Earlier that spring, while preparing for my Confirmation at religious-education classes in St. Agnes, I had entered a contest designed to test knowledge of the catechism. Actually, there were two contests, one among the parochial-school students and the other for students from public school. The winners in each group would then face off in a public competition. Every night after dinner, my mother would drill me in the articles of the Catholic faith. By the time the contest began, I felt unbeatable; I easily bested the others in my class and moved into a faceoff with the champion from St. Agnes.
That night, I looked out from the stage to see my mother, a few friends, and an impressive array of whiteclad nuns, the teachers of St. Agnes. The contest was modeled on a spelling bee. We would each be asked a question, and the first one who made a mistake would lose if the other contestant knew the answer. After several opening rounds, we were asked to take turns in naming the seven deadly sins. “Pride,” my opponent called, and I responded, “Envy.” “Lust,” she rejoined with a smile, but I answered, “Covetousness.” “Anger,” she almost shouted. “Sloth,” I almost whispered. Six sins down. Only one to go. For almost a minute my opponent stood in silence, rubbing her forehead in a gesture of intense thoughtfulness, while I, seeing her difficulty, felt a rising sense of exultant anticipation. “Deceit,” she blurted out uncertainly. There was an audible sigh from the nuns in the audience. Now the moderator turned to me, and when I saw my mother confidently smiling in the audience I was unable to repress a grin of my own. “Gluttony,” I announced in a confident tone, knowing the contest was won. Instead of an explosive cheer, what followed seemed to me a most unpleasant and protracted silence. In that momentary pause, I feared the nuns were disappointed that the girl from St. Agnes had not won, but the applause began and grew, and the Mother Superior seemed delighted when she presented me with my prize—a St. Christopher medal blessed by the Pope. Now this fruit of my triumph would help end the hitting slump of Gil Hodges.
Since St. Christopher was the patron saint of travel, my parents, like most Catholic families, always kept a St. Christopher medal in our car to protect the safety of our voyage. For years, I had heard my father threaten to affix a St. Christopher medal to our washing machine in order to ensure the safe return of every sock to its mate. If St. Christopher could protect socks and travelers, perhaps he could ensure the safe passage of Gil Hodges around the bases, preferably in one swing of the bat.
That weekend, not revealing my intentions, I asked my mother to drive me to Wolf’s Sport Shop for my rendezvous with Gil Hodges. Slipping the small box from my pocket, I joined the line leading to Hodges, who looked uncomfortable, squeezed behind a small table. Nevertheless, he talked patiently to each person in turn, his manner warm and gracious. When I reached the head of the line, I handed him the small box, already opened to reveal the medal, and launched into an accompanying monologue. This medal has been blessed by the Pope, I explained, and I had won it in a catechism contest when I knew the seventh deadly sin was gluttony, and I thought St. Christopher would watch over his swing so that he could return home safely each time he went to bat, which would make him feel good and would make me feel good and would make Dodgers fans all over the world feel great. The people standing behind me greeted my rapid-fire message with good-natured laughter, but not Hodges. He accepted the medal with great solemnity. He told me that he, too, had once had a St. Christopher medal blessed by the Pope. But he had given it to his father, a coal miner in Indiana. Mining was a dangerous business, he explained, and his father had broken his back, lost an eye, and severed three toes in a series of accidents, so he thought his father needed the medal more than he did. He was thrilled, he said, to receive a medal of his own. He reached out in a gesture of gratitude, and my fingers disappeared in a palm four times the size of mine.
The next day, the Dodgers left for a long road trip, and Hodges began to hit. By the first week in June, he was leading the majors with seventeen home runs in forty-four games, three ahead of Babe Ruth’s mark. Sportswriters attributed his miraculous resurrection to his ability to sleep soundly since leaving his infant at home. But I knew better.
