My Remarkable Journey (6 page)

We knew about the death threats. We knew how the manager of the Phillies tried to rattle Jackie by having the players in his
dugout aim bats as if they were machine guns and act like they were shooting at Jackie when Jackie came up to the plate. We
knew how Jackie had to hold his temper when other players spiked him and called him nigger. We heard how our captain, Pee
Wee Reese from Kentucky, put his arm around Jackie when the crowd in Cincinnati shouted every insult under the sun at him
during batting practice. We heard all about it from the voice of Red Barber, who was from the Deep South. As time passed,
we heard about Jackie and Don Newcombe and some of the other black Dodgers integrating the Chase Park Plaza hotel in St. Louis.
But it wasn’t until I spoke with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. years later that I understood the magnitude of what Jackie had
accomplished. It was Jackie, King said, who started the civil rights movement. It was Jackie, King said, who made his job
easier.

To a kid arguing with Herbie at Maltz’s candy store, Jackie was the second baseman who in his MVP 1949 season hit .342 in
593 at bats with 38 doubles and 37 stolen bases. Statistics was something else baseball gave me that would help later on when
I was a broadcaster. You had to know your numbers cold if you were arguing with Herbie. You had to be precise. Get caught
with the wrong statistic in an argument with Herbie, and you were dead. How could anything else you said be believed? Where
I grew up, statistics were ammunition. The only time in my life I ever got into a fistfight was after Herbie argued that the
Yankees’ second baseman, Snuffy Stern-weiss, was better than Jackie.

Looking back, I can only marvel at how lucky I was to grow up announcing into a rolled-up ten-cent scorecard at Ebbets Field.
To see Billy Cox at third base with his beat-up old glove. He’d hold that glove in his right hand while the pitcher pitched.
Then he’d slide it on his left just in time to catch the ground ball that the hitter smashed his way. He’d make the catch,
and look at the ball before throwing to first base. How lucky I was to see Duke Snider and Willie Mays and my brother’s favorite
player, Stan “The Man” Musial. To take the subway to Yankee Stadium and watch Joe DiMaggio. No matter how much you hated the
Yankees, you couldn’t hate DiMaggio. It was the best of times even when it was the worst.

The saddest moment of my life came in the 1951 season. It was even sadder than the day my father died because I wasn’t sad
when my father died. I was
angry
at him for leaving me. For pure sadness, nothing could compare to what happened to the Dodgers in 1951.

We had a thirteen-and-a-half-game lead in August with only a month and a half to go. Day after day, the Giants chipped away
at that lead. Curse of curses, their manager was none other than Leo Durocher—who’d left the Dodgers and gone across town.
The worst part was that we weren’t blowing our lead. The Dodgers would win two out of three, but Leo and the Giants would
win three out of three.

The Giants caught up to and passed us, but the Dodgers managed to tie on the last game of the season when Jackie hit a home
run to beat the Phillies in the fourteenth inning. A three-game playoff was scheduled. Even if you’re not a baseball fan,
you’ve probably heard about it. The Giants won the first game. The Dodgers won the second. I’ll never forget the newspaper
column Dick Young wrote before the final game. The entire column listed the word for
one
in what seemed like every language.

We were ahead 4–1 in the ninth inning. We were one damn inning away from the World Series. I was listening to the radio in
the office of a job I had at the time. Of course, the Giants started chipping away. Ralph Branca was brought in to pitch.
Bobby Thomson came to the plate. Now we were ahead, 4–2, and the Giants had two men on base. Everyone was poised. Nobody had
any idea that Leo and the Giants were reading the catcher’s signs from center field. Then Thomson hit a fly ball. In a lot
of ballparks that’s all it would have been—a fly ball. But the Polo Grounds was a funny park. There was an overhang in left.
The ball went over the fence. There was Leo jumping up and down at third base.

Most people heard the voice of Russ Hodges: “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” But I was listening
to Red Barber, who must have prepared for this, because he put it into perspective by talking about all those families who
had lost boys in Korea. The sun was still going to come up tomorrow for Dodgers fans, he said, but I was in a daze. I left
work, got off at the subway station in Bay Parkway, and bumped into the last person in the world I wanted to see. Davy Fried.
All he did—son of a bitch—was laugh. Never said a word. It was a horrible laugh, a demoralizing laugh, and my shoulders sank.
I’ll never forget it.

