It was Johnny who first told me the story of the 1941 World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees, when Dodger catcher Mickey Owen dropped the third strike, a story I was to hear many times from many people, all ritually re-enacting the tragedy which the years had translated into strange delight. The Yanks had won two of the first three games, but in the fourth game, the Dodgers were leading 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and no one on base. Tommy Henrich stepped to the plate to face Dodger reliever Hugh Casey. Casey quickly got two strikes on Henrich and then threw a wicked curve, which may have been a spitball, which Henrich swung at and completely missed. The game was over and the Dodgers had won, the Series was tied at two games apiece—or so it seemed, until it became clear that Mickey Owen had been unable to catch the third strike. In fact, the dropped third strike had rolled all the way to the backstop behind home plate, and Henrich had reached first base safely. The Yankees made the most of their opportunity: the next batter walked, and the batter after him doubled. The Yankees won the game and eventually the Series.
Ever the fantasist, in my imagination I would stop the action at the point where Casey was about to throw the third strike. This time Owen caught the pitch, the third out was recorded, and the Dodgers went on to become champions of the world. I wondered how many times Mickey Owen himself had replayed that same moment in his mind and tried to force a different ending. I felt terrible for him. Years later, I learned that he was never really the same afterward and that Hugh Casey eventually became a heavy drinker and killed himself with a shotgun blast in his hotel room.
But for every tale of woe there was a tale of joy, and nothing gave me greater happiness than talking with Johnny about our shared hero, Jackie Robinson. Johnny had been to several games in 1947, the historic season when Robinson became the first African American to cross major-league baseball’s color line. Johnny had seen him beat out a bunt, hit an inside-the-park home run, and, most memorably, steal home. Against a backdrop of unyielding pressure his first year up, Robinson batted .297, led the league in stolen bases, and won the Rookie of the Year award. Only later would I come to understand the true significance of Robinson’s achievement: the pioneering role he played in the struggle for civil rights, the fact that, after his breakthrough, nothing would ever be the same—in baseball, in sports, or in the country itself. When I was six it was Robinson, the man, the fiery second baseman, who filled my imagination, taking his huge leads off base, diving headlong to snag a line drive, circling the bases with his strange pigeon-toed gait. “There’s no one like him,” Johnny said. “He plays to win every minute.” “Absolutely,” I added, echoing something my father had said. “With nine Jackie Robinsons, we’d never lose a game.”
Nothing inspires camaraderie like sharing a victory, not only of a game, but of a season. In the splendid performance of the Dodgers that summer of 1949, my relationship with Johnny flourished. Their opening-day rout of the Giants, 10-3, inspired the demented hope that they would add 153 more wins and history would record the only perfect season in the annals of organized baseball. The experts had predicted that the Dodgers would battle the Cardinals in the National League pennant race. Powered by Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, and Enos Slaughter, the Cardinals made reality of these prophecies. By the end of June, the two teams stood at the top of the league, chasing one another for first. That month, the Dodgers won nine straight, helped along by Johnny’s insistence on wearing the same blue-striped shirt as long as the streak lasted.
After we became friends, I confided in Johnny my understanding that the tower at the entrance to the beach was being used as a prison for bad children. He admitted he had heard the same thing, but he didn’t really believe it was true. “Why don’t we go over there and find out for ourselves,” he suggested. Though I was not really keen on the idea, I didn’t want him to know I was afraid, so I followed him to the place where the tower stood. Several times we circled the perimeter of the tower, but there was no sign of life. We were just about to leave when Johnny thought he heard muffled cries coming from inside the structure. I put my ear up against the wall and, sure enough, I heard the same thing. Convinced that it was our job to save the children, we found an indulgent park policeman and led him to the tower. At our insistence, the policeman put his ear against the wall, but said he heard absolutely nothing. When we did the same, the cries we were sure we had heard earlier were no longer audible. We raced back to the pool, determined to try again another day.
Except for Eddie Rust and Steve Bartha, who lived on our block and occasionally joined us girls in punchball, Johnny was the first boy my age that I ever really talked to. On the playground at school, the girls would play on one side, the boys on the other. The boys came over to our side to tug our braids and ponytails, then, cackling, retreated. Being able to talk at length to a boy was something special. And it was my passion for baseball that made it possible.
ON A SULTRY FRIDAY evening that same summer, after months of listening to games on the radio, I saw my first game at Ebbets Field. As my father and I walked up the cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue and approached the arched windows of the legendary brick stadium, he explained how, as a boy, he had watched the ballpark being built, since the place where he had been sent to live after his parents died was only two blocks away. He was at the site in 1912, when Dodger owner Charles Ebbets pushed a shovel into the ground to begin the excavation. And when the park opened a year later, he was in the bleachers watching the first official game, against the Philadelphia Phillies. He had seen the Dodgers win their first two pennants in 1916 and 1920, only to lose to the Red Sox and the Indians. He had sustained his love affair with “dem Bums” through the frustrating period of the thirties, when the Dodgers were stuck at the bottom of their division, into the happier era of the forties, when under General Manager Branch Rickey they began to look like a championship team. And now my own pilgrimage was about to begin.
