AT THE CONCLUSION of the baseball season in early autumn, I turned my full attention to school. Every morning, Elaine and I walked to the Morris School, our notebooks and pencil cases in hand. At noon, the entire grammar school was dismissed for an hour and fifteen minutes so we could walk home for lunch and return for the afternoon session. It was a pleasant walk, especially on crisp autumn days when the fallen leaves, raked up in curbside heaps to be burned on weekends by our fathers, crunched beneath our shoes. Along the way, we filled our pencil cases with acorns, ammunition for our fights with the boys. The distance from Southard Avenue being about three-quarters of a mile, we walked three miles a day.
The Morris Grammar School was a faded red brick two-story building flanked on one side by a large playing field with a baseball diamond and basketball court for the boys, and on the other by a narrower playground with slides and swings for the girls. When the first bell called us from the playground, we hung up our coats in the cloakroom and sat at our desks. The top of the desks lifted up to form a drawer in which we kept our pencil cases, books, and the countless notes we passed to one another throughout our classes. A second bell officially began the day, signaling us to rise and pledge our allegiance to the flag of the United States, which stood in the corner. Having paid homage to country, we bowed our heads to ask God’s blessing, repeating aloud the Lord’s Prayer. Some of my Jewish friends joined in the prayer; others remained silent, heads bowed. Since the Catholic amens followed abruptly upon “and deliver us from evil,” and the Protestants continued on—“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory …”—you could distinguish Catholic from Protestant by noting where the amens fell.
We stayed in the same classroom all day, learning math and reading and practicing the Palmer method of penmanship on lined sheets of paper that resembled music staffs. One of my teachers had devised an elaborate system for rewarding achievement. For each book read or report completed, we were awarded a blue star on the blackboard. Ten blue stars equaled a red star, and five red stars earned a gold star. We eagerly awaited the posting of the stars at the day’s end, hoping each time that we had earned the coveted gold star. For me, that day never arrived. Although I probably accumulated more stars for books read than anyone else in my class, stars could be subtracted if we disobeyed an order or talked in class. Since I rarely stopped talking, I lost stars almost as quickly as I earned them through the day. I watched in dismay as my red stars were erased and my blue stars halved. The injustice of rescinding a reward for a book completed or report written and judged acceptable deeply rankled me. My only solution, however, was to stop talking in class, and this, even for the glory of the gold star, I was unable to do.
Every morning, Elaine and I walked to the Morris School, our notebooks and pencil cases in hand. I am pictured here, third from left, with my second-grade class.
We constructed shoe-box dioramas of the Pilgrims and the Indians, did reports on the revolution and the Civil War, and completed projects on the settlement of the West. We read about the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the waves of immigrants that had come to America from all over the world. Everyone in our class had to give a report on where his or her ancestors had lived. Our teacher placed a little flag of each country of origin on a world map in the front of the room. Almost every part of Western Europe, Central Europe, and Russia was represented by a flag. There were, however, no flags from Latin America or Asia. Not yet. The teacher stressed that America was a special country, because, despite the diversity of our racial, religious, and ethnic origins, we were all one nation, one people with a shared set of values and a common culture. Our textbooks gave us a unifying vision of individuals from all different nations, melting into a new, distinctly American race. Only later would we come to understand that the melting pot did not melt everybody, that racism deprived men and women of color of the equal opportunity promised in the American creed. Only later, as historian Arthur Schlesinger has observed, would we “imagine the arrival of Columbus from the viewpoint of those who met him as well as those who sent him.”
Both my parents showered me with praise for the smallest achievements and spent hours going over my homework, preparing me for tests, and helping me with projects. Just as my mother had helped me learn my catechism, she drilled me in the state capitals, the amendments to the Constitution, the names of the explorers, the dates of the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott Decision, the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine. When I had to prepare a report on Mexico, my father brought home an entire briefcase filled with books, maps, and brochures. The more you read about a subject, he advised me, the more interesting it will seem.
