Sister Marian told us stories about the early Christian martyrs who were willing, sometimes even eager, to die for their faith when put to the test by the evil Roman emperor, Nero. After a great fire destroyed much of Rome six decades after Christ, Nero’s people began to suspect that he had started the fire himself to clear a site for his proposed “Golden House” and had celebrated the conflagration on his fiddle. To deflect the people’s wrath, he made the Christians of Rome his scapegoats, sending them into the jaws of lions if they insisted on professing their Christian faith. Many a night I lay awake worrying whether I might lack courage to die for my faith, fearing that when the test came I would choose instead to live. Lions began populating my dreams, until visits to the Bronx Zoo found me standing in front of the lion’s cage, whispering frantically to the somnolent, tawny beast behind the bars in hopes that, if ever I were sent as a martyr to the lions’ den, my new friend would testify to his fellow lions that I was a good person. Evading the terrible choice, I could exhibit courage, affirm my faith, and still manage to survive.
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So RICH were the traditions and the liturgy of my church that I could not imagine being anything other than Catholic. Though there were Jews and Protestants on our block—the Lubars and the Barthas were Jewish, the Friedles and the Greenes Protestant—I knew almost nothing about these other religions. I could not describe what distinguished an Orthodox Jew from a Reform Jew, or say what made someone a Methodist rather than a Presbyterian or Episcopalian. I understood that our neighbors were devoted to their religions, lighting Sabbath candles on Friday or attending services Saturday or Sunday. Their church or synagogue was central to their social lives. The Friedles were very active in the Mr. and Mrs. Club at the Congregational church, which sponsored dances, pot-luck dinners, and card-playing evenings, and their children attended Sunday school every week. I knew that the Lubars were active in their temple and that the Greenes, who had been the Greenbergs before converting to Protestantism, were equally involved in their church. Indeed, in my neighborhood, everyone seemed to be deeply involved in one religion or another. Although I observed the fellowship that other religions provided, I had no inkling of what beliefs they inculcated in their followers. We were taught only that these people were non-Catholics and that we should not read their literature or inquire about their beliefs. Furthermore, it was, we thought, a grievous sin for us to set foot in one of their churches or synagogues.
It was this last admonition that produced my first spiritual crisis. In early February 1950, our newspaper, the Long Island News and Owl, reported that Dodger catcher Roy Campanella was coming to Rockville Centre. He planned to speak at a benefit for the local black church, then under construction, the Shiloh Baptist Church. The program was to be held in the Church of the Ascension, an Episcopal church one block from St. Agnes.
The son of an Italian American father and an African American mother, Campanella had joined the Baltimore Elite Giants, one of the great teams in the Negro League, when he was only fifteen. In short order, his skill in calling pitches, his ability to fathom the vulnerability of an opposing hitter, his strong arm, his prowess at the plate, and his endurance became legendary. He once caught four games in a single day: a twin bill in Cincinnati on a Sunday afternoon, followed by a bus ride to Middletown, Ohio, and another doubleheader that evening. Unlike Jackie Robinson, who considered his experience in the Negro League demeaning, Campanella claimed to have thoroughly enjoyed his years in black baseball. Less combative and more conciliatory than Robinson, Campanella repeatedly said that he thought of himself as a ballplayer, not a pioneer; that, when he was catching or hitting, he focused only on what the pitcher was throwing, not the color of his opponent. Since his rookie season with the Dodgers in 1948, he had established himself unequivocally as the best catcher in the National League. In 1949 he led all catchers with a .287 batting average, twenty-two doubles, and twenty-two home runs.
I couldn’t wait to tell my father that his favorite player would be coming to our town, so he would get tickets and take me with him. I begged my mother to take me to the train station so I could tell my father the dramatic news as soon as he stepped off the platform, As our car passed St. Agnes on the way to the station, however, it dawned on me that Campanella was scheduled to speak in the Episcopal church. “Oh, no!” I said. “It can’t be.” “What?” my mother asked. Close to tears, I announced that there was no hope of my going after all, since I was forbidden to set foot in the Episcopal church. Campanella was coming to my town and I could not even go to see him. To my surprise, my mother simply said, “Well, let’s see, let’s wait and talk to Daddy.” When I explained the dilemma to my father, he said that he understood the church’s prohibition against participating in the service of another church, but he didn’t really believe it extended to attending a lecture by a baseball player in the parish hall. He was certain it would be proper for us to go and would get the tickets the following day.
Reassured, I put my qualms aside until the big night arrived and the moment came to cross the threshold of the white clapboard church. A sudden terror took possession of me, and my knees began to tremble. Fearing that we would be struck dead in retaliation for our act of defiance, I squeezed my body against my father and let his momentum carry me past the door, through the sanctuary, and into the parish hall. At first, I tried to keep my eyes on the ground, but I soon found myself surveying the simple altar, small windows, and plain wooden pews, so much less ornate and imposing than ours. A podium had been set up in the hall with about 150 folding chairs, and we were lucky enough to find seats in the second row.
