Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (31 page)

I watched the wedding ceremony with mingled feelings. It was a hopeful new beginning for my father; and for me, it was a final liberation from lingering concern and guilt. But it also, at least symbolically, marked a dissolution of my ties to the world of my girlhood, transporting the immediacy of experience into the world of memory where it would forever remain.

Although time and events outdistanced and reconciled my personal losses, my anger over O’Malley’s treason still persisted. At Colby College and in my first year at Harvard—where I would teach for almost a decade before leaving to become a full-time historian—I refused to follow baseball, skipping over the sports pages with their accounts of alien teams called the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. Then, in my second year of studying for my doctorate, a young man invited me to Fenway Park. Allowing my desire for his companionship
to overcome my principled reluctance, we took the subway to Kenmore Square in Boston, and together we walked up Lansdowne Street to the park. There it was again: the entrance up the darkened ramp disclosing an expanse of amazing green, the fervent crowd contained in a stadium scaled to human dimensions, the players so close it almost seemed that you could touch them, the eccentric features of an old ballpark constructed to fit the contours of the allotted space. I watched the players, the dirt scars which marked the base paths, the knowledgeable fans shouting their imprecations and exhortations.

For years I had managed to stay away. I had formed the firmest of resolutions. I had given myself irrefutable reasons, expressed the most passionate of rejections. But I could not get away. Addiction or obsession, love or need, I was born a baseball fan and a baseball fan I was fated to remain.

Nor could I have found a team more reminiscent of the Brooklyn Dodgers than my new team, the Boston Red Sox. Perpetual bridesmaids, exciters of hope and destroyers of dreams, the Red Sox often made Boston seem like Flatbush North. Mickey Owen’s dropped third strike and Bobby Thomson’s home run would be matched in baseball legend by Bucky Dent’s pop-fly home run which lost the division and Bill Buckner’s error which lost the World Series. Now, once again, every season would begin with large expectations and end with large disappointments, a scenario beautifully adapted to the somewhat masochistic temperament shared by Brooklynites and Bostonians alike.

Nor could anyone else in my family escape our shared past. Charlotte, obviously possessing a maturity and capacity for detachment far larger than my own, roots for a team called the Dodgers somewhere west of the Appalachians. Jeanne would become an acolyte of the Colorado
Rockies, an expansion club just beginning to create its own history and traditions.

My father, like so many disinherited New Yorkers, turned to the New York Mets, and we resumed our baseball dialogue. When the Red Sox lost the seventh game of the World Series in 1967, my father was quick to instruct that I must not let the defeat destroy the memories of a glorious season. And during the final weeks of the Mets’ amazing drive to the world championship in 1969, we would discuss the day’s events almost every evening. It almost seemed as if, through the medium of baseball, we could recreate the old intensities—the loving, counseling father and his adoring, curious daughter—which had helped form my girlhood.

Shortly after my father died in 1972, the fatal heart attack coming as he watched a Mets game on television, I married and began to raise a family of my own, finding myself reenacting many of the rituals I had shared with my father. I took my oldest son, Richard, to spring training, and watched with an almost jealous pride as the generous Jim Rice let him feed balls into the pitching machine while the All-Star slugger took batting practice. I taught my two youngest sons, Michael and Joe, how to keep score, bought season tickets, and took them to dozens of games every year.

Sometimes, sitting in the park with my boys, I imagine myself back at Ebbets Field, a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below—Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges. There is magic in these moments, for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond among our three generations, an anchor of loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they have
never seen but whose person they have come to know through this most timeless of sports.

When the 1986 Red Sox went to the World Series against the Mets my boys were certain the Sox would win. That certainty was a gift of youth that I could no longer share. Cruel experience had taught me that no expectation of triumph was unsullied by the possibility of defeat. Still, in the tenth inning of the sixth game, with the Red Sox ahead and only one out away from victory, I overcame my caution. My husband and I brought out the victory champagne. But even before we could open the bottle, an easy grounder went through the first baseman’s legs, the game was lost, and the hopes of a world championship were smashed. As I sat in front of the television set in tears after the Sox lost the final game, my two youngest boys rushed to console me. “Don’t worry, Mom, they’ll win next season.”

When I began to raise a family of my own, I found myself reenacting many of the rituals I had shared with my father. I took my oldest son, Richard, shown here in his little league uniform, to spring training. I taught my two youngest sons, Joey and Michael, how to keep score and took them to dozens of games every year.

That’s right,” I said, forcing a smile, “there’s always another season.” I did not remind them that the Red Sox had not won a World Series for seventy years. There would be time enough for them to learn a harsher truth, I thought. But not yet. Not till they’re older. Then, as they continued their concerned assurances, I realized that my mature wisdom was a deception. They were right. They were absolutely right. There would be another season. There would be another chance.

W
YNCOOP
W
ALK
at Coors Field in Denver contains a quadrant labeled “1995 Coors Field Inaugural Season.” In that quadrant can be found Brick Number 1334 purchased by my sisters and me. On the brick is graven “In memory of Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns.” From that spot, on a summer night, one can hear the cheers of Rockies fans, and the occasional satisfying crack of a bat as it propels a ball toward the Colorado sky.