The Rockville Centre Public Library became one of my favorite buildings in town. When my mother wasn’t feeling well, she would send me to the library with titles of books she wanted to read. Since I now had a card of my own, I took great pride in checking out her books as well as mine. In those days, each book had a sheet glued to the last page on which the librarian stamped the due date and cardholder’s number. It was possible to count how many others had read the same book. I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others; it made me sad for both the author and the book when I discovered that I was the only one to take a particular volume off a shelf for months or even years.
As long as I could remember, my mother and I talked about books. In the early days, she would ask me to summarize in my own words the book she had read aloud. Now she would often get me to sit by her side and read to her. With all the dramatic effect I could muster, I picked out chapters of the book I was reading at the moment. I blithely assumed she would find my children’s books as absorbing as I did. I especially liked books that were written in series. As I opened each new volume of Nancy Drew, there was her blue roadster, her father, Carson Drew, and her kindly housekeeper, Hannah Gruen. These details provided a sense of comfort and contributed to a feeling of mastery as I progressed through the series. When I discovered an author I liked, I wanted to read everything he or she had written. Weeks spent with Louisa May Alcott were followed by months with Robert Louis Stevenson. From my mother’s reading of The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories, I turned to Captains Courageous and Kim.
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WHEN I WAS in the third grade, I was assigned an oral report on Franklin Roosevelt, who I knew had been president when I was born. After I had insisted on talking about Roosevelt every night for a week, my parents decided to take me to Hyde Park to visit the house in which young Franklin had grown up, and which had anchored his entire life. On a chaise longue in Roosevelt’s bedroom I saw Fala’s leash resting on the plaid blanket where the little dog had slept. And sitting on a small desk in the study were the president’s cigarette holder and his pince-nez glasses, exactly where he had left them at the end of the day. The house was called a museum, but it seemed to me a home where people lived. And I was sure it was only a matter of time before Roosevelt would return, pick up his cigarette holder, put on his glasses, and sit down to read, patting his dog at his side. I realized that day I could play an inner game with history just as I did with baseball. If I closed my eyes I could visualize Roosevelt in his room with Fala, just as, when I listened to the stories my father told, I could see the great players of the past—Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Zack Wheat—knock the mud from their cleats, settle into the batter’s box, narrow their eyes on the pitcher, and unleash their majestic swings.
CHAPTER FOUR
A BLACK DELIVERY VAN pulled up to the front entrance of the house next door. My parents and I watched from the window as a uniformed driver dismounted, opened the gate of the van, and wheeled a large wooden crate toward the visibly excited assemblage of the Goldschmidt family standing at the front door.
Television had come to the neighborhood.
That night, the parents and children of Southard Avenue crowded into the Goldschmidts’ living room, and watched as vaguely defined, snowy figures cavorted across the seven-inch black-and-white sc
reen embedded in an odd block of furniture. “A marvel,” the adults assured one another, as Mr. Goldschmidt continually adjusted the metal rod of the antenna. But to me and my playmates, it was only another wonder in a world of constantly unfolding wonders, like the stories my mother told me, the first book I read, or my first trip to Ebbets Field.
When the Goldschmidts bought their television in 1946, there were only seven thousand sets in use in the entire country, and theirs was the only one on our block. Within months, the number doubled when the Lubars’ living room became the home of a nine-inch set with a slightly better picture, which became an irresistible attraction for all the children on the block. Almost every afternoon we would congregate on the Lubars’ front stoop, waiting expectantly, and often vocally, for the invitation to enter, so we could sit cross-legged on the floor and watch the amazing parade of puppets, comedians, and cowboys which marched across their tiny screen.
It was only a matter of time, spurred by embarrassment at our imposition on the Lubars, before every family on our block had a set. And the pattern in our neighborhood, where desire begot what seemed like necessity, was repeated across America. By 1950, there were sets in three million homes; from then on, sales grew at a rate of five million a year, until, by the end of the decade, more than fifty million families would own a television.
