That afternoon the neighborhood was silent. The customary shouts of playing children, the friendly gossip of grown-ups gathered on front lawns, had all been stilled. As we gathered in my house to watch the game, my parents greeted the Greenes and their three children, my father laughing when he saw the entire family wearing caps of Dodger blue. Mr. Rust and Eddie entered, along with Elaine Friedle, whose Yankees had already clinched the American League pennant.
The game started disastrously. The Phillies took a 6-1 lead in the third, due in part to an error by Robinson, who had struck out and hit into a double play in his first two trips at bat. In the fifth inning, it was Robinson again, this time as hero. He sent a triple to the wall which drove in one run, and then he scored a second run himself a few minutes later. In the eighth, the Dodgers scored three more runs, and the ninth inning ended with the game tied.
In the bottom of the twelfth inning, with two outs, the Phillies loaded the bases. Devastation was only ninety feet away. Then Eddie Waitkus hit a screaming line drive over second base. Robinson raced to his right, dove, and lay sprawled on the ground. As the baserunner on third raced toward the plate, the umpire ran toward the prostrate Robinson, saw the ball in his glove, and jerked his thumb skyward, signaling that the inning was over. The crowd in Philadelphia, which had been on its feet, fell silent, but my house exploded in celebration.
The cameras followed Robinson as he was helped back to the dugout, where he sat slumped on the bench. The Dodger trainer held a piece of cotton soaked in ammonia under his nose. The announcers told us that he probably wouldn’t be able to stay in the game. “Push him out there, Doc,” Reese yelled. “He’ll be all right once he gets on the field.” And after the Dodgers failed to score in the top of the thirteenth, there he was, standing right beside second.
I sat tense and silent as the Phillies came to bat. I always hated it when the other team was up at bat, but this was far worse than usual. Seeing my anxiety, my father tried to comfort me. “I know,” he said, “nothing’s worse than extra innings played on the other team’s field. One swing can end it all.” I wasn’t comforted. That was the whole point.
In the top of the fourteenth inning, the game still tied, with two outs, the mighty Robinson came to bat. “C’mon, Robby,” I urged, “you can do it. I know you can”—and then, flatteringly, “you always do.” I tried to summon all my strength and send it through the television set. Robinson wheeled on the pitch and drove an immense home run into the bleachers that would win the game and send the Dodgers into a three-game playoff for the championship of the National League. We had done it. We all raced out into the street. Grown men were slapping neighbors on the back, pumping each other’s hands, as if they had just received an award.
That night, cheering crowds greeted both the Giants and the Dodgers as their respective trains converged on New York. “I’ve seen a lot of ball games in my time,” Dodger pitching coach Clyde Sukeforth said as he stood on the platform, “but I’ve never seen a greater one.”
It was the second-most-dramatic moment of the 1951 season. The most memorable was yet to come.
THE COMPLETION of a continental cable a few months earlier had made possible the first national audience for any sporting event. Thus baseball enthusiasts from all over America were watching as more than thirty thousand fans crowded Ebbets Field for the opening game of the playoffs, to see home runs by Bobby Thomson and Monte Irvin give the Giants a 3-1 victory. The next day, at the Polo Grounds, his pitching staff exhausted by the ordeal of the closing weeks, Dressen called on Clem Labine, who pitched a brilliant six-hit, 10-0 shutout in the biggest game of his career. In the Daily News the next morning, I saw a picture of a smiling Dressen, his arm draped around the young rookie hurler. I couldn’t help imagining how things might have turned out if Dressen hadn’t put Labine into the doghouse two weeks earlier.
Giant Bobby Thomson swings for a home run against Dodger Ralph Branca to make the “shot heard round the world” and win the 1951 National League pennant. The Giants mob Thomson as he crosses home plate. It was the worst day of my life as a fan.