The program opened with choral singing, which subsided as the black Baptist minister, Reverend Morgan Days, came forward to introduce the squat, powerful Campanella, dressed in a black shirt and a light jacket with broad lapels. His topic was not baseball, but “Delinquency and Sportsmanship.” Nonetheless, I tried to absorb every word. Children, he argued, were not born with prejudice but were infected with it by their elders. The only way to combat this cycle of bigotry was to bring kids of different races together early on in social and recreational programs. He had a surprisingly squeaky voice for a powerful-looking man, but his message rang with such conviction that he received a standing ovation. When his presentation ended, Campanella stood around for half an hour shaking hands with everyone. There were a dozen things I wanted to say, but when he turned and took my hand, I managed only to thank him for being a Dodger and for coming to our town. The warmth of his broad smile was all I needed to know that this was a night I would never forget.
My earlier fear returned, however, as I climbed into bed that night. The warnings of the nuns tumbled through my head, convincing me that I had traded the life of my everlasting soul for the joy of one glorious night when I held Roy Campanella’s strong hand in a forbidden church. Jumping out of bed, I got down on my knees and repeated every prayer I could remember, in the hope that each would wipe away part of the stain that the Episcopal church had left on my soul. I was distracted in school the following day, and again that night had difficulty falling asleep. It was a Friday night, and my parents were playing bridge with three other couples in the dining room, so I could not run downstairs and curl up on the porch sofa, as I sometimes did when I could not fall asleep.
I must have dozed off, because the long-drawn-out squeal of a siren awakened me. Three times the siren wailed, paused, then started again, summoning members of the volunteer fire department. I ran downstairs to find my worried parents and their friends. “They’re calling all the surrounding towns!” my father exclaimed, listening to the pattern of the alarm. “Not just Rockville Centre,” said my mother. At that moment, my sister Jeanne ran into the house with her friends. “There’s been an awful train wreck!” she announced, breathless. “Two trains—it’s gruesome!” Shaking, she burst into tears. We found out from her friends that they had followed the crowd to the station after a basketball game at the high school, but the scene was so appall
ing that they had to turn around and come home. My parents and their friends debated whether they should go into town; I remember my mother remarking that it was ghoulish to be a spectator to misery and unable to do anything about it.
As I eavesdropped, I began to discern in this calamity an opportunity for my own redemption. If there were no priests present, if I could locate a dying person and baptize him “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” thus granting his entrance to heaven, I would earn considerable points toward purging my sin. I grabbed my coat and slipped undetected out the front door while my parents were still absorbed by the catastrophic news. Although it was cold and dark, I wasn’t afraid as I set forth on the familiar route to my grammar school, knowing the train station was in the same direction. Once I rounded the corner at Brower, the pitch-darkness scared me and I considered returning home, but just then one of my sister’s friends offered me a ride, and soon we were joined by hundreds of people, all moving in the same direction. Emergency floodlights and car headlights leached the color from faces as the crowd surged forward. My heart hammered with excitement. I was ready. Though I had no water to pour on the forehead of my convert, I figured I could find some clean snow that would serve the same purpose.
My zeal gave way to horror as I approached the station. The fitful lights picked out people huddled in shock and misery, bandaged heads and limbs, men hustling with difficulty up the embankment carrying a stretcher on which lay a motionless blanketed body. I fought the impulse to flee. Pushing my way toward the tracks, I was small enough to maneuver through the immense crowd that had gathered around the carnage.
It was the worst wreck to date in the history of the Long Island Rail Road, a head-on collision of two trains, one eastbound for Babylon, the other westbound for New York. The collision occurred on a short temporary stretch of single track set up to run trains in both directions while a construction project was under way. The engineer of the eastbound train had inexplicably failed to heed a stop signal and plowed straight into the oncoming train. Most of the casualties were from the front cars on both trains, which were split down the middle by the force of the collision. “It looked like a battlefield,” one policeman said later. “I never heard such screams. I’ll hear them till I die.”
More than forty doctors were at the scene, some still dressed in the tuxedos they had worn to a big event at the local hospital. It was hard to see at first through the haze of the blue light from the acetylene torches used to cut away the steel that was trapping bodies inside the cars. Scores of volunteer firemen aided the doctors in amputations performed by flashlight with only local anesthesia.
Ambulances arrived from as far away as twenty miles. In the glare of their floodlights7 I saw at once that I wasn’t needed. A half-dozen priests were moving through the wreckage, bending down to minister to those in pain, giving last rites, providing comfort to stricken relatives who had converged on the scene. This grotesque and terrifying scene was not the one I had rehearsed with my doll propped up on my pillow. My missionary theatrics completely vanished. My pretensions suddenly seemed ugly and absurd, and I longed for my orderly bedroom, for my glass cabinet of dolls and the set of Bobbsey Twins books beside my bed. I turned away and started home, running as fast as I could. Quietly, I let myself in through the front door, tiptoed carefully upstairs so as not to disturb the conversation of my parents and their guests in the dining room, put my coat under my bed, and fell into a troubled sleep.
