Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

  The Dodgers, by contrast, had floundered all spring: Newcombe and Campanella were overweight; Hodges began camp late because his wife had given birth to their second baby. The team seemed to lack focus. Its play was shoddy. I agonized over the box score of every defeat as if it were the World Series. My father tried to explain that Dodger manager Chuck Dressen was more concerned with evaluating players and selecting a lineup than with winning preseason ball games. “Except for the pitching,” he explained, “we’ve got the best team in the National League, hands down. Just say the names.” He smiled. “Campanella, Hodges, Robinson, Reese; Snider, the best center fielder in either league right now; Furillo, the best arm in baseball. Just say the names, honey, and relax.”

  But I couldn’t stop worrying, my own anxiety fed by the smiling, confident boasts of my friends and rivals in the butcher shop. “It’s going to be our year, Ragmop,” they told me, while choosing a cut of meat for my mother. “But don’t worry, your time will come.” To me at the age of eight, however, no appeal to the future could possibly compensate for the prospect of failure in the present. This was my time.

  Durocher’s widely circulated claim that he had the “best pitching staff in baseball,” along with my father’s insistence that pitching was our only weakness, forced me to shift my attention away from Robinson, Snider, and Campanella, our titans of hitting, to the bizarre figure of Dodger pitcher Rex Barney, whose problems with control threatened to end his once-promising career. When Barney had first come up in 1943, he’d been compared with Bob Feller and Walter Johnson. With the best fastball in the league, he had pitched a no-hitter against the Giants and had struck out Joe DiMaggio with bases loaded in the World Series. But on the final day of the ’48 season, he broke his leg sliding into second base, and ever after he seemed to have lost both his rhythm and his control. Even after a good start, if he threw a few bad pitches in a row, he would suddenly fall apart, unable to find the plate, throwing well above and behind the batter into the screen, bouncing the ball into the dirt, hitting three or four batters in a row. Branch Rickey had taken Barney to a psychiatrist, put him on a special diet, and made him memorize pages of Charles Dickens every night to improve his concentration. Nothing worked. Barney became so desperate, he later admitted, that he contemplated jumping off buildings and bridges.

  Now, Dressen announced, under the new regime, Barney would be treated like any other pitcher, rather than like a freak. No more psychiatrists, no more Dickens, no more pitching between two clotheslines for two extra hours every day. With this new approach, Dressen believed, Barney would recover the form that had promised to place him among the premier pitchers in baseball and strengthen our problematic rotation of Newcombe, Erskine, Roe, and Branca. But we all knew that this year was Rex Barney’s last chance.

  THAT SPRING, fortunately, my attention was diverted from baseball by a sporting tradition of our own. My sister Jeanne was selected co-captain of the Blue Team at her high school. As it had for more than three decades, the South Side Senior High School had divided all the girls into a Red Team and a Blue Team for an Olympic-style competition. Each team would begin with an elaborate opening presentation, a pageant of marches, songs, and dances all organized around a unifying theme. After the judges had scored the opening ceremony, the athletic events began: basketball, stunts-and-tumbling, Volleyball, relay races. The victor in each event (including a poster contest and a cheerleading display) would receive a specified number of points. On the final night of competition, following an often spectacular finale in which all four hundred girls participated, the points were tallied and a winner was proclaimed.

  At a time when there were no opportunities for girls to play in Little League or participate in varsity-level sports, the Red and Blue Meet attracted the attention of the entire town. For six weeks, the high-school girls, divided between two teams, thought of little else. They practiced for hours after school each day, and spent every weekend at school. Our house was at the center. My sister’s selection had transformed our quiet rooms into a frenzied arena, crowded with girls sewing costumes, writing songs, and practicing their dance steps. I would rush home from school, and in a state of almost perpetual excitement, I hovered at the edge of activity. I felt no one could possibly surpass the Blue Team’s brilliant theme. All of their routines would constitute a “Museum of Headlines,” each dance performance emblematic of an important event in American history, such as the revolution, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the achievement of women’s suffrage.

