The Boys of Summer (40 page)

We walked through the Mets’ dressing room, carpeted and empty, into Hodges’ office, a large underground room without windows. “Did you plan on managing?” I said.

“How can you plan on getting a job that may not be offered? I suppose I hoped, but when George Selkirk asked me to take
over Washington, I didn’t jump. I called some people. Talked to my wife, Joan.”

“Do you find it hard?”

“Sending out an older player, telling him he’s released, is hard.”

“How about strategy?”

“Most is simple logic. I don’t think it calls for any great thinking.”

“Hello, Dad,” called Gil Hodges II, a cheerful, chunky boy of nineteen. “I thought me and my friend Jack here could work out.”

Hodges looked at his oldest son. “Since you got a haircut, okay.” Someone appeared and began to talk to Hodges about the jewelry he could get wholesale and Hodges nodded and said he had to go out for a minute and look for Rube Walker, his pitching coach.

The two boys dressed quickly. “Hey,” the younger Hodges said to Jack, “what kind of spikes you wearing?”

“What do you mean what kind?”

“They got white tops.”

“That’s right. The uppers are white.”

“Well, you can’t use them here. My father’s a kind of conservative man.”

“He don’t seem bad.”

“He isn’t. He’s just kind of conservative.”

Hodges returned. “Your hair should be even shorter,” he said. Young Gil grinned and shook his head. The father dressed silently. “I’m not a Durocher type,” he repeated at the batting cage. “I can’t get that worked up all the time.”

“Or even talk that much,” I said.

“You got it,” Hodges said.

I turned and suddenly he was gone. I found him back in his office, speaking with Harold Weissman, the Mets’ publicity director.

“Tommie Agee,” Weissman said, “is having chest pains.”

“How old is Agee?”

“Twenty-seven.”

Hodges looked pale and concerned. “Don’t tell the papers just yet.”

“A city edition will be closing,” Weissman said. “We can’t withhold something like that.”

“Don’t tell them,” Hodges said.

“You’re losing points with me, Hodges.”

“If it was a matter of needing your points, I wouldn’t be behind this desk. You’re losing points with
me.”

“Give a man an office,” Weissman said, “and he goes wild.”

“We should wait,” Hodges said. “Wait for the cardiogram. Then if it’s nothing, you can announce it as chest pains that
weren’t
a coronary.”

“Got you,” Weissman said.

“The word scares people,” Hodges said.

“We’ll wait,” Weissman said.

“Rube out there?” Hodges asked.

“Ru-u-ube!” someone called.

Rube Walker, the catcher who backed up Roy Campanella, has grown bald and portly.

“How’s Koosman?” Hodges said.

“No complaints,” Walker said.

“Good,” Hodges said. The phone rang on his desk. Someone from the front office was calling. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I’ve taken care of that. Long distance? Sure. Put it on the other line.”

Gil Hodges’ salient quality, strength, works a strained contrast against the tension of his silences. A slim fierce infielder named Don Hoak appeared with the Dodgers during Walter Alston’s first year and established himself as a neurotic. Hoak liked to be called “Tiger,” and he raged several times a day, as others might take meals, or yawn. Hoak had fought professionally
in Pennsylvania and when he became angry—at a train schedule, at an umpire or at the color of the sky—he cocked his fists. Visiting the clubhouse once, I saw him chattering at Hodges, then suddenly throw two punches to the upper arm. Hodges is fair-skinned. The blows left small red marks. Expression flowed from Hodges’ face. He stared at Hoak, his pale eyes the more menacing because they showed no emotion. Hodges himself did not so much as make a fist, but before the gaze Tiger Hoak retreated.

A sense of strength stays with a man. When Hodges managed the Washington Senators, he learned once that four players were violating a midnight curfew. Hodges believes in curfews and he convened his ball club and announced: “I know who you were. You’re each fined one hundred dollars. But a lot of us are married and I don’t want to embarrass anyone. There’s a cigar box on my desk. At the end of the day, I’m going to look into that box and I want to see four hundred dollars in it. Then the matter will be closed.” Hodges gazed. At the end of the day, he looked into the cigar box. He found $700.

