Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (14 page)

These prayers became more urgent as the 1950 season got under way with a crushing 9-1 loss to the Phillies. By the All-Star break, the Dodgers were in fourth place, behind the Phillies, Cards, and Braves. Pitching was the problem. Rex Barney, as usual, was having trouble getting the ball over the plate, Ralph Branca was tiring after four or five innings, Dan Bankhead had an ailing arm, and Don Newcombe was unable to pitch the way he had his spectacular
rookie year. Only Preacher Roe kept the Dodgers in contention.

In August, though improved pitching and hot bats had moved us into second place, there seemed little chance of catching the Phillies. Nevertheless, there were fabulous moments. At the end of the month, I sat with my dad listening to my favorite kind of game, a 19-3 blowout of the Braves. No anxiety, no need to duck out and walk around the block when the opposing team was at bat, just pleasure that deepened as the even-tempered first baseman Gil Hodges hit one, then two, then three home runs. By the time he stepped up to the plate in the eighth, everyone was rooting for Hodges to make history by hitting four home runs in a single game. Since 1900, Red Barber told us, only three men had hit four home runs in one game, and two of them had needed extra innings to accomplish their feat. Only the immortal Lou Gehrig had hit four in regulation innings. We could hear the fans chanting as Hodges worked the count to two and two and then let go with a monstrous swing that sent the ball into the upper seats of the left-field stands. The roar of the crowd couldn’t have been louder if the Dodgers had clinched the pennant.

Elation at Hodges’ accomplishment was short-lived, however, as the Dodgers slipped into third, falling behind the Braves as well as the Phillies. On September 18, they were nine games behind Philadelphia with only seventeen left to play. Nothing but a miracle could save the season, people said. And it did indeed seem that divine inspiration descended upon the Dodgers in those last weeks of September, when they launched a remarkable winning streak that coincided with a collapse of both the Phillies and the Braves. Their amazing run brought Brooklyn within two games of first with two left to play. And the last two games were against the first-place Phillies!

After the Dodgers won the first game, 7-3, they needed only one more win to have come further faster than any team in history, forcing a playoff starting in Brooklyn the following day. The final game, a duel between Don Newcombe and Robin Roberts, was so tense that I could barely listen. The two teams were locked in a 1-1 tie when the Dodgers came to bat in the bottom of the ninth. Cal Abrams, a young outfielder who lived in Levittown, not far from Rockville Centre, drew a lead-off walk and reached second when Pee Wee Reese singled to left. With no outs and Abrams in scoring position, I began to relax a little, certain that one of the next three batters—Snider, Robinson, or Furillo—would somehow push over the winning run.

Now, if Snider would bunt Abrams to third, a fly ball could bring him in. But Dodger manager Burt Shotton had Snider hit away, a surprise move that seemed to work perfectly when Snider singled to center. As Abrams rounded third heading toward home, I was certain we had won the game and forced the Phillies into a playoff. Then, suddenly, everything unraveled. Expecting Snider to bunt, Richie Ashburn had positioned himself in shallow center field. Not needing to charge the ball, he fielded it quickly and threw a perfect strike to home plate that allowed Phillies catcher Stan Lopata to tag Abrams out. Once again, as in 1941, when Owens dropped the third strike, Dodger fans were left with the indelible image of defeat being snatched from the jaws of victory.

At least Reese and Snider had advanced to third and second with the throw home, so a fly ball could still win the game. But after Robinson was intentionally walked to load the bases, Furillo popped out and Hodges hit a fly to right for the final out. I knew with a grim certainty that when the Phillies came to bat in the top of the tenth it
was over for my Dodgers, even though we’d have another chance at the bottom of the inning. The first two Phillies singled, and then Dick Sisler hit a long home run to left, giving the Whiz Kids a 4-1 victory and their first pennant in thirty-five years.

When the World Series started between the Phillies and the Yankees, I hardly cared who won. I despised both Allie Reynolds and Robin Roberts, and when they faced off against one another, the less I heard the better. Elaine was terribly annoying when the Yankees swept the powerful Whiz Kids, but not so insufferable as she would have seemed had my Dodgers been the victims.

A
T THE CONCLUSION
of the baseball season in early autumn, I turned my full attention to school. Every morning, Elaine and I walked to the Morris School, our notebooks and pencil cases in hand. At noon, the entire grammar school was dismissed for an hour and fifteen minutes so we could walk home for lunch and return for the afternoon session. It was a pleasant walk, especially on crisp autumn days when the fallen leaves, raked up in curbside heaps to be burned on weekends by our fathers, crunched beneath our shoes. Along the way, we filled our pencil cases with acorns, ammunition for our fights with the boys. The distance from Southard Avenue being about three-quarters of a mile, we walked three miles a day.

The Morris Grammar School was a faded red brick two-story building flanked on one side by a large playing field with a baseball diamond and basketball court for the boys, and on the other by a narrower playground with slides and swings for the girls. When the first bell called us from the playground, we hung up our coats in the cloakroom and sat at our desks. The top of the desks lifted up
to form a drawer in which we kept our pencil cases, books, and the countless notes we passed to one another throughout our classes. A second bell officially began the day, signaling us to rise and pledge our allegiance to the flag of the United States, which stood in the corner. Having paid homage to country, we bowed our heads to ask God’s blessing, repeating aloud the Lord’s Prayer. Some of my Jewish friends joined in the prayer; others remained silent, heads bowed. Since the Catholic amens followed abruptly upon “and deliver us from evil,” and the Protestants continued on—“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory …”—you could distinguish Catholic from Protestant by noting where the amens fell.