  My mother seemed unbothered by the unprecedented confusion as she helped with the costumes and happily stirred a big vat of blue dye into which five hundred clothespins were dipped to create the team emblems. Our house seemed to have become a different place. Needless to say, this was a special occasion for Jeanne, and my mother made the most concentrated effort to open up our house and make it a place where Jeanne could exercise her role as co-captain. Loyalty to Jeanne’s team prevented me from wearing any color but blue for six weeks straight: blue underpants, blue socks, and blue shoelaces as well as blue skirts and blouses.

  The night before the competition, the school held a Mother and Daughter Banquet, which served as a dress rehearsal for the songs and cheers. I wandered into my parents’ room as my mother dressed, watching as she stood in her bra and panties and pulled her armorlike girdle over her thin hips. She wriggled her nylons up her long legs, fastened them to the rubbery flaps that hung down from her girdle, put on a full slip to smooth the ridges of the girdle, and finally dropped a lovely blue silk dress over her head and shoulders. She let me pick out her earrings and help fasten a silver bracelet on her wrist. With high blue pumps, and a spritz of perfume on her neck, she was ready to go. When my father came home that night, he whistled at her graceful pirouette in the middle of the living-room floor.

  After my mother and sister left, my dad took me to dinner at Shor’s, my favorite place for hamburgers, and then to Jahn’s, an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor. For a while, we talked about Rex Barney, who, in his most recent outing, had thrown thirty-one straight balls, walked seven, hit one batter, thrown one wild pitch, and almost decapitated three batters before mercifully being pulled—and all in two-thirds of an inning! Dressen’s laissez-faire regime was producing no better results than Rickey’s old methods. The club was beginning to concede that Barney was a lost cause. Suddenly, my father interrupted my running commentary on the ill-fated Barney, turned to me, and said: “That dress was just the right color for your mother.” I was struck by the light in his eye and the tone of his voice as he continued, “Didn’t you think she looked lovely tonight?”

  There was standing room only the next evening when the town converged on the high-school gym to watch the three-hour meet. I cheered every performance by the Blue Team, and struggled to remain silent when the Red Team came on stage. When Jeanne’s team was proclaimed the winner by a narrow margin, I leaped from my seat for a final yell, only to find I was so hoarse from screaming I could no longer speak. So I watched in compelled silence as Jeanne and the captain were lifted up in the air by their exultant teammates and, for the first time, I became aware that the camaraderie and pride of competition involved in sports was not limited to the world of men.

  As THE GIANTS prepared to return north, their impressive performance in spring training had brought euphoria to the meat market. “Hey, Ragmop,” the butchers preened as I stopped by the shop on my way home from school. “Did you hear that Jim Hearn pitched a three-hitter today? And how about those back-to-back homers from Monte Irvin and Bobby Thomson?”

  “Don’t talk to me about Irvin and Thomson,” I countered somewhat defensively. “Snider and Hodges will hit twice as many homers. Did you see how they crushed the ball yesterday?”

  “Yeah,” Max said, smiling, “but we’re winning and you’re not.”

  Stung by the truth of this comment, I fell back on my father’s mantra. “Just wait till opening day, when it counts; then we’ll see who’s better.?
??

  Shortly before opening day, Joe and Max beckoned me in as I walked past the market. Since this would certainly be a glorious season, they explained, they had decided to make a special window display of the relative fortunes of the Giants and the Dodgers. (Presumably no other team really counted.) On a big bulletin board they would fill in the daily total of runs, hits, and errors for the Giants, and, they informed me, I had been specially selected to do the same for the Dodgers. Thus the entire neighborhood would know exactly how each team was doing on a daily basis. I accepted with delight, imagining myself well on the way to becoming the Red Smith of Rockville Centre, the scribe upon whom which all my neighbors would depend.

