The Boys of Summer (42 page)

“When I got there, holy gee, Mr. Rickey had a scouting report on me a whole loose-leaf book thick. They’d had Clyde Sukeforth following me and they knew how I catched and hit and threw and Mr. Rickey told me everything from school to my mother and father to what I did off the field. And he signed me and then he signed Newk.

“But we wasn’t definitely assigned to any club. That was 1946 and something happened in Florida, where Jack was training with Montreal. A sheriff came and threw him off a field. There was talk they was gonna run Jack out of town. Now Mr. Rickey said, ‘If they want to run out Jack, you better stay North.’ I’d played all winter in Venezuela. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m in good shape.’ Later I met Rickey in his office in Brooklyn. I sat there and he called every general manager in the system, fifteen, twenty men. ‘Would you accept Roy Campanella?’ None of ‘em would touch me. He called Buzzy Bavasi. Buzzy was the onliest one to say, ‘Yeah. I will accept him.’ Mr. Rickey said, ‘Roy. You will go to Nashua and play.’ I said what did he mean; where was Nashua? I thought he was telling me Nashville.

“Newk and I went to Nashua, New Hampshire, and if you don’t believe I could run, I stole sixteen bases that year. There were no colored people in the town ‘cept for Newk and me.
Rickey wanted us to work together. Walter Alston was the manager. One night in Lynn, Massachusetts, I hit a couple of home runs and Newk pitched good and after the game Buzzy went in to get his money and the manager of Lynn said, ‘If it wasn’t for them niggers, you wouldn’t have beat us.’ Buzzy jumped him. And they were swinging and all the players came running in. Buzzy was fighting him for what he said. It was always some sly thing. I never did let it peeve me.

“The next spring, I was training with Montreal and we flew to Panama for games with the Dodgers. Jackie was with Montreal. We had a pretty good club. Hugh Casey was pitching, listen to this, and Jack faked a bunt toward third. Casey broke that way and Jack bunted the ball slow up toward Eddie Stanky, who was playing second. Stanky didn’t have a play so he picked that ball up and threw it over the top of the grandstand in Panama. Stanky can’t deny that neither. It was the worst thing I ever seen on a ball field.”

Campanella was not appearing to tire. “I’m in good shape,” he said. “Most everybody paralyzed like me has to take regular exercises. I don’t seem to have to. I thank baseball for that. I believe it put my body in this good condition where being paralyzed wasn’t as bad for me as it would be for some.”

“But it
is
bad for you,” I said.

Roy shrugged; a look of hurt invaded his eyes.

“I mean you were really a physical man. You’d lived a physical life. That was everything to you and this thing happened and you can’t be physical any more.”

“That’s true.”

“Well, where did you get the courage to go on?”

“Uh-huh,” Campanella said, as though he had been waiting. Now he spoke very slowly and softly, and before he was done his eyes would film with tears.

“After the accident,” he said, “and laying in the bed and realizing that I was paralyzed. No. At first I didn’t realize. It
happened January the twenty-sixth and I was laying there in Glen Cove Community Hospital and I thought in a few weeks I would be well and go to spring training. They had my arms strapped out and my legs and I couldn’t move them. Suddenly I couldn’t move my arms and my legs. When you get like that and lie in that position, you start trying.

“I tried to move my right leg. My right arm. No reaction.

“I tried to move my left leg. My left arm. No reaction.

“I tried a little every day. The doctors weren’t disclosing a whole lot. You don’t think, ‘I’m
paralyzed,’
right away. You think, ‘Hey, I can’t move my arm.’

“After a lot of days, I started wondering to myself. Gee, I can’t move this, I can’t move that, I can’t move
anything.
I was a good one for prayers and I prayed to the good Lord to let me accept whatever was happening.

“One day it started getting tough to breathe. The shortness of breath was getting worse and worse. They put me in an oxygen tent. I realized then that it was pretty bad. They never told me that the way it was going I was about to lose my life.

“A doctor said they wanted to perform a tracheotomy, make a hole in my throat, let me breathe through that, and hope. And the best I could do, paralyzed in that oxygen tent, was nod my head. It was my life and all I could do was nod. Now I knew it was real bad.

“I got through it. The next day I felt a little better and I started to ask questions. It was tough to talk. They had my trach plugged with a cork and when the cork was in there I could say something. If the nurse wanted to quiet me, she pulled the cork.

“They told me I had broke my neck and what vertebrae and how they had operated on my spinal cord. They said they were still waiting for reactions. I might be in shock.