Against this sense of power and command beat the serious silences of Gil Hodges. Always (it seemed to me) the silences were tense. Yes, he could lift Dick Williams, flatten Don Hoak, physically awe an entire team. But he knew how weak physical strength really was. He had learned that watching his father die one part at a time. And he learned it again, when smaller, weaker men mixed fast balls at his head with curves. It was fine for Reese to talk about flattening a pitcher, as if flattening one man would work. But the game was played by rules and one rule commanded him to stand in and take it and he believed in rules. He practiced a devout, quiet Catholicism and he sought humility, but he drove himself to move ahead and drove himself to fight down fear, and what can give a strong athletic man a frightful heart attack at forty-four is the war he wages within himself, even if he is soft-voiced, like Hodges, and blankets the
conflict under casual remarks, a hard blank look, bantering ways and the faint, almost casual smile.

Tommie Agee had not suffered a coronary. By nine o’clock he was back in Shea Stadium. “Chest pains,” Harold Weissman announced in the press box, “which were probably caused by indigestion. We had a precautionary cardiogram and it proved negative.” A crowd of 50,586 appeared, but it was not an easy night. The Cubs scored three in the first inning when Jim Hickman, an original Met, who was traded in 1967, hit a home run. After one of Koosman’s pitches in the second inning, Jerry Grote, the catcher, called time. Hodges walked toward the field and Grote said, “He had nothing on it. Something must be hurting.” At the mound Koosman admitted that his arm ached and came out of the game. Later a downpour stopped play for fifty-five minutes. The Cubs stayed ahead and won, 6 to 4.

Hodges had promised to talk on a Chicago television program after the game. Still in uniform, sweating from the sultry heat, concerned about Koosman, reminded of heart pains by Agee, he made his way up runways to the corner of the press box that would serve as the studio.

“Yes,” he told the announcer, an ebullient man named Jack Brickhouse, “I’m disappointed in the loss, but the Cubs played well. Agee is fine. He’ll play tomorrow. Koosman? We’ll have to wait a day. We’re hoping it’s nothing.” Then, “Thank you, Jack. Thanks for having me. I’ve enjoyed talking.”

The television lights blinked off. We started down the runway, myself and the manager of the Mets, a forty-five-year-old postcoronary. In the half light his face seemed dry and gray.

“Tough night?”

“They’re
all
tough. I mean it. I’m being serious. In this
job the days don’t get easier. I thought maybe we could sit up a while, but with the rain and all the problems, when I go home, I better go to sleep. The one thing after a heart attack is you don’t want to overtire yourself.”

I said, “Sure. You need a lift back?”

“I’ll go with Gilly. You can go home. I guess you’re tired, too.”

I said yes, but I wasn’t. We parted, and in the large empty ball park I tried to imagine how this job and night and life felt to a man with mine deaths in his past and a heart condition in his present and I missed a sense of joy. He has been close to the peaks of baseball for a quarter century and, though he has gained things he wanted, Hodges has paid. He had seemed more tranquil as a player struggling to hit Maglie than as a pennant-winning manager. In the empty ball park, where my footfalls on cement made the only sound, I wondered whether Gil Hodges truly was better off with the satisfactions and fierce strains of his success or whether sometimes he envied his older brother Bob, who always talked a better game, but disappeared into the chasm of corporate life during the 1940s when all his talk and scheming ended with a dead arm on a Class D ball club playing in West Central Georgia. And here it was, only May.

For half of Roy Campanella’s ten seasons behind the plate the Dodgers won a pennant, and when each World Series came and the dreary ball-park railings flowered with bunting of red, white and blue, and politicians strutted in the pocked cement runways and four hundred newspapermen gathered to watch batting practice, Campanella’s round face glowed and he broke into patter. “Yessir, it gets me real excited to be in a Series and see these writers here and all them flags. It makes me feel like I was at a circus. There’s nothing a boy likes better than a circus, and to play this game good, a lot of you’s got to be a little boy.”