  “Don’t take the first game too seriously,” my father reassured me after an opening-day loss to the Phillies, but I remembered the previous season, when we had lost the pennant by a single game. It was conceivable that this single loss could once again spell victory or defeat. After opening day, however, the Dodgers began to soar. By the end of April, they were in first place, while the Giants, after losing eleven games in a row, had tumbled into the cellar. “It’s like a snake eating its young,” Durocher explained. “The thing starts, the guys start to press, the worse it gets.” As I went into the butcher shop each day to post my totals, I didn’t want to gloat, although concealing my happiness was beyond my powers. “Don’t worry,” I said, somewhat condescendingly, and quite pleased with my own generosity of spirit, “there are still lots of games left. The season is young. Anything can happen.”

  DURING THE AFTERNOON of the last day of April, all over the neighborhood, children waited restlessly for their fathers to return from work. We were all going to Ebbets Field for “Rockville Centre Night,” an annual tradition established several years earlier to celebrate the fact that a member of the Brooklyn team, outfielder Dixie Walker, known as “the People’s Cherce,” had chosen to make his home among us.

  My father and I boarded one of the dozen buses which would transport more than seven hundred residents of Rockville Centre to Brooklyn. No sooner had we arrived at the park than, with my father’s permission, I ran toward the crowd of kids already lining the rail behind the Dodger dugout. Like a pantheon of gods, they were all there, Jackie and Duke, Campy and Gil, just a few feet away, talking to the kids who were waiting in line for autographs. But by the time I got there the lines were already too long, and even though I joined the group attending on Jackie Robinson, I knew I was too far back to reach him before the game started. Dismayed, I looked along the dugout and saw rookie pitcher Clem Labine standing alone and unattended toward the end of the rail. Only the week before, Jimmy Cannon had written that the Dodgers had great expectations for the tall right-hander. More important to me than his prospects, however, was the fact that he probably represented my only chance to get an autograph. Breaking away from the Robinson line, pen in hand, I rushed over to Labine, and was rewarded with a pleased smile and a signature. Grasping my prize, I moved back along the rail. But, still unable to get close to the other players, I soon returned to the available Labine.

  “Weren’t you just here?” he asked with a grin.

  “Oh, yes,” I explained, scrambling for an explanation, “but if I have two of your autographs, I can keep one and trade the other for a Jackie Robinson.”

  “No kidding,” he said, his eyes widening, “you could trade me even up for Robinson? Well, that’s something,” he said, shaking his head, and I thought I detected a bounce to his step when he strode back toward the field, where our high-school band was beginning to assume formation for the pregame exhibition.

  On earlier trips to Ebbets Field, I had felt part of the invisible community of Dodger fans, linked by shared emotions and experience to thousands of strangers who, for a few hours, were not strangers at all. But tonight was different. All around me, in the sections of the grandstand set aside for our town, were the familiar figures of my mundane daily life. It was as if my block, my school, my church had been snatched up and transported to a gigantic ocean liner for a trip to some fantastic land. I recognized all the people, of course, but they were not the same. The familiar setting of our lives, the context we shared, had changed and, in changing, had imparted a different dimension to my existence. The invisible barriers dividing the natural compartments of my life had been dissolved, leaving me a resident of a larger world.

  Out on the field, I could see George Wilson, the highschool bandleader, who had recently moved to our block with his wife and two girls. After school, Mr. Wilson gave music lessons in his home, the wail of saxophones and trombones spilling out into our spring afternoons. Now, resplendent in a bright-red uniform with brass buttons and gold epaulets, he stood with solemn dignity in front of his forty-five-member band, waiting while Red Barber himself introduced the mayor of Rockville Centre. After a few welcoming remarks, we rose and Mr. Wilson signaled the band to begin an impressive rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  A few seats to my right, I saw Doc Schimmenti, wearing a blue Dodger shirt instead of the white pharmacist’s jacket which had always seemed as much a part of his appearance as his kindly face or his slicked-back hair. I almost didn’t recognize my teacher, Miss Levitt, until she said hello to me. Standing before our class, she had always been primly dressed, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Here, seated in the next row, she was wearing pedal pushers, her legs exposed, her hair hanging loosely over her shoulders. And I had to conceal my laugh as I looked over and could swear I saw—cracking roasted peanuts and brushing the shells from her habit—my First Communion teacher, Sister Marian, from St. Agnes. Mr. Rust sat behind us with his son, Eddie, not far from Mr. Greene, who had brought his two sons, Kent and Jay. Twenty or thirty feet over to my right, Max and Joe from the butcher shop waved sheepishly to me, somewhat subdued since everyone knew they were rabid Giant fans. At the top of our section, Miss Newton, our grammar-school principal, held a sign on which twelve big teardrops had been painted to suggest the grief of the Giants as they faced the prospect of losing their twelfth game in a row.