When our own ten-inch table console finally arrived, my parents invited everyone on the block to come over for a Sunday-afternoon showing of The Super Circus. That morning, my mother set out hot dog rolls and hamburger buns, prepared a salad, put extra chairs in the living room for the grown-ups, and laid a blanket on the floor for the children. The entrance of the handsome ringmaster into the center ring, dressed in a sequined costume, was greeted by a low, admiring whistle from Elaine’s grandmother, and the circus began. We giggled at the antics of the clowns, marveled at the sight of the stately lions, and gasped at the daring of the high-wire artists.
To me, the afternoon was more memorable and exciting than my trip to see the actual Ringling Brothers Circus in Madison Square Garden. But not because of television. As a result of my mother’s illness, I almost never had a group of friends at my home, to say nothing of the entire neighborhood. On this Sunday, however, I was a hostess, bringing someone a second hot dog, refilling the bowl of potato chips, constantly looking around to see what needs I could fill. Even though everyone was looking at the television set, I felt as if I were on stage, playing a role I thoroughly enjoyed. As soon as the show was over, and the guests departed, I asked my mother if we could do this every week, making our house the center of Sunday activity. “I’m sorry,” my mother said, “but I simply can’t do it. Even now, I am so exhausted just from having everyone here that I’ve got to lie down for a little while. But I’ll tell you what, if you’d like to pick one show each week and have all the kids over to see it, I think that would be fine.”
I picked Howdy Doody, my favorite show, featuring a freckled puppet in a plaid shirt, dungarees, and cowboy boots; an affable ventriloquist, Buffalo Bob, in fringed buckskin; and a “Peanut Gallery,” composed of the luckiest kids in the world. At 5:25 p.m., we gathered before the set, staring at NBC’s test pattern for five minutes before Buffalo Bob’s booming voice opened the show: “Say, kids, what time is it?” “It’s Howdy Doody Time,” we shrieked in reply. The pitch of excitement continued as Clarabell the clown sneaked up behind Buffalo Bob to shoot water in his face, and we laughed so hard our stomachs hurt. Only when Buffalo Bob said good night and the kids in the Peanut Gallery waved goodbye did we finally calm down, and my friends disperse for dinner.
When the Friedles bought their thirteen-inch console, we flocked to their house on Tuesday evenings to watch Milton Berle; the Lubars’ house became our scheduled stop for the Saturday-morning cartoons. We gathered to watch TV’s first interplanetary heroes: Tom Corbett, Captain Video, and Superman. I was visiting Eileen Rust when their television set arrived. The box was unimpressive, and Eileen began to cry, fearing that her set would have the smallest screen in the neighborhood. We watched as the carton was opened to reveal a giant eighteen-inch set, the largest on the block. Eileen gasped and the rest of us began to clap. Suddenly, Eileen’s house became the most desirable place to gather.
Television entered our lives robed as the bearer of communal bonds, providing a new set of common experiences, block parties, and festive gatherings shared by children and adults alike. The fantasies of television slowly infiltrated our own. After the first soap operas, Search for Tomorrow and Love of Life, appeared on the air in the fall of 1951, our mothers could be found in spirited conversation discussing the behavior of their favorite characters and debating the likely outcome of their latest difficulties as if they were another family on the block. For days, our parents discussed the dramatic reaction of Elaine’s seventyfive-year-old great-grandmother, Amelia, to the kidnapping of the little girl, Patti, on Search for Tomorrow. Patti was the six-year-old daughter of Joanne Barren, a young widow whose rich in-laws had kidnapped the child after losing a custody battle. A desperate week-long chase ended as police helped Joanne pursue the child’s kidnappers through woods, which, in the early days of live television, consisted simply of a dark area filled with a maze of music stands affixed with branches to represent trees. Finding Patti’s shoes near a pond, the searchers feared she had drowned, though viewers knew she was still alive in the hands of her evil grandmother.