Although the Dodgers stayed in first place throughout June, the Giants found their groove, winning game after game to climb into second place, only five games behind. The topic of conversation among Giant fans, however, was not the performance of the team, but the appearance of an astonishing young center fielder named Willie Mays. After coming to the majors at the end of May and going hitless in his first twelve at bats, Mays had caught on fire. Leo Durocher claimed he was the best rookie he had ever seen. Giant fans had fallen in love with him. Max and Joe could talk of nothing else. He had changed the chemistry of the entire team, they claimed. His enthusiasm was infectious, his fielding incomparable, and his swing reminiscent of Joe DiMaggio’s. I had to admit they were right. He was one of the most exciting players I had ever seen. And my silent envy was magnified by the knowledge that Campanella had urged the Dodgers to sign him, but the scout who was sent to watch him play had reported that he couldn’t hit a curveball!
SUMMER WAS our season of exploration. Elaine and I rode our bicycles everywhere, and the map of our world expanded each year—beyond our immediate neighborhood and school to the library and the church, past Woolworth’s and the Fantasy Theatre in the center of town, to the expanse of Allen Field. We leaned our bikes against a tree while we wandered off to the swings, where, scuffing our feet in the dirt, we exchanged reminiscences from the school year just past. For the first time it seemed we had our own stores of experience, our own short histories—not just baseball history or History with a capital “H.”
No one tried to rein in our expeditions so long as we came home when we promised. It never occurred to us that something might happen to the bikes we left behind, even less that anything might happen to us. There was simply nothing to fear. No one in our town could remember the last time there had been a murder or even a violent crime. In 1951, the forty-six-member police force in Rockville Centre made only 139 arrests, the great majority for traffic violations and minor offenses. The great “law-and-order” controversy of the day was the movement to prohibit pinball machines, which, judging by the village report, had taken on the threatening overtones conveyed by pool tables in The Music Man; in the same report, the local guardians of moral probity asked that residents be restrained in their summer dress, pointing out that “apparel that may be proper at the beach is not always proper for public streets.”
Though our parents let us play on the street, walk to school, or ride our bikes into the village center without trepidation, they were haunted by the sweeping fear that marked our summers year after year—the fear of polio, a disease which struck silently and seemingly at random. In the midst of play, a healthy child might be struck down by a blinding headache or a high fever, transformed within hours or days into a lifelong invalid. Although children were the principal victims, the disease struck adults from every walk of life, and had even crippled a president of the United States.
In the late forties and early fifties, polio moved toward epidemic proportions, striking more victims in the seven years between 1948 and 1955 than in the previous thirty years combined. In 1949, more than ten thousand cases were reported, a number which tripled in 1950 and would reach sixty thousand two years later. And since many cases were undoubtedly left unreported by parents, fearing the unknown hazards of hospital quarantine, the actual numbers were probably much higher.
Ignorance of how the disease was transmitted bred an anxiety verging on terror, as parents and medical scientists alike speculated whether it might be carried through the air or conducted by way of food or water. Perhaps it came from insects, or the shock of plunging from the warm summer air into cold water. Lack of understanding about the spread of polio created a vacuum which parents and editorialists filled with a thousand admonitions: avoid crowded places where you may be sneezed or coughed upon; beware of contacts in trains, buses, or boats; kee
p children away from strangers; avoid swimming in cold water; don’t sit around in wet clothes; don’t play to the point of getting overtired; avoid public drinking fountains; avoid using one another’s pencils, whistles, handkerchiefs, utensils, food; burn or bury garbage not tightly covered; wash your hands before eating; call your doctor immediately if you’ve got a stiff neck, upset stomach, headache, sore throat, or unexplained fever.
Each of our mothers evolved her own rules. At the height of the polio scare, Mrs. Friedle forbade Elaine to go under the sprinkler unless the temperature was above ninety degrees. Mrs. Rust insisted that her children come in from the street an hour early at night. My mother had even more elaborate rules, her anxiety for me greatly intensified by the fact that my sister Charlotte had contracted polio when she was three years old. When the doctor confirmed that Charlotte and a neighboring boy had polio, my mother collapsed and suffered a miscarriage. The neighboring boy was sent to the contagious ward at Willard Parker Communicable Disease Hospital, but my parents decided to keep Charlotte at home with nurses around the clock. Although the boy ended up paralyzed, Charlotte escaped with a brace on her weakened left leg that came off before the year’s end.