  But the tears were not to flow. The Giants took a large lead in the early innings. In the bottom of the third, the loudspeaker announced that rookie Clem Labine was entering the game in relief. For luck, I pressed my two autographs in my hand and watched with proprietary pleasure as he cooled off the Giants with two hitless innings. But for me the real drama of the game was the confrontation between the player I liked best, Jackie Robinson, and the player I detested and feared, Sal Maglie. In the first inning, we cheered when Robinson got up from the ground after a Maglie bean ball and hit a home run. Robinson was still angry when he came to bat in the fourth. The first pitch was right at his head. I covered my eyes with my hands, wanting to look away, fearing that something bad was going to happen. For weeks reporters had been warning that a dangerous bean-ball feud was under way between the Dodgers and the Giants. There had been ugly incidents in each of the five games they had played. In their very first encounter, Dodger pitcher Chris Van Cuyk had forced Henry Thompson to the ground with a pitch that exploded dangerously close to his head. In the next game, Carl Furillo, whose skull had been fractured by a Giant pitcher two years earlier, had been driven into the dirt. In the game after that, Robinson was hit by a pitch that left a bad swelling and a deep discoloration of his arm.

  I peeked through my fingers to see Robinson drag a bunt down the first-base line. Maglie ran to cover first. Although the ball rolled foul, Robinson barreled into Maglie so hard the pitcher was thrown to the ground. Players from both teams spilled out onto the field, and Robinson’s teammates had to pull him away from Maglie. A loud chorus of boos followed Robinson as he walked back to the plate. Never before had I heard Robinson booed at Ebbets Field. From behind me, someone yelled, “That’s a dirty trick, Jackie. Who do you think you are?”

  “Who do you think you are?” I shouted back and was appalled to confront none other than Mr. Rust. He looked as surprised as I felt, but before either of us could speak, the
angry roar burst into cheers as Robinson singled to left. When the Dodgers scored a few more times, it seemed they might climb back into the game, but time ran out, and the Giants won by a score of 8-5.

  The next day, Robinson explained that he had deliberately created the disturbance to force league action on the bean-ball feud before someone really got hurt. “I don’t believe people come to ballparks to fight or see fights, but this business of maliciously throwing at batters’ heads has got to be stopped,” he was reported saying. “The rule book specifically says the umpires must take action on bean balls. Not one of them has moved. I don’t care if I’m fined, but I’m telling you I bunted and ran into Maglie deliberately to bring this whole thing to a head…. This has got to stop. I hope what I did helps stop it. I don’t want to have to do it again but if I have to I will.”

  But it didn’t stop. Durocher answered Robinson by saying that what made Maglie such a great pitcher was his willingness to throw at a batter when the situation demanded it. When Maglie was out there, Durocher said, it was him or the hitter. “I’ll throw at anybody,” Maglie added. “That’s part of the game. I’ve got to do it to protect myself against hitters leaning in on my curve.” So the feud continued, making each successive Dodger-Giant game that season more flammable and nerve-racking than the last. It almost seemed as if the season was moving toward some kind of tragic ending. And it was, but not one I had ever imagined.

  ALTHOUGH THE GIANTS improved steadily through the month of May, the Dodgers remained in first place. They were playing well, with the exception of Gil Hodges, who was hardly hitting at all. Reporters speculated that his new baby was responsible for his slump, causing him to stay up at night, making him continually exhausted and ten pounds lighter than he should be. I planned to write Hodges a letter of encouragement until I heard he was coming to Wolf’s Sport Shop on Sunrise Highway that weekend to sign autographs. I had something that would surely help him break out of his slump and I wanted to give it to him personally.