The marble rotunda at the entrance to the shrine looked like a train station in a dream, with dozens of gilded ticket windows scattered around the floor. The floor tiles were embellished with baseball stitches, and in the center of the domed ceiling hung an elaborate chandelier composed of a dozen baseball bats. As we started through a tunneled ramp into the stadium, my father told me that I was about to see the most beautiful sight in the world. Just as he finished speaking, there it was: the reddish-brown diamond, the impossibly green grass, the stands so tightly packed with people that not a single empty seat could be seen. I reached over instinctively to hold my father’s hand as we wended our way to seats between home plate and first base, which, like the thousands of seats in this tiny, comfortable park, were so close to the playing field that we could hear what the ballplayers said to one another as they ran onto the field and could watch their individual gestures and mannerisms as they loosened up in the on-deck circle. There, come to earth, were the heroes of my imagination, Snider and Robinson and the powerful-looking Don Newcombe; and there were the villains—the “hated New York Giants,” an epithet that was to us a single word—Monte Irvin, Sheldon Jones, and the turncoat Leo Durocher.
Below: The 1949 Dodgers. What a storied lineup the Dodgers had in the postwar seasons: Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, and Carl Erskine. Top right: Some of the distinguishing characteristics of Ebbets Field included the Schaefer beer sign and Abe Stark’s curious advertisement (top right of the photograph). Bottom right: Catcher Roy Campanella was the second African American to join the Dodgers after Jackie Robinson and 1949 rookie of the year pitcher Don Newcombe was the third.
As the game got under way, my father proceeded to point out to me all the distinguishing features of the park: the uneven right-field wall with the scoreboard in the middle and the Schaefer beer sign on the top, where the “h” would light up for a hit and the “e” for an error; the curious advertisement for Abe Stark’s clothing store, “Hit sign, Win suit,” which ear
ned Stark such visibility that he was later elected borough president of Brooklyn; the presence of Hilda Chester, a large woman in a print dress repeatedly clanging two cowbells to support the Dodgers and to irritate the opposition; and the arrival of the SymPhony, a ragtag band formed by a group of rabid fans whose comic accompaniment had become an institution at Dodger games. When they disagreed with an umpire’s call, the little band played “Three Blind Mice.” When a strikeout victim from the opposition headed back to the dugout, they played “The Worms Crawl In, the Worms Crawl Out,” punctuated by a loud thump on the bass drum as the player sat down on the bench. And when an enemy pitcher was taken out of the game for a reliever, the band serenaded his walk from the mound with “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.” As opposing teams grew increasingly irate at these antics, a sense of camaraderie grew among Dodger fans that made the experience of going to Ebbets Field unforgettable.
I was witness to a splendid first game. Not only did the Dodgers win 4-3, but my hero, Jackie Robinson, ignited the Dodger offense in the second inning when he walked, stole second, went to third on an errant pickoff throw, and scored on an infield out. Watching him on the base path, with his long leads, his feints toward second, and his needling of the pitcher, kept me on the edge of my seat. If he looked awkward when he first started running, with his shoulders rocking and hips swaying, once he gained momentum he created an indelible image. I knew that Jackie’s baserunning was part of his mystique, that once he got on base he was such a distraction that the opposing pitcher often lost his concentration and ended up either throwing the ball away trying to pick him off or throwing a bad pitch to the batter at the plate. But to see him in person, through my own eyes instead of Red Barber’s, was thrilling. “As long as he got on base,” was our ritual refrain, “he was going to do something to bring himself home.”
The game at Ebbets Field that day was a first not only for me, but for the sport of baseball as well. When Giant batter Henry Thompson stepped up to bat against Dodger rookie Don Newcombe, it was the first time that a black pitcher faced a black batter in a major-league game. Though Newcombe was the third black player to join the Dodgers after Robinson’s debut in 1947 and Campanella’s arrival the following year, most of the other teams were slow to follow suit. For the Dodgers, Newcombe’s intimidating presence in ’49 was critical not only because he became Rookie of the Year but because he provided a certain measure of protection for Robinson. Opposing pitchers knew, if they threw at Robinson, Newcombe would promptly return the favor.
At the start of the ’49 season, Branch Rickey had told Robinson that he no longer had to honor the pledge he had made when he first came up, to tolerate insults without retaliation. Freed from this restraint, Robinson was more aggressive than ever at the plate and on the base path, quick to stand his ground against his tormentors. This attitude provoked an even greater desire on the part of opposing pitchers to “get him.” Despite the tension on the field, Robinson’s newfound freedom proved intensely liberating: the 1949 season would be his best in baseball, earning him the batting title and the MVP award and marking the beginning of six consecutive seasons in which he would hit over .300.
