Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (6 page)

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.

O
N A SULTRY
F
RIDAY
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 earned 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.

O
N 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.