October 3, 1951, was unseasonably warm, more like summer than early fall. When I returned home for lunch, both my sisters had already arrived, having left the city so they might watch the big game with my mother. Jeanne had graduated from high school with high honors the previous June and had followed Charlotte into the nursing program at Lenox Hill. Despite Charlotte’s claim that she had been drawn to nursing for its starched white uniforms, she had already become an exceptional nurse. At the age of twenty-four, she was the head nurse on the evening shift of the male surgical ward. Her tough, no-nonsense supervision of the nursing staff had earned her the nickname “Stonewall Jackson.”
When I implored my mother to let me remain at home after lunch, she agreed without hesitation. “Of course,” she said. What other decision was possible? Our teachers had let us listen to the first two games on the radio. But I badly wanted to watch this culminating game. And I wanted to be in the sanctity of my home, sitting on the couch, my scorebook across my lap. Later, I discovered that more than half my classmates had failed to return to school that afternoon.
Each team had saved its best for last—Sal Maglie against Don Newcombe, both twenty-game winners. For seven innings, they battled to a 1-1 tie. It was the worst kind of stressful game. Then, in the top of the eighth, after a Duke Snider single sent Pee Wee Reese to third, the fearsome Maglie threw a sharp breaking curve which soared past both Robinson and his own catcher. Reese scored and the Dodgers were ahead. “It serves the old bean-bailer right!” I said. Now, with a man on second, hoping to set up a double play, Durocher ordered Maglie to walk Robinson. But the next batter, Billy Cox singled, both runners scored, and the Dodgers were ahead 4-1. Quickly, I turned to my scorebook and meticulously drew the lines which told the story, anxious to inscribe the glorious moment for enduring history.
In the eighth inning, a visibly tiring Newcombe pitched himself out of a jam, and the score was still 4-1 as the game entered the bottom of the ninth. “Three more outs,” I prayed silently, “just give us three more outs.” And even though I always feared the worst in the most gloomy depths of my imagination, I could never have conceived what was to come.
After Alvin Dark led off with a single, Don Mueller hit a ground ball up the middle, sending Dark to third. With one out, Whitey Lockman hit a solid double, scoring Dark and sending Mueller to third, where he collapsed on the base path, having caught his spike on the base. All eyes were focused on the stricken Mueller, who, grimacing in pain, was lifted onto a stretcher. Almost unnoticed, Chuck Dressen left the dugout and strode purposefully to the mound. “Oh, no,” I exclaimed involuntarily. “Newk will come through. Leave him in.”
“He’s had it,” disagreed my mother. “Bring on Erskine.” But it was Ralph Branca who began the long walk to the pitching mound. I was horrified. Images of Branca’s other failures filled my mind—his reputation for giving up hits in tight situations, the home-run balls he had pitched to Bobby Thomson and Monte Irvin in the first game. “No, no,” I whispered, addressing my entreaties to the empty, indifferent air, “please send him back; anybody but Branca.”
But my pleas were fruitless. The stage was set, the moment irrevocable. Ralph Branca stood on the mound, the destiny of millions in his hands. And Bobby Thomson was advancing to the plate.
“Don’t worry,” Jeanne said to me. “Everything’s going to work out.”
“This is it,” announced Charlotte. “He’s going to hit a homer right now and win it for the Giants.”
Almost instantly, before I could even feel angry, my hands clenched, my body rigid, I saw Thomson swing. Then came the never-to-be-forgotten voice of Giant announcer Russ Hodges. “There’s a long fly…. It’s gonna be … I believe.” He stopped for a moment. Then, as the ball dropped majestically into the lower deck of seats, there came that horrifying shout. “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the
pennant!”
I threw down my scorebook, the last page never to be completed. For a moment I believed that my sister’s prophecy had influenced the outcome and I hated her with all my heart. That night and the following day, I couldn’t bear to talk about the game, nor did I read the papers the following day, though I did catch a glimpse of Branca stretched out alone on the clubhouse steps. I was told that he couldn’t stop crying, repeating over and over, “Why me, why me?”
