Professional baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson was born in 1888 in Pickens, SC and died in 1951 in Greenville, SC. He got his nickname during a game in his teenage years when he suffered from a blister on his foot from a new pair of cleats. They hurt so much that he had to take his shoes off . Once he was on base, a fan started yelling inappropriate and vulgar comments at him. One of the things Jackson was called was a "Shoeless son of a gun." The name stuck with him throughout the remainder of his life. His professional baseball years were with teams in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago. There is a statue of Shoeless Joe in downtown Greenville. The bricks surrounding the statue are from Cominsky Park in Chicago where Joe played with the White Sox. This statue was one of our virtual geocaches of the day. We had to look at the bricks surrounding the statue and see how many diamond shapes are on some of the bricks... the answer was "one".