That pleased the sportswriters. It gave them something for their first edition, to set against ponderous prebattle statements and wordy medical reports. Campanella was indeed excited as he spoke and his voice rose to a tenor pipe. “Ol’ Roy,” the writers said, “is lotsa fun.”

After the game began far below the press box, Campy, Number 39, came striding to the plate, swinging a bat, serious, intent
but also portly. There was none of Snider’s limber grace, no long-muscled fluidity, to his walk. He pumped his bat toward Allie Reynolds, then swung at a fast ball, dropping his right knee so that it almost touched the earth. The mighty uppercut produced a foul tip and Campy shook his head, indignant at the wasted exertion. “Old colored gentleman,” Red Smith repeated, quite softly.

In the sunburst of his prime, Roy Campanella, pale-skinned, round, doggedly jovial, played at 190 pounds. When he gained weight, it showed first at the belly and Charlie Dressen talked about “putting him in a rubber suit and runnin’ him.” Usually Campanella was roundness without flab. He stood a big-boned five feet nine, with massive arms and torso, a sumo wrestler pared to catcher’s size.

Given a relaxing day and an audience, he broke into stories as naturally as someone else would whistle. “Did I ever tell you how it was in the colored league when I was playing down in Venezuela? You talk about catching double-headers. Oncet I caught three double-headers in a day, from ten o’clock in the morning till past midnight, and all they paid me was sixty dollars a month, plus fifty cents a day for meals. That was the onliest money we had, but I was catching so much I didn’t have
time
to eat. Yessir.”

Whenever Campanella hit a foul into the rows behind a dugout, he stooped to retrieve the other catcher’s mask. He chattered with opposing hitters all game long, as though he were running for office. Except for a questionable outburst against bean balls and another against characteristic Southern segregation practiced in Bradenton, Florida, he chose to ignore the facts of American bigotry. He moved smooth, pale and placid against Jackie Robinson’s dark fire.

The contrasting styles fed an ironic rivalry. Both men broke pathways, but by different methods, and in the competition of seasons forgot that their divergent roads led toward one goal.
Sometimes when Robinson denounced reporters and umpires, his clear voice rising into long, shrill paragraphs, Campy shook his head as if despairing to find a black man so fierce, so wanting tolerance. Sometimes after Campy had retrieved a mask, or ignored someone’s taunt of “nigger,” Robinson told intimates, “There’s a little Uncle Tom in Roy.”

Covering the team intensely, you were driven toward one or the other. I drew closer to Jackie Robinson, perhaps because his bellicosity fit my preconception of what black attitudes should be, perhaps because I believed that his road was the more difficult, perhaps because I knew he had few allies in press boxes. Dick Young had already embraced Campanella. Magnificent in 1951, Campanella won the first of three Most Valuable Player awards, and after that chose Young as his collaborator on an autobiography. He then insisted that Young keep the entire $1,000 advance against royalties. “You gotta do the work, buddy,” he said. Subsequently Young brought ardor to his Campanella rooting. “Mighty Roy,” he said, after the movie about a genial gorilla known as
Mighty Joe Young.
“Come on, Mighty Roy,” he cried. “Hit one. Sell a book.”

Despite moments of bickering, I enjoyed Campanella. Delight brightened his eyes when he talked about electric trains, tropical fish, baseball or his children. There was that habit, annoying, actually dangerous to reporters, of making one statement on Tuesday and then, when controversy rose, denying on Wednesday that he had said any such thing. The Dodgers did not lack for lay analysts, and looking at Roy, with the toy trains, the fish, the petulance, analysts said, “He really is, in a sense, a boy.” But at the same time he was Red Smith’s dark, old gentleman. I felt I understood Roy Campanella less than any of the Dodgers, although it is possible that in those days there was really nothing much to understand.

The catching trade makes messy, painful work. In midsummer heat a man straps on mask, chest protector, shin guards and stuffs sponges into a fat round mitt. His laboring posture is a squat. Years of catching turn the thighs to lead.