“But I still wasn’t moving or anything. I gave up the idea of going to spring training. Then Walter O’Malley sent Dr. Howard Rusk from NYU to look me over, and he checked me and
said, ‘Roy. You can’t run water through a broken pipe. It’s just that simple. Your spinal cord has been messed up. You may get to walk again and you may not. If you don’t, you have to learn how to live with it.’”

Very softly, Campanella said, “I think I’ve learned how.”

“You sure have,” I said, and that was when I saw the film of tears.

“I’ve accepted the chair,” he said. “My family has accepted it. My wife has made a wonderful home. I’m not wanting many things. Sure, I’d love to walk. Sure, I would. But I’m not gonna worry myself to death because I can’t. I’ve accepted the chair, and I’ve accepted my life.

“My oldest son, Roy Junior, is twenty-two years old and teaching at Harvard. I never went to college. Tony is a sophomore at Elmhurst right outside Chicago. John is a senior at Windsor Mountain, a prep school in Lenox, Massachusetts. And Princess, my baby, seventeen years old, is waiting for me in the kitchen. Why don’t you go downstairs with Mrs. Campanella and look at the playroom we got? I’ll be talking to Princess.”

He pushed the lever and the wheelchair started off bearing the broken body and leaving me, and perhaps Roxie Campanella as well, to marvel at the vaulting human spirit, imprisoned yet free, in the noble wreckage of the athlete, in the dazzling palace of the man.

During my last trip with the team, I finished the story of an easy victory in Milwaukee, stowed my typewriter in a bare room at the Hotel Schroeder and, rather than consider prints of strawberries, I walked across Wisconsin Avenue to a bar called Holiday House. Inside, Duke Snider gestured for me to join him.

Across drinks, Snider was serious, soft-voiced, opinionated and quietly insistent that each opinion was correct. The more intense he became, the more softly he spoke. “Did ya write a good story?” he asked in a low tone. “What’ll you drink?”

“Medium. It was a medium game. Scotch, thanks.”

“I’m buying,” Snider said. “Bring him a double Scotch and soda.”

“Something bothering you, Duke?”

“Something? Everything.”

“You’re hitting .335.”

“I know.” The long face fell into a pout. “But it’s this whole damn life. You know what I’m gonna do? Get some good acreage. I know a place south of Los Angeles. I’m gonna move there and raise avocados.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding. I dreamed of being a big leaguer once, but that’s not it for me any more. Last fall in the World Series, I’m out there. Big bat. Seventy thousand watching. Great catch. You know what I’m dreaming then? About being a farmer.”

“There’s the money.”

“That’s right, and if it wasn’t for the money I’d be just as happy if I never played a game of ball again.” He was twenty-six years old.

“Duke, if you mean what you’re saying and you’re willing to put your name to it, we can both make a little money just by printing it.”

“I mean it,” Snider said. “You go write it, just so’s it comes out I’m explaining, not complaining.”

I put off the story for years. Then Gordon Manning, the penultimate managing editor of
Collier’s,
called me for lunch and asked if I had any article ideas. “We’ll give you enough for the Jaguar you always wanted, or the down payment anyway,” he said.

When I mentioned the old conversation with Snider, the editor glowed faintly and made a fair offer for each of us. A week later he handed me a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles and an expense check of $500.

“I’ll only be a day or two,” I said.

“Spend it all. Keep the Duke happy.”

The Sniders owned a small white house on a quiet street in Compton, which lies just south of the Los Angeles city line.
Duke was grossing $50,000 a year, but his house could have belonged to someone earning a fifth as much. The rooms were compact. The children slept in bunks. “We aren’t getting anything fancier until we’re sure it’s for keeps,” said Beverly Snider, a trim, forceful woman. “Baseball isn’t all that secure.” Duke was large, long-striding, somewhat jowly. Beverly was petite, unlined, determined. As I set up a recorder and Duke groped for the sources of his disenchantment, Beverly wandered in and out of the small living room monitoring.

A few fans threw marbles at him when he chased fly balls, Duke said. The endless travel bothered him. The press could be cruel. “It isn’t any one thing, but when they all come at the same time, when you get off a train after a couple of hours’ sleep and a manager snipes at you before the game, and the fans throw stuff during the game, and the writers second-guess you after, you begin to wonder about baseball as a trade.”

“Could you think of one particular bad day?”

“No,” Duke said, “but lots of bad times. Like once when Charlie was managing a bunch of us went to see
The Caine Mutiny
in Philly. Well, in the movie Captain Queeg blew up over a quart of strawberries. The next damn day Charlie blew up over an order of creamed cauliflower. The Warwick Hotel was expensive and someone had a good meal and added creamed cauliflower à la carte for an extra seventy-five cents. That night it was drizzling and we got stuck in the clubhouse and Charlie opened up. ‘You damn wise guys. You got nothing better to do than order creamed cauliflower, seventy-five cents extra?’ He kept repeating it and it wasn’t raining that much and around the fifth time I said, ‘Hey, Charlie. What say we go out on the field?’