I had brought my red scorebook with me, but it wasn’t as easy to concentrate on scoring as it was at home. There was so much to see I wasn’t sure where to look. A man two rows behind us had a portable radio with him, and I found myself almost compulsively listening for Red Barber’s voice to tell me what I was seeing. Still, I managed to score the entire game, and to this day, I cannot watch a ball game at the ballpark without keeping score. As we left the ballpark, I did not want the evening to end. Sensing this, my father suggested that we stop for ice-cream sodas so that we could go through my scorebook and re-create in full detail the game we had just seen.
I experienced that night what I have experienced many times since: the absolute pleasure that comes from prolonging the winning feeling by reliving the game, first with the scorebook, then with the wrap-up on the radio, and finally, once I learned about printed box scores, with the newspaper accounts the next day. But what I remember most is sitting at Ebbets Field for the first time, with my red scorebook on my lap and my father at my side.
CHAPTER TWO
ON SUMMER MORNINGS, my father would come downstairs dressed in his three-piece suit, glance at the gold pocket watch that was attached to his vest with a slender gold chain, kiss my mother and me goodbye, and leave for work. From the window I watched him greet the other men on our block as they walked to the corner to catch the bus for the short ride to the train station, where, every few minutes, an engine whistled, the platform quivered, and one of the seventy-five daily trains swallowed up a new group of commuters for the thirty-eight-minute ride to Penn Station that had made suburban living possible. Now, the fathers departed, our neighborhood, like some newly conquered province, belonged to the women and children.
At my mother’s assenting nod, I dashed next door to fetch my best friend, Elaine Friedle, and together we gathered up our gang, upward of a dozen children roughly our age, and began our day’s activities. After breakfast, our energy at its height, we raced our bikes down the street, with playing cards clothespinned to the spokes to simulate the sound of a motorcycle, challenging one another to see how many times we could circle the block without holding on to the handlebars. Carelessly discarding bikes on the nearest lawn, skate keys dangling from multicolored lanyards around our necks, we zipped past each other on roller skates, throwing up our hands and shouting in the sheer exuberance of our performance. Then it was on to our endless games of hide-and-seek. My favorite game was ring-a-levio, in which the players on one team would crawl carefully up to the protected circle, hoping to free an imprisoned teammate, and would dart away with a squeal if intercepted by one of the opposing team’s guards.
My friends from the block were like an extended family: me, Eddie and Eileen Rust, Elaine Lubar, Marilyn Greene, Elaine Friedle, Ginny and Judy Rust. The house in which I grew up was modest in size; for my parents, however, it was the realization of a dream.
Our days might have seemed shapeless to an adult, but to us, there seemed a definite rhythm to our activities. When we began to tire, we played potsy, a form of hopscotch, on the sidewalk, leisurely jumped rope, rolled marbles, played jacks, or flipped cards against the stoop to see who could come closest to the bottom stair without actually hitting it. After lunch on steamy afternoons when there was no baseball game in progress and no one to take us to the beach, we would jump through the spray of one of the sprinklers which were constantly watering our precious lawns, or lounge on blankets in the shade of a favorite tree for games of Go Fish, Monopoly, and Chinese Checkers.
In the late-afternoon sun, we set up our Kool Aid stands, strategically placed to catch our fathers as they returned in twenty-minute intervals from work, rounding the corners with jackets over their arms as they walked down our street, their faces glistening with sweat, anxious, we thought, for the refreshing drinks we were glad to sell them for the price of a nickel. As my father approached, trying, usually without much success, to maintain a professional demeanor, I would hand him a cup and happily receive the coin he placed in my palm. Soon the summons would come from the front doors of the houses, and we would race in to dinner, not because we were hungry, but in the hope that if we finished quickly enough we could reassemble for another hour or so of play before the encroaching dark put an end to our day on the block.
The small section of Southard Avenue that lay between St. James and Capitolian was my world. Our street, unconnected to any major thoroughfare, and lined by large maple trees which cast a cooling shadow on our activities, was our common land—our playground, our park, our community. If an occasional car passed, we would stand aside, waiting impatiently for the intruder to leave our domain. If we never thought of our neighborhood as safe, that was because it never occurred to us that it could be otherwise—except, of course, for the weed-choked hovel on the corner where the strange and fearsome ?
??Old Mary” lived.
The house in which I grew up was modest in size, situated on less than a tenth of an acre, and separated from the neighboring houses by the narrowest of driveways and a slender strip of grass. For my parents, however, as for other families on the block, the house on Southard Avenue was the realization of a dream. My family had moved to Rockville Centre from the crowded streets of Brooklyn in the late 1930s, early pioneers of that vast postwar migration which was to transform America into a nation of suburbs, and bring to once-bucolic Nassau and Suffolk counties a population as large as that of sixteen of the forty-eight states. Here they would have a single-family home, a private world for themselves and their children, which they could make their own—furnish, repair, remodel—something which only a few years before had seemed the prerogative of the impossibly affluent. They took visible pleasure in every room, the gabled roof, the small enclosed porch that looked out onto the street, the breakfast nook that stood in an alcove off the kitchen, and most of all in the tiny front lawn amid which our house was set. They had land, grass, soil of their own. The great American ambition.