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A family banded together to make one relative’s 99th birthday party extra special this year. Katherine Kyle has been a lifelong Pittsburgh Pirates fan but the woman from nearby Carnegie, Pennsylvania, just 11 miles away (6min drive), had never seen her Pirates play at PNC Park before.
The family surprised Katherine for her 99th birthday and the Pirates also showed up BIG TIME, absolutely demolishing the Cincinnati Reds by a score of 14-0.
This is a feel-good story through and through. One of the relatives, a cousin, is a season ticket holder and volunteered to get everyone in the family tickets for the grandma’s special day. Here’s the story from CNN:
But to celebrate her upcoming 99th birthday, Kyle’s family — calling themselves Catherine’s Crew — took her to the Pirates home game against the Cincinnati Reds Saturday.
“I was really surprised,” Kyle told CNN. “They like to surprise me.”
“What I want to do is hear them sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the seventh inning,” Kyle told CNN affiliate KDKA.
At the game she did and sang along, she said.
“It was good game,” she said. “It was really fun.”
Kyle’s family came together to make her baseball dream a reality, said Donna Kinzler, Kyle’s granddaughter.
In total, 16 children, grandchildren, and great-grandkids all attended the game alongside 99-year-old Katherine Kyle who said she’d been watching pirates games on TV with her husband Jack, since way back when.
I can’t even wrap my mind around being a diehard fan for nearly a century without ever seeing that team play in person. I’d get it if you were like a first-generation American and your parents raised you to root for some team in a country across the pond and you haven’t had the chance to see them play yet.
But, if this is a team that you’ve been rooting for your entire life and they’re stadium is just a road trip away, how do you wait YOUR ENTIRE LIFE to see them?!? All it takes is picking a date on the calendar and going.