We stayed in the same classroom all day, learning math and reading and practicing the Palmer method of penmanship on lined sheets of paper that resembled music staffs. One of my teachers had devised an elaborate system for rewarding achievement. For each book read or report completed, we were awarded a blue star on the blackboard. Ten blue stars equaled a red star, and five red stars earned a gold star. We eagerly awaited the posting of the stars at the day’s end, hoping each time that we had earned the coveted gold star. For me, that day never arrived. Although I probably accumulated more stars for books read than anyone else in my class, stars could be subtracted if we disobeyed an order or talked in class. Since I rarely stopped talking, I lost stars almost as quickly as I earned them through the day. I watched in dismay as my red stars were erased and my blue stars halved. The injustice of rescinding a reward for a book completed or report written and judged acceptable deeply rankled me. My only solution, however, was to stop talking in class, and this, even for the glory of the gold star, I was unable to do.

Every morning, Elaine and I walked to the Morris School, our notebooks and pencil cases in hand. I am pictured here, third from left, with my second-grade class.

We constructed shoe-box dioramas of the Pilgrims and the Indians, did reports on the revolution and the Civil War, and completed projects on the settlement of the West. We read about the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the waves of immigrants that had come to America from all over the world. Everyone in our class had to give a report on where his or her ancestors had lived. Our teacher placed a little flag of each country of origin on a world map in the front of the room. Almost every part of Western Europe, Central Europe, and Russia was represented by a flag. There were, however, no flags from Latin America or Asia. Not yet. The teacher stressed that America was a special country, because, despite the diversity of our racial, religious, and ethnic origins, we were all one nation, one people with a shared set of values and a common culture. Our textbooks gave us a unifying vision of individuals from all different nations, melting into a new, distinctly American race. Only later would we come to understand that the melting pot did not melt everybody, that racism deprived men and women of color of the equal opportunity promised in the American creed. Only later, as historian Arthur Schlesinger has observed, would we “imagine the arrival of Columbus from the viewpoint of those who met him as well as those who sent him.”

Both my parents showered me with praise for the smallest achievements and spent hours going over my homework, preparing me for tests, and helping me with projects. Just as my mother had helped me learn my catechism, she drilled me in the state capitals, the amendments to the Constitution, the names of the explorers, the dates of the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott Decision, the sinking of the U.S.S.
Maine
. When I had to prepare a report on Mexico, my father brought home an entire briefcase filled with books, maps, and brochures. The more you read
about a subject, he advised me, the more interesting it will seem.

The Rockville Centre Public Library became one of my favorite buildings in town. When my mother wasn’t feeling well, she would send me to the library with titles of books she wanted to read. Since I now had a card of my own, I took great pride in checking out her books as well as mine. In those days, each book had a sheet glued to the last page on which the librarian stamped the due date and cardholder’s number. It was possible to count how many others had read the same book. I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others; it made me sad for both the author and the book when I discovered that I was the only one to take a particular volume off a shelf for months or even years.

As long as I could remember, my mother and I talked about books. In the early days, she would ask me to summarize in my own words the book she had read aloud. Now she would often get me to sit by her side and read to her. With all the dramatic effect I could muster, I picked out chapters of the book I was reading at the moment. I blithely assumed she would find my children’s books as absorbing as I did. I especially liked books that were written in series. As I opened each new volume of Nancy Drew, there was her blue roadster, her father, Carson Drew, and her kindly housekeeper, Hannah Gruen. These details provided a sense of comfort and contributed to a feeling of mastery as I progressed through the series. When I discovered an author I liked, I wanted to read everything he or she had written. Weeks spent with Louisa May Alcott were followed by months with Robert Louis Stevenson. From my mother’s reading of
The Jungle Book
and the
Just So Stories
, I turned to
Captains Courageous
and
Kim
.

·    ·

W
HEN
I
WAS
in the third grade, I was assigned an oral report on Franklin Roosevelt, who I knew had been president when I was born. After I had insisted on talking about Roosevelt every night for a week, my parents decided to take me to Hyde Park to visit the house in which young Franklin had grown up, and which had anchored his entire life. On a chaise longue in Roosevelt’s bedroom I saw Fala’s leash resting on the plaid blanket where the little dog had slept. And sitting on a small desk in the study were the president’s cigarette holder and his pince-nez glasses, exactly where he had left them at the end of the day. The house was called a museum, but it seemed to me a home where people lived. And I was sure it was only a matter of time before Roosevelt would return, pick up his cigarette holder, put on his glasses, and sit down to read, patting his dog at his side. I realized that day I could play an inner game with history just as I did with baseball. If I closed my eyes I could visualize Roosevelt in his room with Fala, just as, when I listened to the stories my father told, I could see the great players of the past—Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Zack Wheat—knock the mud from their cleats, settle into the batter’s box, narrow their eyes on the pitcher, and unleash their majestic swings.