When the tallies of those stricken sharply increased, my mother placed all public swimming pools off limits, carefully circumscribing my movements beyond our neighborhood. I resisted rules which seemed arbitrary and unreasonable, since I, like most children, did not share my parents’ fear of a disease which seemed remote. To me, it was inconceivable that anything might impair my own vitality. Sensing my resistance, wishing to make the danger more real, one hot day when I had been told to stay inside, my mother called me down to the television set to see a young boy imprisoned within an “iron lung,” the gigantic machine that pumped his chest. “You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in one of those, do you?” she asked. The thought was so alien, I refused to admit it to consciousness, but afterward, occasionally, in my dreams at night, I saw myself stretched out, trapped within the fearsome metal monster.
Forbidden to go to the beach by our parents, Elaine and I spent our afternoons sitting under the big maple tree on her front lawn. We lounged in the shade reading comics and books, and knitted multicolored squares in preparation for the day when they would miraculously fuse into a beautiful afghan. On afternoons when both the Dodgers and the Yankees were playing an afternoon game, we set our dueling radios on opposite sides of the blanket, the warm voice of Red Barber issuing from one end of the blanket, the harsh, tinny voice of Mel Allen from the other.
IF FEAR OF POLIO had curtailed my physical activity, the Brooklyn Dodgers liberated my spirit. In July 1951, the Dodgers won ten in a row. Almost every night I went to bed hoping that sleep would speed the hours toward morning, when, as soon as my eyes opened, I would race downstairs to read the newspaper account of the Dodger victory I had witnessed the day before. Nor was a single reading enough. Throughout the day I would return to the sports pages, always left in an honored place on the kitchen table, experiencing anew a game-winning home run, or a spectacular double play that had ended an enemy rally. I would stop before the entrance of the butcher shop, pausing to calm myself, anxious not to appear gloating at my friends’ misfortune, before I entered to post the latest Dodger triumph on the wonderful bulletin board they had provided.
By the midseason All-Star break, the Dodgers had moved eight and a half games ahead of the Giants. Seven Dodgers, the largest contingent from any team in either league, were chosen for the All-Star game—Robinson and Campanella, Hodges and Snider, Reese and Newcombe and Roe. My satisfaction soared in the second week of August, when the Dodgers swept a three-game series with the Giants, stretching their lead to twelve and a half games. The television camera caught Leo Durocher sitting in the dugout at the end of the third game, his head bent over his knees, his body slumped in dejection. The Dodgers, on the other hand, were the very image of jubilation, smiling, laughing, slapping their teammates on the back, while thousands of fans cheered in exultation.
But then something snapped. Justified satisfaction yielded to arrogance, to excessive pride. I sat with my father as he read newspaper stories telling how a few of the victorious Dodgers had gone banging on the door to the Giants’ locker room, shouting “The Giants are dead!” and “How do you like it now, Leo?” Other Dodgers joined in and soon a chorus was struck: “Roll out the barrel, we got the Giants on the run.”
“Someone should have stopped them,” my father said when he read about the unpleasant incident in the papers. “Where in the world was Dressen?” He shook his head in disgust. “You can’t go on like that—gloating and taunting. Steal a team’s dignity and they’ll fight like the devil to get it back.”
Excessive pride, I thought, one of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins … Perhaps if they all went to confession, things would be all right. But they weren’t all Catholics. “I could pray for them myself,” I suggested, but my father only smiled affectionately.