It was the worst moment in my life as a fan, worse even than any loss to the Yankees in the World Series, and clearly I was not alone. From that moment to this, Bobby Thomson and the Brooklyn Dodgers would be forever linked, the mere mention of his name calling forth in every Dodger fan instant recognition, comradeship, a memory of where they were, how they felt. I now live in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, not far from the Old North Bridge, where the American Revolution began. Whenever I take visitors to see the monument, and stand before the marble shaft, reading that lovely inscription which commemorates “the shot heard round the world,” I think privately of Bobby Thomson’s home run.
Despondent and humiliated, I could not make myself return to the butcher shop to complete the last entry on the Bryn Mawr bulletin board. When walking to and from school, I would cross to the opposite side of the street so they couldn’t see me. After almost a week had passed, a large bouquet of red roses arrived at my door addressed to me. It was the first time anyone had sent me flowers.
“Ragmop, please come back,” the card read. “We miss you. Your friends at the Bryn Mawr Meat Market.”
My excitement about the flowers drowned my humiliation and pain over the Dodgers’ collapse. I ran to the store to thank them, and while I was there, I took a deep breath and made the final entry.
CHAPTER FIVE
MY FIRST EXPOSURE to the Cold War that dominated American politics in the decades after World War II came through the disheveled figure of Whittaker Chambers, the most notorious alumnus in the history of South Side Senior High School in Rockville Centre. Chambers’ sensational accusation that a high-ranking State Department official, the patrician and greatly respected Alger Hiss, had spied for the Soviet Union, catapulted him into the national spotlight. Chambers went on to provide the House Committee on Un-American Activities with the names of other government officials who, he alleged, had secretly served the Soviet Union. His testimony helped inaugurate a search for traitors in our midst; and, not incidentally, gave an enormous boost to the political career of Richard Nixon, who, like John Kennedy of Massachusetts, was a war veteran serving his second term in Congress.
However one felt about Chambers, and judgment was seriously divided, he had become the most controversial of our local citizens. Memories were searched for tales from his boyhood, for the origins, as it were, of this traitor turned patriot. He had, according to rumor, made a suicide pact with his brother Dick, but after Dick had killed himself, Chambers reneged on his end of the deal. Later, he scandalized our area of Long Island by bringing a woman of “low repute” to live in his mother’s house. Although I heard these stories and more, the only one that hit home was the tale of his outrageous class-day address—a story I first heard while listening to my sister and her friends discuss the graduation oration which Jeanne had been chosen to deliver.
“I’m going to pull a Chambers,” Jeanne asserted.
“What’s a Chambers?” I asked.
Some thirty years ago, Jeanne’s friends explained, Chambers had been selected by his classmates to compose a class prophecy. When he submitted his speech to the principal for required approval, his cynical, vituperative remarks were deemed inappropriate. Unless he changed them, he would not be allowed to speak. He made the required revisions, but on the appointed day, he reverted to his original speech, which, among other unsavory passages, predicted a career in prostitution for one of his classmates. Angry school officials forbade him to attend the graduation ceremony the next day. They withheld his diploma until the middle of the summer, when his distraught mother, arguing that his artistic temperament had gotten the better of him, finally persuaded them to release it.
Jeanne’s friends explained that it was a great tradition to follow Chambers, that it was Jeanne’s responsibility to deliver a perverse speech—to tell her classmates that they should aim low rather than high, follow their self-interest rather than their ideals, be ready to snitch on their closest friends if it would help them to get ahead.
“You’d never do that, would you?” I asked, not liking the whole business one bit, but Jeanne and her friends simply smiled. By the time Jeanne stood up to deliver her speech on the theme “So Much to Remember,” I was anything but relaxed. As soon as she began to speak, however, I realized that they had been teasing me. Jeanne delivered an idealistic speech, and received a warm welcome from the audience. I was so relieved that I couldn’t even remember to be annoyed. But, clearly, Chambers had left his mark in our small world, his name connoting unimaginable transgressions.
In the larger world, the apprehension that communist subversion was undermining America, heightened by Chambers’ disclosures, was intensified enormously by news that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. It seemed inconceivable to many that the Russians had mastered nuclear science on their own. Traitorous spies must have provided the secret. The search for communist sympathizers in the government spiraled into a nationwide hysteria.