“ ‘What you trying to do?’ he hollers. ‘Run this ball club?’

“ ‘Hell, no. I just want to loosen up.’

“ ‘You’ll loosen up when I tell you to loosen up. Now about this creamed cauliflower, you listening, Snider?’

“ ‘Look,’ I yelled. ‘I didn’t even eat at the hotel on the club. I ate in a restaurant with my own money. Why don’t you deduct the seventy-five cents for the cauliflower from the six-bucks meal money I didn’t use?’”

Remembering, Duke made a little laugh. “And then he reamed me.”

We walked out of the white house in Compton to a clothing store where Duke said he would sell sports jackets during Christmas week. We stopped in a bar and he drank Seven Crown and Seven-Up. When he tried to take the bill, I explained about the $500 expense check.

“Keep the money,” he said. “Bev and me don’t need entertaining.”

“Well, I have it. Why don’t we go to a club tonight on Sunset Strip?”

“It’s Saturday,” Snider said. “We couldn’t get in anywhere good.”

“Can I use your name for the reservation?”

“Sure but that won’t help. They don’t know me here. I’m not a coast league ball player.”

We reached Ciro’s at 8:30. “Mr. Snidair,” cried a maître d’, in great excitement, “we didn’t think it was really
you.
People call all the time and use famous names. What a pleasure.” Bus boys began chattering and pointing. The maître d’ led us toward the stage and placed us at a table, second row center.

“I don’t know,” I said, “if I should have tipped, or if movie guys have all the first rows tied up.”

“I’m just surprised they know me,” Duke said.

Beverly considered a menu and cried, “Look at these prices.”

“I don’t see any creamed cauliflower,” Duke said.

Eartha Kitt’s act at Ciro’s built to a climactic number in
which she stripped to black brassiere and underpants, while singing variations of a lyric:

At the final chorus she leaped into the arms of a Latin, who suddenly appeared at one wing and carried her off, presumably to ecstasy and other Christmas gifts.

“Well,” said Beverly Snider, as the lights came up. “Well!” Duke gazed toward a wall. “Certainly not the sort of thing,” Beverly said, “one could recommend to one’s friends.”

“Depends on the friends,” I said.
Collier’s
paid our check. We departed in silence.

In the spring of 1956
Collier’s
published the article, Snider and myself sharing the by-line. The piece stands as accurate, reasonably balanced and mild compared to the commercial sports iconoclasm of the 1970s. Snider described some of his disillusion, said he hoped to play through 1962 and then looked forward to retirement. He imagined a California Elysium, with avocados bursting from every tree. For all its bluster, the story was genial, no more mature than either author, harmless.

But the sporting press hurried to flagellate us for unorthodoxy. At least fifty newspaper articles described Snider as an ingrate. Red Smith composed an arch column in which Snider was said to have grabbed my lapel and wept. Stanley Woodward, rescued from Miami, was working for the Newark
Evening News.
He wrote that I had sat in a little room, invented the article and gone forth to find a ball player, any ball player, to lend a name and share the profits.

“Son of a bitch,” I told him afterward. “You were wrong.”

“Not wrong,” Woodward said. “Entertaining and short of libel. And that’s my definition of a good column.”

Only John Lardner, who was writing for
Newsweek,
took us seriously. He was a tall, bespectacled, profound man, infinitely gentle to his friends, and typically he found depth in the article beyond what Snider and I had conceived.

“You see,” Lardner said at the long bar of the Artist and Writers Restaurant, “Duke thought if his dream came true he would be a different person. He’s not unhappy about the dream. He’s unhappy that he is still the same man. Happens to a lot of us. We get somewhere we wanted and find we’re still ourselves.” Lardner had revealed more than he intended. He said quickly, “Needles has the staying power to win the Belmont.”

“I don’t like to bet horses,” I said. “You really think the dream is killing Snider?” Lardner gazed at me with kind, despairing eyes.

I telephoned Gordon Manning and said that we ought to do something for Duke. “You could write an editorial, for example. He’s getting murdered.”

“He should have thought about reaction before he did the piece,” Manning said.

“I didn’t think about it. He certainly couldn’t have.”

“But you each have the down payment on a Jaguar,” Manning said. He was closing another issue, he said. If I had any other story ideas, would I let him know?