The following week, after the Dodgers’ lead reached a season high of thirteen and a half games, the Giants began to play their best ball of the season. They played like a team reborn: hitters who were striking out with men on base began to come through in the clutch; pitchers who had lost their control with the game on the line began to throw strikes. It was at last, Giant fans exulted, the team whose prowess in spring training had so excited New Yorkers and stirred sportswriters to prophecies of glory. They quickly reeled off eleven consecutive victories, their longest winning streak since 1938, five years before I was born. They narrowed the Dodger lead from a comfortable two-digit margin to an alarming six games. Delirious Giant fans remained in their seats long after each win, savoring the community which victory had forged.
Invoking the power of ancient baseball superstition, Leo Durocher wore the same socks, shirt, and tie every day the streak lasted. Bobby Thomson refused to change his undershorts with their distinctive pattern of black ants. “He’s got ants in the pants and games in the bag,” wrote a poetic scribe. Closer to home, Max Kropf roamed the butcher shop wearing the same faded Giant cap from the time he arrived in the morning until closing time. “I even wear it to bed,” he told me. And that gave me an idea.
I became convinced that the streak might end if I could somehow get Max to take off his hat. With accumulated allowances, I went to Wolf’s Sport Shop and bought a new Giant hat, black with the orange logo. “Your team is doing so well I wanted to give you a present,” I explained to Max. With a twinkle in his eye, Max thanked me but explained that he didn’t want it ruined by the blood and grease of the butcher shop. Instead, he reassured me, as my heart began to fall, he would keep it in an honored place on his bedside table so he would constantly be reminded of my generosity. I nodded with pretended pleasure. Thus Max continued to wear his battered old cap, and the Giants kept winning until their streak had reached an astonishing sixteen games.
While the Giants played with abandon, the Dodgers were tight and jittery, swinging at bad balls and stranding too many men on base. Both Snider and Reese fell into a slump, Campanella was injured and Newcombe exhausted. By the third week of September, the Dodgers’ once-formidable lead had shrunk to a thin margin of three games. There was, however, one bright ray of new hope—the pitching of my friend from Rockville Centre Night, Clem Labine.
At the end of August, Labine made his first majorleague start, pitching a seven-hit, 3-1 victory over Cincinnati. He followed this performance with three straight victories in September. Everyone was talking about Clem Labine, who had emerged from obscurity to become the hope of the Dodgers. I pulled my two Labine autographs from my shoe box of baseball memorabilia. Never would I find a better opportunity for trading a Labine for a Robinson. Eddie Rust accepted my deal on the condition I throw in a Billy Cox and an Andy Pafko. I hesitated, not because it wasn’t a good deal, but because I remembered how I had told Labine that I could trade him for a Robinson on even terms. But Eddie wouldn’t reconsider. It was three for o
ne, or nothing. Reluctantly, I agreed. We came to terms, but later that night, as I placed my signed Robinson card on my bedside table so I could look at it before going to sleep, I felt a twinge of guilt. I worried that my bad faith might bring bad luck to the young rookie.
And sure enough, the very next day, Clem Labine’s star began to wane. In the first inning of his fifth major league start, he lost control of his curveball and loaded the bases. Dressen saw that he was pitching from the stretch and directed him to take a full windup. Labine, feeling he had better control from the stretch, disobeyed Dressen’s order. The next batter hit a grand slam. Furious at the insubordination of his young pitcher, Dressen not only pulled Labine from the game but withdrew him from the rotation. Though Labine later admitted that he had made a mistake in ignoring the manager, Dressen made an even larger error when he sat down his hottest pitcher in order to teach him what would prove one of the most ill-timed lessons in the history of the Dodger franchise. The decision probably cost the Dodgers at least one or two games, games which turned out to be decisive.
The Giants’ incredible surge, twelve wins in their last thirteen games, thirty-seven of the last forty-four, reached a dramatic climax when they tied the Dodgers for first place with only one game left in the regular season. Once again, the entire season would come down to the final day. On the last Sunday in September, the Giants beat the Braves in Boston 3-2, and moved into sole possession of first place for the first time all season. Everything now depended on the outcome of the Dodgers’ contest against the Philadelphia Phillies.