Crouched, offering the glove as a target, he has to catch a ball moving one hundred miles an hour, or break forward for a bunt or spin backward for a foul pop. Almost every time the pitcher throws, the catcher throws, too, returning the ball to the mound. In addition, a catcher, if he is a good one, can fire a baseball 130 feet to second base without rising. Roy Campanella was a very good catcher, and some seasons he became a great one. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969, and if one part of the vote was sentimental, some surely stands in cold tribute to his record.

But Hall of Fame catchers even as schoolboys sweat into their masks, strain their arms, and suffer knotted legs, foul tips cracking into fingers and the frightful pounding of fast balls into the left hand. Campanula’s three best years, 1951, ‘53 and ‘55, were interrupted by seasons in which he could neither hit .300 nor catch every day. Bruises and fractured metacarpals stopped him. At his best, in 1953, he clouted 41 homers and won game after game with clutch hits. He drove in 142 runs, which, Allan Roth pointed out, “would be a record, most runs batted in for a catcher, except they don’t figure batting records by fielding position.” Roy loved those great years. Then his stories sparkled and his eyes shone with the dark devil’s wine of success. The bad years frustrated him; pouting, he would say, “Maybe I ain’t hittin’, but it ain’t as easy as it looks. Like to see one of you fellers in the press box come down and try to hit Robin Roberts with sore hands.”

“I couldn’t do it with good hands, Roy.”

“Sheet. You couldn’t even come close.”

“I’m not arguing, Roy.”

“Sheet.”

He had no good seasons after 1955, and by 1957, the Dodgers’ last year in Brooklyn, he caught only one hundred games. He was thirty-six that November, his body worn, and a new black catcher, John Roseboro, was pressing. Still the catching job was Roy’s and he rose to challenges. Carl Erskine was not the only man who believed that the short left field in the Los Angeles Coliseum would inspire a revival.

In mid-January 1958 one of Ruthe Campanella’s brothers was involved in a minor automobile accident, which disabled Roy’s station wagon. The family also owned a Cadillac hardtop. Ruthe usually drove the Cadillac and Roy used the wagon to commute from Long Island to his successful new business in central Harlem. With help from Walter O’Malley, a man of increasing political power, Campanella had obtained a liquor license and opened Roy Campanella Choice Wines and Liquors on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 134th Street. After the accident, Campanella drove to work in a rented Chevrolet.

At suppertime on January 26, a clear, bitter cold evening, Campanella was hurrying to Salt Spray, his waterfront home on Morgan’s Landing, an expensive section on the north shore of Long Island, between the Scott Fitzgerald country of Sands Point and Oyster Bay, where the Republican Roosevelts reigned. Salt Spray had cost almost $75,000, and newspapers ran occasional features describing the playthings with which it was filled. The collection of tropical fish was “impressive"; the electric trains, running intricate courses down hundreds of feet of track, were “any child’s Christmas dream come true.”

Five miles south of Salt Spray, on a two-lane blacktop road, Campanella rolled onto a slab of ice, at a sharp bend to the left. The rented Chevrolet skidded, slammed almost head on into a telephone pole and turned upside down. Seat belts were uncommon at the time. Campanella’s body crashed heavily into the steering wheel. Then his head whipped backward. A rescuer found him conscious and badly frightened. “Would you please turn the key in the ignition,” Campanella said. “Turn off the engine. Please. I don’t want to burn to death.” He had fractured the fifth cervical vertebra—broken his neck—and injured his spinal cord.

An ambulance bore him to Glen Cove Community Hospital, where a surgeon tried to repair the damage. It was three months before Campanella was strong enough to be moved to the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University. There he came slowly to recognize the full measure of his injury. He was a quadriplegic. He could not walk or use his arms or hands. For the rest of his life his lungs would be threatened by every cold and his kidney and bowel functions would have to remain under almost continuous medical monitoring. In one physician’s description, “Even though he survived, such sweeping paralysis loosens his grip on life itself.”