T
HE MOST VALUABLE SOURCE
material for this memoir was a series of interviews with my sisters, childhood playmates, school friends, and teachers. Though we moved from Southard Avenue more than forty years ago, I was able to track down almost every person who lived on my block. Most of these people I hadn’t seen or talked to in more than three decades. Finding them again was the most satisfying part of writing this book.

Elaine Friedle and I had lost touch with one another several years after she moved to Albany. When I started my research two years ago I found her living in Germany, where she teaches English literature. After we exchanged more than a half-dozen long letters, we made arrangements to see each other at her brother’s house in Connecticut. It was an extraordinary evening, not only because Elaine has a photographic memory for our childhood, but because once we started talking, the years began to fall away. I could see once more the face of the young girl who had been my best friend, I could hear the familiar voice that had reached my bedroom window so many nights before we both fell asleep.

I found Eileen Rust living in New York City, where she runs an art gallery; Elaine Lubar Moskow married with children on the West Coast; Rose and Sid Lubar in Baldwin, New York; the Barthas and
Joe Schmitt’s widow, Anna Mae, in Florida; Julia Rust and Max Kropf’s wife, Melitta, in Long Island; and the Greenes in California. Each of my old friends and neighbors had a particular store of recollections that remained uppermost in their minds. As we talked, we sparked each other’s memories; half-forgotten details slowly began to emerge.

In addition to my childhood playmates, I interviewed about a dozen school friends and teachers who generously shared with me their own recollections, along with diaries, letters, yearbooks, pictures and reading lists. I am grateful to Robert Geise, Ken Jenkins, Susan Gilman Krieger, Judy Lehman Ruderman, Valerie Ger Ostrower, Jill and Lillian Fine, Howard Rabinowitz, Robert Fastov, Marjorie Rosen, Marsha Gillespie, and Marjorie Garber.

My thanks also to the staff at South Side High School, especially Dorothy Zaiser, who was always available to help with her time and knowledge of South Side and Rockville Centre history; the staff at the Rockville Centre Public Library, including Rhoda Friedland, Ruth Levien, and Gretchen Browne; the staff at the Nassau County Museum, the Long Island Studies Institute, Dr. Barbara Kelly and Dr. Mildred De Riggi; the Schimmenti family; Diane Hackett, owner of the present Bryn Mawr Delicatessen; and Eugene Murray, mayor of Rockville Centre. For information on St. Agnes and recollections of growing up Catholic, I am grateful to Reverend Monsignor Robert Mulligan, Rector, St. Agnes (deceased); the Sisters of St. Dominic, Amityville, New York; Elissa Metz; Marilyn O’Brien; Margaret Williams; Pam Shannon; Nancy Dowd; and Grace Skrypczap. I thank Mary Stuart, who played Joanne Barron on
Search for Tomorrow
and shared her experiences as a pioneer in early television. For information on the urban renewal project, I owe thanks to Barbara and Jim Bernstein, Toni Ehrlein, Rockville Centre Historical Society, Doris Moore, and Reverend Morgan Days. For sharing remembrances of the Dodgers, I thank Neil Krieger and Barry Moskow. For general research on the fifties, I turned to my longtime research assistant, Linda Vandegrift. For the original idea of writing a memoir about my years as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, I thank Wendy Wolf.

At Simon & Schuster, where I feel I have found a warm and welcoming home, I owe thanks to my publisher, Carolyn Reidy, whose enthusiastic response to the book spurred me on when I wasn’t at all sure I was going to finish on time; to Liz Stein, who once again shepherded the book through its various stages with good cheer and consummate skill; to Lydia Buechler and Terry Zaroff, who copyedited the manuscript with flawless skill; to my
publicists Victoria Meyer and Kerri Kennedy; to Wendell Minor, who painted the elegant cover; and, of course, to my longtime editor and good friend, Alice Mayhew, whose continual support, confidence, good judgment, and editing prowess proved critical once again. It is now more than twenty years that we have worked together and I look forward to twenty more. This is my first book with Binky Urban as my literary agent, and what an absolute pleasure it has been to have her at my side in a relationship I deeply treasure.

For additional readings of the manuscript, I thank Clark Booth, James Shokoff, and Janna and David Smith. To my good friend, Michael Rothschild, who read and critiqued every chapter, I am more thankful than he can ever know.

I am especially grateful to two of my old friends, Nancy Adler Baumel and Barbara Marks, who helped me with every single phase of the research: searching through archives at the Rockville Centre Public Library and other archival repositories for historical data and pertinent photographs, reading old newspapers, making contacts, conducting interviews with local sources, checking facts, reading and editing draft pages. This memoir owes a great deal to their cheerful and tireless efforts. Nancy’s son, Richard Baumel, was also of great help in researching the 1951 and 1955 Dodger seasons.

To my sisters, Charlotte and Jeanne, who provided countless hours of interviews and a lifetime of love and support, I dedicate this book.

Finally, my deepest thanks to my husband, Richard Goodwin, my best friend and companion, who worked with me at every stage of this work, as he has done with all my previous works, listening to my stories, suggesting themes, editing my words, critiquing my drafts. As a child, I had dreamed of sharing a marriage like that of Carl and Edna Probst, the husband and wife team who ran the corner delicatessen, working side by side all day with no separation of the work place and the living place. With my husband who, like me, writes at home, I have found just such a marriage, except, of course, that we deal in words rather than cold cuts and potato salad.