Years later, long after the Dodgers had finally beaten the Yankees to win the 1955 World Series, I emceed a banquet attended
by a lot of the players from the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants. At the end, I called up Branca and Thomson. I looked at Branca.
Then I looked at Thomson. And I said to Thomson, “I still hate you.”

In 1951, the year of the Giants’ miracle run, Larry would get in arguments every day with Giants fans. Not only with our friends,
but with our friends’ fathers. Larry was like an encyclopedia of baseball. He’d throw out statistics and get these fifty-year-old
men frustrated to the point where they were frothing mad.

After Bobby Thomson hit the home run, Larry disappeared for three days. Every Giants fan in the neighborhood was saying, “Where’s
Larry?” They couldn’t wait to get at him.

Then the Giants went into the World Series and started to lose to the Yankees. Suddenly, Larry appeared and continued to harass
these Giants fans about how their team had let down the National League. These were old men. He would drive them crazy.

As if there weren’t enough passion in baseball and Maltz’s candy store, girls entered the picture when I was about age sixteen.
Women have always mystified me. The more I know about them, the less. I once talked with Stephen Hawking, the physicist, the
guy who could tell you about black holes in space. At the end of the interview, I said, “You’ve been called the smartest man
on the planet. What don’t you know? What puzzles you?” He said, “Women.”

For me, it’s always been a little like the song in
My Fair Lady
.

Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?

I never really talked to my mother about girls. Mothers aren’t women anyway, they’re mothers. My affairs with the opposite
sex didn’t get off to a good start at Lafayette High when Herbie bet me five dollars that I couldn’t get Iris Siegel to walk
out of school with me. Iris was the most beautiful cheerleader, a far-off fantasy, but the bet was winnable because I simply
had to walk down the front steps next to her.

“I don’t have to hold her hand or anything?”

“That’s right,” Herbie said. “Five bucks.”

I went straight to Iris and asked her. But she told me she was in a hurry to get to cheerleading practice. I confessed the
bet to her, told her I’d give her the five bucks. But she went on her way. It didn’t get any lower than handing Herbie the
cash in front of all our friends at the bottom of those steps.

At least I thought so at the time. My first kiss turned out to be even more embarrassing. It was a cold night, and I had just
started smoking. Hoo-ha’s date lived on one end of the block, Herbie’s on the other. Mine lived in the middle. Judy, her name
was. I must have been about seventeen. I was walking Judy home with a cigarette dangling from my mouth because I thought it
made me look like Humphrey Bogart. We headed up the steps. She turned around, closed her eyes, and puckered. Holy Shit, I’m
gonna be kissed. So I kissed her… with the cigarette in my lips. She screamed. All the lights in the neighborhood came on.
Herbie and Hoo-ha came running. The girl’s father raced downstairs. Judy was crying. I was apologizing from the bottom of
my heart. “I just started smoking. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Herbie looked closely at Judy’s lip and said: “Don’t worry. That hole will be gone in two years…”

About twenty guys in our neighborhood formed a club called the Warriors. We had jackets with a
W
over the heart and a club room in Hoo-ha’s basement with a Victrola to play records for parties. One time, Herbie and I sneaked
in two girls. Teresa and Angela. Teresa said, “I don’t neck unless I have music.”

Our Victrola was broken. So Herbie said to me, “Go upstairs and get Hoo-ha’s radio. It’s in his bedroom.”

I got the radio. I was coming through the kitchen to go down to the basement, and there was Dora, Hoo-ha’s mother, making
chopped liver.

“Vhere you goin’ with my son’s radio?”

“Downstairs.”

“Vhy?”

“I want to listen to the baseball game.”

She looked at me through squinted eyes. “I think you’ve got girls down there.”

“Mrs. Horowitz, I’m going down.”

“No, you’re not!” She stood in front of the door.

At just that moment, one of the girls yelled, “Are you coming with the music?”