The return to Salt Spray brought a burst of joy that changed at once into more pain. The paralysis had not left Campanella impotent but had robbed him of motion, the push-pull, so to speak, of sex. Dr. Valery Lanyi, a physician who has worked at the NYU Institute, explains; “In such cases the man is still capable of intercourse, although his pleasurable sensations are diminished. Women coming to such a man with tenderness and love can lead fulfilling sex lives. We have many cases of this. In practice a little training is necessary for each partner, with which we can help, but the woman must be willing to be gentle.” Ruthe Campanella would not be gentle, and a story most uncongenial to small boys or old colored gentlemen soon exposed the private life of the Campanellas in the courts.

On August 2, 1960, Roy instituted a suit against Ruthe for legal separation. Through his attorney, Harold Stackel, he charged that Ruthe had said “she doesn’t love me, I’m a helpless cripple, I serve no purpose in her life and she intends to come and go as she pleases.” Campanella cited occasions when he was cuckolded “in Atlantic City,” in “another man’s apartment,”
and “once at 2
A.M.
outside our home she got into a car with a man and they embraced passionately and made love with abandon.” When he complained the next morning that the children had heard her cries, Ruthe “raised a fork to me and said, ‘I’ll give my body to anybody I desire. You can’t do anything about it.’”

Ruthe underwent surgical sterilization because “I want to enjoy life.” She drank heavily, Campanella said, and sometimes struck him during arguments, although he was unable to raise his arms and defend himself, much less strike back. After the charges produced headlines in New York’s tabloid press, Campanella temporarily withdrew his suit.

But by spring, 1962, Roy had moved into an apartment in Lenox Terrace, a complex of high-rise apartment buildings inhabited by middle-class blacks that rises near his liquor store. Ruthe remained in Salt Spray, which Roy sought to sell. The house was too costly now that the marriage was spent. Between 1960 and 1963 the Campanellas shuttled in and out of court at least three times. Ruthe complained he had taken away her charge accounts. Roy said she was irresponsible, but paid her more than $800 a month for child support. Meanwhile Ruthe’s romance with a musician fed the gossip which babbles through the bars and living rooms of Harlem.

On November 27, 1962, Salt Spray was sold at auction. Thirty-one people bid. The house had been appraised at $60,000. But trouble—others’ knowledge of family trouble—undercuts the price of a house. The best bid was $47,000, which did not leave much cash after fees were paid to the auctioneer and lawyers and after a bank equity of $29,000 was satisfied. One scene remained to crown the tragedy. On January 26, 1963, Roy and Ruthe were talking by telephone. He heard a gasping sound and a crash. Ruthe had suffered a fatal heart attack.

When she died, she was forty years old.

Surely, he had been the manchild with toy trains and pet fish in the promised land of baseball, but time had torn at him and now he could no longer hit or run or walk. In June 1964 the tabloids reported that he had married his Lenox Terrace neighbor, Mrs. Roxie Doles. May 5 was the wedding date; the newspapers had missed it at the time. “She lives right next door,” a tabloid columnist wrote in June, “so all wunnerful Roy has to do to have family life again is to break down the walls.”

“How has he weathered these tragedies?” I’d asked Joe Black in Chicago.

“For a time bad, now good,” Black said. “He’s got a nice house up near White Plains and this wife is very good for him. Used to be, when Camp was in trouble, and you had a chair for a hundred and fifty dollars, he’d have to buy one for two-fifty. The department stores loved that. But this wife has settled him down. Don’t worry about a visit being depressing. You’ll probably enjoy the day.”

When I telephoned the liquor store months later, Campanella said, “I know what you been doing. I heard about it.” The old piping voice was lower, more breathy. Paralysis cuts a man’s wind. “I’m real busy at the store, but Saturdays is good. I try to take Saturdays off. The house is close to Tarrytown Road. I’m gonna look forward to talking about the old times.”

“You don’t sound like an old-timer.”

“Buddy,” Campanella said, “I was born in 1921. I’m fifty years old right now.”

The large, brick house sits on a knoll, close to others in a comfortable suburban cluster. Roxie, a pretty, soft-voiced woman who looks to be in her thirties, met me at the garage. A Cadillac bore the license plate “ROY—39.” “That’s Roy’s elevator over there,” she said, pointing. “We have some ramps inside. He gets around just fine.”