At this point in the drama, Amelia, her print housedress flapping, her white hair disheveled, came rushing into the street, alarm in her voice. She demanded that we call the police and tell them where Patti was. By doing nothing, she insisted, we were endangering the life of this lovely child. Futilely, our mothers tried to explain that the show was a fictional drama, that Joanne and her daughter were actresses following a script. But Amelia refused to believe it, and we could do nothing to assuage her anxiety until the next episode, when Patti was found and returned to her mother.
The confusion of television with reality was not limited to the very old. One evening, my television screen revealed Joan of Arc being burned at the stake. There, before my eyes, the young woman stood, lashed to a piling atop a pyre in the old marketplace in Rouen, France. A male voice denounced her as a heretic who must pay for her sins with her life. She was, he said, like a rotten branch that must be severed to preserve the tree. “It is not true,” Joan cried. “I am a good Christian.” Her words went unheeded. The fire crackled and the flames consumed her. Stunned by this violence taking place in front of me, I raced into the kitchen to find my mother. She reassured me that no one was being hurt, that the program was simply one of a series of historical dramatizations, called You Are There, narrated by Walter Cronkite. Through re-enactments and “eyewitness” accounts, the series endeavored to provide viewers with a sense that they were actually present at important moments in history. My anxiety was replaced by embarrassment at my naïveté, and I returned to the screen. In the weeks that followed, I watched the capture of John Wilkes Booth, the siege of the Alamo, the fall of Fort Sumter, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, and the duel between Hamilton and Burr.
For me, however, the flow of drama and entertainment was of small consequence beside the glorious opportunity to watch my Dodgers on the screen. In 1951, for the first time, I could follow the Dodgers for a full season on television. I watched Gil Hodges stretch to snag a skidding grounder and throw to the pitcher covering first; saw Carl Furillo as he barehanded a ball that bounced off the rightfield wall and then fired to second to catch a runner trying to extend a single into a double; and glimpsed the smile flicker across Robinson’s face as he crossed home plate with the winning run.
THE BASEBALL SEASON of 1951 would be seared into the memory of every Dodger fan, its scar carried across the years as the progress of lives took old New Yorkers to different parts of the country. Not long ago, I was talking about the last game of the ’51 season with friends in the
lounge of a San Francisco hotel. A man seated at the adjoining table—tall, distinguished, a prosperous executive from the miracle factories of Silicon Valley—leaned over, a mournful tone in his voice. “I remember,” he said. “I was there.” I knew immediately what he meant.
The rivalry between the Dodgers and the Giants was unlike any other in baseball. Even in years when the two teams were not contending for the pennant, every meeting was regarded as a separate war, to be fought with implacable hostility. For twenty or thirty hours before the first pitch, thousands of fans would line up in front of Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds in hopes of buying a ticket before the game sold out. After the last inning, the arguments overflowed to the streets and bars of Brooklyn and New York. But in 1951, this historic rivalry entered a new dimension, reached a level of intensity never before attained and never to be surpassed.
Over family dinners, and in our daily encounters, children and parents alike discussed and analyzed the reports from spring training which carried the first hints that this would be no ordinary season. Although every manager is publicly optimistic before a season starts, the braggadocio of Giant manager Leo Durocher was both irritating and ominous, heightened by my father’s belief that Durocher was a great manager. Durocher had managed the Dodgers for six years in the forties, when he was beloved in Brooklyn and despised in New York. Then, in one of the more grotesque twists of baseball history, he left the Dodgers to manage the Giants, becoming their champion and our nemesis.
During spring training, Durocher, now known to us as “Leo the Lip,” proclaimed that the ’51 Giants would have the best pitching in the National League, with Sal Maglie, Larry Jansen, Jim Hearn, and Dave Koslo. To me, even the thought of the scowling, bearded Maglie was a kind of nightmare, his face the one I would most dread if it appeared in my window. He was called “the Barber,” because, when he saw fit, his high, tight fastballs nearly shaved hitters’ chins. To make things worse, Giant slugger Bobby Thomson was ripping the ball in spring training with the authority he had shown in 1949, when he had driven in over one hundred runs and paced the Giants’ attack. “We have the pitching, the power, and the speed,” Durocher said; “what else can any manager ask?”