Snider played for more seasons than anyone else—curiously, none of the team had an exceptionally extended career—but in the 1959 World Series he strained a knee. After that he had to cramp his swing. In 1963 the Dodgers shipped him to the Mets, where he was a sentimental favorite and batted .243, a hundred points below his best standard. A year later the Giants signed him to pinch-hit. He batted .210, and a few months after his thirty-eighth birthday he retired. He had hit 407 home runs, more than any Dodger, more than all but about a dozen men in baseball history. And he had found forty rolling acres outside
the village of Fallbrook, California, and bought his farm.

To reach Fallbrook, you drive south from Los Angeles down Highway 1, out of yellow haze into an open country of tan beaches and golden fields. You pass San Juan Capistrano, the Marine base at Camp Pendleton, and then you turn into a smaller road toward handsome uplands and a crossroad village called Bonsail. There you follow a two-lane blacktop winding among citrus trees. Two miles before Fallbrook, a narrow road cuts toward Green Canyon, and a few minutes down Green Canyon Road, in a pleasant ranch house looking toward Mount Palomar, one finds the Duke of Fallbrook. The setting is attractive but not overwhelming. Eight years out of baseball, Duke Snider has had to sell the large home, the avocado trees, the farm.

He seemed cheerful, almost unchanged. He had put on weight at the jowls, but he always did tend to go puffy. His hair, gray in 1953, was black. He had performed on television for a hair darkener and the contract required him to keep using dye. Beverly, still trim, made soup for lunch, and Duke asked if I wanted to see the town and the countryside. He walked his two acres lovingly, showing me a small pool and dwarf lemon trees. A few avocados stood on a slope where he had installed sprinklers. “Bev and I like to grow things,” he said. We got into a car and drove slowly over rolling dun ridges, green where irrigation touched them. “See that,” Snider said pointing to a rambling Spanish-style manor on the shoulder of a hill. “That was our house. And that all over there—those rows of avocados—was the farm.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Aaah,” Snider said. “I made a bad guess. Look at those things. I owned them all.” Avocados grow short, stumpy and gnarled. Against a memory of Eastern maples, they are not handsome, but Duke considered the stumpy rows tenderly. “They were bearing fine,” he said. “Then we decided to do a
little more, invest in a bowling alley near Camp Pendleton. The Marine families would be permanent customers. Vietnam happened. The families were broken up. The recruits want more action than a night of bowling. So I had to get out of the business.

“By the time I did, I’d lost a lot. There went the farm. But Buzzy’s taken care of me. I broadcast for his San Diego club and do some coaching.”

“Back on the damn road.”

“It’s not that bad,” Snider said, “but you know what bothers me. This house there”—he pointed at his lost manor—“is set so high we could get TV stations from L.A. and San Diego both. Now where we are, down Green Canyon, we only get San Diego.” A breeze stirred through the avocado fields. “Come on,” Duke said. “Let’s get a brew.”

We drove into Fallbrook, a low, sprawling town, and as we walked into the bar, men called greetings. Snider introduced me and one of the men said, “Keep your money in your pocket. You come all the way from New York, we won’t let you buy.”

“Thanks.”

“But if you come all the way from New York, how can you speak English? I didn’t know they spoke English in New York.” Others nodded. “How do you like it out here?” the man asked.

“It’s great,” I said, quoting Fred Allen, 1938, “if you’re an orange.”

“Hey,” said the man, “that’s all right.” He was wearing work pants and a khaki jacket. “You know we let Duke in our softball game once.”

Snider nodded. “They told me it was fast pitch, but everything I hit went foul. Fast pitch to these guys, but I pulled everything inside first base.”

They took softball seriously, said the man in khaki, as someone bought a second round. They played through the summer in informal leagues, building to “a kind of world series.” A year
before, the Fallbrook team had reached the series against a team from an Indian reservation. The Indians went ahead, three games to nothing. The Fallbrook team sent for the Duke.

“Right,” Snider said, “and I said I’d help if I could use a hardball bat.”

“I don’t remember what he used, but we put him at shortstop, and from losing three games to nothing, we won the series four games to three.”

“He still hits good,” someone said.

“Different league,” the Duke said. “My round.” And he bought the beers with a flourish.

As we drove home, he reminisced. “My dad, Ward, come out west from Ohio. He used to see Cincinnati play. He kept putting the bat on my left shoulder when I was little because he knew the right-field fences were closer. Pete Rozelle and I were forwards on the same basketball team in Compton and he wrote for the newspaper, the
Tartar Shield.
My wife was with him the day he went ice skating and fell and lost his two front teeth. I could throw a football seventy yards. Pete says I coulda been a T quarterback. But I liked baseball. The Dodgers give me seven hundred and fifty dollars to sign and I took a train acrost the country to Bear Mountain, where they were training. I was seventeen and I never owned a topcoat.”