Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (17 page)

But it didn’t stop. Durocher answered Robinson by saying that what made Maglie such a great pitcher was his willingness to throw at a batter when the situation demanded it. When Maglie was out there, Durocher said, it was him or the hitter. “I’ll throw at anybody,” Maglie added. “That’s part of the game. I’ve got to do it to protect myself against hitters leaning in on my curve.” So the feud continued, making each successive Dodger-Giant game
that season more flammable and nerve-racking than the last. It almost seemed as if the season was moving toward some kind of tragic ending. And it was, but not one I had ever imagined.

A
LTHOUGH THE
G
IANTS
improved steadily through the month of May, the Dodgers remained in first place. They were playing well, with the exception of Gil Hodges, who was hardly hitting at all. Reporters speculated that his new baby was responsible for his slump, causing him to stay up at night, making him continually exhausted and ten pounds lighter than he should be. I planned to write Hodges a letter of encouragement until I heard he was coming to Wolf’s Sport Shop on Sunrise Highway that weekend to sign autographs. I had something that would surely help him break out of his slump and I wanted to give it to him personally.

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!

S
UMMER 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; keep 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.

I
F 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.”