MILL HALL - For a local youth, the annual Little League World Series in South Williamsport is about much more than just the games, it's about learning other's cultures and traditions through pin-trading.
For the past half-dozen years, Clayton Gummo, 15, of Mill Hall spends most of Little League Week in South Williamsport collecting and trading pins... and watching the many baseball games. It was a custom he followed from his grandparents, Bruce and Bernie Walker.
"It's kind of neat to see different ideas," said Clayton, the son of Todd Gummo of Lamar and Kelly Gummo of Mill Hall. "You can almost see people's culture through their pins and it's neat throughout the World Series to see what all people's ideas are and what kind of stuff they get into."
Through the last five or six years, Clayton has amassed hundreds of pins.
"We take either pins we make or got through trading before, go down to the tent, sit down and people come up to you or you go to other people and look for trades... If it's a good trade, then you trade with each other," he said.
Through his years of knowledge, Clayton was able to score the much-sought-after scoreboard pin late Thursday night, which led to a group of other pin-traders chasing him down trying to either buy the pin or trade for it.
"I was getting ready to leave and I was looking through a pin book. He said if I didn't see anything in the book I liked, he had something else I might be interested in," Clayton said. "Then, he pulled out the stadium pin. I had heard about them and seen them... They are very rare and hard to get. We started negotiating with what pins he wanted for them and I told him I would try to do a pretty good deal. After about 15 minutes, we got the deal done... I gave him six pins for the two-piece scoreboard pin."
A few minutes after the trade, Clayton said he heard a couple of kids whispering about the scoreboard pin and chased after him, asking him to either trade or sell the pin.
"They were yelling, 'Scoreboard, scoreboard, scoreboard. I slowly took off toward my grandparents in the stadium, and I went around the complex two or three different times to get away from them. I eventually lost them."
The biggest tradition for Clayton is to try to get the rare Grand Slam Parade pin, which is given out by area businesses the day after the Grand Slam Parade that kicks off the week-plus of baseball action. To get one, he said, you have to be there bright and early on the first Friday of the series.
"They're given out in only certain businesses," he said. "We usually get up about 4:45 a.m., so we can be down at the stores at 6 or 7 a.m. when they open. They only make about 50 or 100 so you have to be pretty quick to get them."
Friday, he said, was his only day off from attending the World Series, and he plans to go to South Williamsport this morning and stay all day. He'll also be there all day tomorrow.
Clayton's hobby landed him in the national news, with a mention in a story about the pin-trading tent in the Connecticut Post. That newspaper noted he started designing his own pins just last year.
"It's the most exciting part of my summer," he told the newspaper.