Now that America no longer had a monopoly over nuclear weapons, the devastating power which had brought the Japanese to their knees might be turned against us. The threat of an atomic attack not only changed the course of the Cold War; it produced reactions which filtered down from the offices of government into the lives of an entire generation of young people. To us, the Cold War was not an abstraction. It was the air-raid drills in school, the call for bomb shelters, and exposure to the deliberately unsettling horror of civil-defense films. Our generation was the first to live with the knowledge that, in a single instant, everyone and everything we knew—our family, our friends, our block, our world—could be brought to an end. If a bomb exploded in Manhattan, which was considered a likely target, its fireball would vaporize everything from Central Park to Washington Square, and produce deadly fallout over a twenty-to-thirty-mile radius. On the basis of some obscure calculation, we were informed that the bomb’s impact would reach Rockville Centre in twelve minutes.
The air-raid drills conducted by our school were treated with the utmost seriousness. When the shriek of sirens interrupted our studies, we practiced two different drills. On the assumption that the bomb was close by, we were to fall to the floor, face down beneath our desks, elbows over our heads, eyes shut. Although I could never figure out how my flimsy desk, with its worn inkwell and its years of name-scratching, could protect me from the atomic bomb, I did what I was told, and kept absolutely still while we awaited the shriek of the falling missile. In the second drill, designed for situations in which there was time to take cover, teachers led us into the hallway and down into the basement, where they directed us to lean against the wall and fold our arms over our heads.
We were told to practice the first drill—the one which anticipated an imminent explosion—at our homes at night, so we would be prepared to fall out of bed and onto the floor with maximum speed. Between these practice “atomic fallings,” and the hundreds of prayers I said each night for my own account, for the poor souls in purgatory, and for my family and the Dodgers, it is a wonder that I ever got to sleep.
My Catholic faith provided one peculiar benefit to offset the possible destruction of the entire world in a nuclear holocaust. I had always assumed that my afterlife would require many restless years in purgatory before I was lifted into heaven. If my death coincided with the last day of the world, however, there would be no layover in purgatory, for on that last day, we were taught, Christ would pass a General Judgment on all the men, women, and children who had ever lived, sentencing each person either to heaven or to hell.
But what if the bomb fell, whole cities were destroyed, and yet some people survived? Though we understood there was no hope of living if the bomb fell directly on our village, the civil-defense authorities optimistically assured us that, with twelve minutes’ warning and with efficient civil-defense mechanisms in place, the casualties in our city could be reduced by 50 percent. I remember seeing a film in school: How Can You Stay Alive in an Atom Bomb Blast? The narrator described a self-contained underground shelter which could be built in your backyard for less than two thousand dollars. More practical for most people was the film’s suggestion that an existing basement could be converted into a shelter, and stocked with canned foods, soft drinks, candles, and a first-aid kit. The film also extolled the importance of civil-defense volunteers, who would assume all manner of responsibilities in case of an attack, serving as air-raid wardens and auxiliary policemen, and directing people to emergency shelters.
At regular intervals, the entire town, participated in what were called “Atom Attack Tests.” All pedestrian and vehicular traffic was brought to a halt when the siren rang. Thousands of volunteers were mobilized, including Boy Scouts and high-school seniors, to act the role of casualties and evacuees. Victims were carried to emergency hospitals; makeshift shelters were supplied with cots and blankets. In one location, volunteer firemen fought to subdue a blazing pit of oil, nearly blinded by thick “smoke” provided by a fog machine that belonged to the Public Works Mosquito Division. Others fought a simulated apartment-fire without the aid of water, on the assumption that an atomic blast would put the water mains out of service. The films and demonstrations were not meant to frighten us, we were told, but to prepare us. No amount of preparation, however, could hide the gruesome fact that an atomic bomb would kill tens of thousands of people, and, as the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, would later express it: “The living would envy the dead.”