The next morning, the collision was the talk of the village. Large headlines and photographs of the wreckage covered the front pages of the newspapers, along with a list of the twenty-nine people who had died. Obsessively, I tried to read each story. I repeated the names of the dead with grim curiosity: John Weeks, thirty, a graduate of Yale and an editor of Time; Harry Shedd 3d, a senior at Harvard who had temporarily suspended his studies to work at Simon & Schuster; Jefferson Allen, twenty-four, a glassblower killed along with his father, Charles; and Martin Steel, thirty-one, a veteran of nine campaigns in Italy and Germany during the Second World War. Their concise biographies seemed disconnected from the frightful scene that filled my mind. Images of mangled bodies pursued me, and every time I thought of that night, I squeezed back tears. Nor could I explain my inordinate fixation with the horrible night to my parents. Not only had I sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night, but I had made myself something they detested: a spectator to misery. My secret heaped yet another sin on my already endangered soul.
FEAR THAT another train crash could happen and that my father and all the men on our block might be found among the dead began to torment me. I begged my father to find another way to go to work. This was not possible, he explained. “Why don’t you come with me tomorrow? We’ll take the train together, spend the entire day at the Williamsburg, Bank, then take the train home. You’ll see how safe it is.” For as long as I could remember, I had awakened from sleep to the sound of my father showering and shaving in the bathroom across the hallway, preparing to leave for work. How often I had wished to accompany him into the city with all the other men instead of being left behind with the women and children. Now, if I could overcome my fear of the train, that wish could come true. “I’d love to,” I said.
After the train crash at the Rockville Centre station (above), my father, pictured (below) with my sisters, took me with him to work at the Williamsburg Savings Bank (right) to convince me that traveling by train was still safe. That day in the city opened up to me the world outside my neighborhood.
The next morning, my mother prepared bacon and eggs for my father and me. Though I was rarely hungry before school, on this morning I was determined to do whatever my father did. I ate my eggs over easy and sipped a cup of tea as he drank his coffee. While my father distributed his cigarettes, money clip, and watch into his jacket, pants, and vest pockets, my mother cleared the table, washed our cups and plates, and swept the floor. When she kissed us both goodbye, I felt a new sense of importance. Like soldiers off to war, we marched to the corner bus stop, falling in with the other men of our neighborhood. “Who is that young lady you’re with this morning, Mike?” asked Mr. Rust with a pleasant smile. Across from the drugstore we boarded the bus, and moments later rolled past the streets that led to my grammar school, where all my less fortunate schoolmates would soon be assembling. In short order, the cross atop St. Agnes came into view and we pulled up to the Long Island Rail Road station.
When the train arrived, we headed directly for the last car, which was the smoking car. We found two seats together and my dad handed me the sports section of the New York Daily News to peruse while he lit a Chesterfield and leaned back to read the Herald Tribune. He seemed to know everyone in the car, and proudly introduced me to a half-dozen unfamiliar men. Across the aisle from us, a group of four men had turned their seats to face one another so they could play cards. Except for me, the entire car was filled with men. I paid little attention to their conversations about politics, their opinions of President Truman and the war in Korea, about which I knew little. When the talk turned to baseball, however, the confusion cleared and I became suddenly attentive.
The 1950 season was about to begin, and the Dodgers and the Red Sox were overwhelming favorites to win the championships of their leagues. But there were ominous signs: “I don’t like this,” muttered one man, shaking his head and glancing up from his newspaper. “Robinson’s reported to camp twelve pounds overweight.” Two fellow passengers shook their heads in agreement.
“Jackie Robinson will get himself in shape before the season starts,” I interjected, as if I’d been personally attacked.
The men smiled indulgently.
Undeterred, I assured them, “You’ll see on opening day.”
“Newcombe’s way off his rookie form, pitched too much last year on two days’ rest, the old sophomore jinx,” another man chimed in.
“Don’t worry,” my father said, “Newk’s slow spring probably doesn’t mean
anything.”
Participation in their baseball conversation was so much fun I forgot my apprehension about the train ride, and we arrived in the city before I knew it, emerging at Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, right across from One Hansen Place, site of the Williamsburg Savings Bank building, which my father was then examining. The only Manhattanstyle skyscraper in Brooklyn, the Williamsburg Savings Bank was built in 1929, around the same time as the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings. From its vast banking floor, designed to make every depositor feel like a millionaire, the building rose thirty-four stories to a tower adorned with the largest four-sided clock in the world. Capped by a golden dome, the Williamsburg Savings Bank was celebrated by Brooklyn residents as the “Tower of Strength.” Over the years, my father had examined this bank so many times that he apparently felt an affiliation with the building itself. He gave an affectionate pat to one of the two lions, which guarded the main entrance, emblematic of the security offered by a savings bank. Metalwork silhouettes in the entrance gate represented the various crafts and occupations which had built and sustained the institution: electrician, carpenter, tile worker, machinist, plumber, ironworker.
The day’s work was just beginning as we walked into the Main Banking Room, a cathedral of commerce, with its multicolored marble floor, stained-glass windows, and a ceiling of golden glass mosaic from which hung elaborate chandeliers. Customers were already beginning to line up at the teller windows as we took an elevator to the secondfloor offices where my father and his fellow examiners worked. Beaming, I stood alongside him as he introduced me to about a dozen of his male colleagues and to several female secretaries.