ruth may have had “nature-deficit disorder,” a term coined by author Richard Louv in his book Last Child in the Woods published in 2005. Linda Ruth Tosetti insists that, throughout his legendary life, her grandfather was sustained by nature. “He was a fisherman and huntsman. That’s where he got his solace.”
In his books
about connecting children with nature, Louv says he is convinced that “The
future will belong to the nature-smart...to those who balance the virtual with
the real...achieving natural balance.” He encourages taking children to parks
regularly, close to home. His words ring true during this COVID-era: “Near is the new far.”
During the past year, D&R Greenway partnered with the
Trenton Thunder baseball team at Waterfront Park in Trenton where parts of the
video were filmed. Mead says, “The
way many, many people connect with nature and the outdoors is through the
sports their children play when they are young.”
The benefit of
spending time in the outdoors has been proven in many academic studies. The University
of Michigan demonstrated that participant’s memory performance and attention
spans improved by 20 percent after just an hour of interacting with nature.
University of Illinois researchers discovered that children show a significant
reduction in the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder when they engage with
nature. Professionally led field trips with city children
have proven that so-called at-risk students who have not had much experience in
nature show a marked improvement of 27% in test scores related to
mastery of science, when they learn in weeklong residential outdoor education
programs.
Ending on a happy note, high school students from the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s FUTURO program share how they feel when they are out in nature. These students have worked in partnership with D&R Greenway over the past year, learning about nature’s benefits, clean water and open spaces. In contrast to being indoors during the pandemic, these students’ words about “a good lost” while outside on a wide, open field will stick with the viewer for a long time.