Now Mrs. Horowitz was really blocking the door. So I busted right by her. She fell, and as she fell, the chopped liver in
her hands shot up to the ceiling and crashed down on the floor. The kitchen was covered with chopped liver and we all had
to leave.

I don’t know what a psychologist would make of that moment. To me, I was seventeen years old and feeling the heat. The next
day, I was standing on the corner with Herbie and there came Hoo-ha, raging mad.

“Did you beat up my mother?”

“Hoo-ha, it was kind of an accident.”

“You beat up my mother. You know what I’m gonna do?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna go to your house and kick your mother in the face.”

“Hoo-ha, you go to my house and kick my mother in the face, and I’m gonna go to your house and kick your mother in the stomach.”

“You kick my mother in the stomach and I…”

This went back and forth until Herbie said, “Look at this. These two guys will kill each other’s mother, but they won’t touch
each other.”

SISTER-IN-LAW

Can you imagine what it must have been like for this kid who grows up poor in Brooklyn to years later sit at the same dinner
table with Angie Dickinson, the sex symbol of the time? There must have been an element of disbelief.

Maybe I wasn’t the best candidate to be drafted for the Korean War. Plus, it was the Navy that drafted me—and I couldn’t even
swim. Once, when I was young, I’d gone out in the ocean and been flipped over by a wave. I found myself gasping for air on
the sand and I never wanted to go back. I had no college prospects after graduating from Lafayette. I never cared about school
from the day my father died. The draft notice came, the Warriors threw me a farewell party, and I went for my physical. I
was placed at the end of the line during the eye test—they didn’t want the guys with glasses slowing up the rest. We were
waiting to be sworn in, and I heard, “Zeiger—go home.”

“Go home?”

“You failed the eye test. Your eyes are so bad, if you lose your glasses in war, you’d shoot up everything around you. If
we swear you in, we’d have to give you a medical discharge and pay you.”

I went home. I told my mother. She was thrilled. I went out, turned the corner, and all my friends were there.

“What happened?” Hoo-ha wanted to know.

“I’m 4-F.”

“That wallet I gave you.” It was a going-away gift. “Give me back my wallet.”

“But Hoo-ha, I’ve already used it.”

“No, no, no, no,” he said. “That wallet was for the Navy.”

Truth is, from that day on, I was lost. Childhood was over. Herbie went into the Army, and all my friends seemed to be leaving
the neighborhood. My mother had to endure the comments of friends and relatives who sent their kids off to a bright future
in college or to the service to become a hero. Seeing me flounder at home had to be difficult.

When my younger brother, an excellent student, arrived at Lafayette, the dean walked over to him. “Martin Zeiger. Are you
Larry Zeiger’s brother?”

“Yes,” Marty said.

The dean put his hands on my brother’s shoulders and asked, in the most sympathetic voice imaginable, “How’s your mother?”

Herbie’s father would take me for walks around the neighborhood to offer guidance. For years, I wanted to be Herbie. He had
a father. He had money. He had a television set. Herbie’s father asked me what I was going to do with my life.

I told him I wanted to go into broadcasting. “What are you,” he said, “a pipe dreamer? What are you, Arthur Godfrey? What
are you, nuts? Get a job.”

Herbie’s father had a little factory that made bindings for hats. “I’ll give you a job in my factory,” he said. “You’ll learn
to be a binder. And someday,
someday
, you could be foreman. Foremen get three weeks’ vacation. Like this, you can be somebody.”

I went through a bunch of odd jobs. My Uncle Lou hooked me up with the United Parcel Service. I was an assistant on the truck
that delivered packages. We had a driver—Crazy Krauss—who liked to drive down the street and clip off the side-view mirrors
of parked cars. I sold Borden’s milk for a little while. But the best success I had was working the phones for the collection
division of a department store.

I invented the word
congealiate
. There’s no such word. But it sounds like a word. It was very effective in the collection business. I used to call up people
and say, “If you don’t have your payment in here by Thursday, we’re going to congealiate the whole account.” Or “I may be
forced to recommend congealiation. The sheriff will congealiate your account forthwith.”

I remember one guy pleading, “Don’t congealiate me! Please, don’t congeliate me!”