The Boys of Summer (2 page)
Read The Boys of Summer Online
Authors: Roger Kahn
But Robinson was the cynosure of all eyes. For a long time he shocked people seeing him for the first time simply by the fact of his color: uncompromising ebony. All the baseball heroes had been white men. Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson and John McGraw and Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth and Dizzy Dean were white. Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Bill Klem and Connie Mack were white. Every coach, every manager, every umpire, every batting practice pitcher, every human being one had ever seen in uniform on a major league field was white. Without realizing it, one had become conditioned. The grass was green, the dirt was brown and the ball players were white. Suddenly in Ebbets Field, under a white home uniform, two muscled arms extended like black hawsers.
Black.
Like the arms of a janitor. The new color jolted the consciousness, in a profound and not quite definable way.
Amid twenty snowy mountains, the only moving thing was the eye of a blackbird.
Robinson could hit and bunt and steal and run. He had intimidating skills, and he burned with a dark fire. He wanted passionately to win. He charged at ball games. He calculated his rivals’ weaknesses and measured his own strengths and knew—as only a very few have ever known—the precise move to make at precisely the moment of maximum effect. His bunts, his steals, and his fake bunts and fake steals humiliated a legion of visiting players. He bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him more strong. If one can be certain of anything in baseball, it is that we shall not look upon his like again.
As a young newspaperman covering the team in 1952 and 1953, I enjoyed the assignment, without realizing what I had. Particularly during one’s youth, it is difficult to distinguish trivia from what is worthy. The days are crowded with deadlines, with other people’s petty scoops and your own, bickering and fantasies and train rides and amiable beers. The present, as Frost put it,
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowded, too confusing—
Too present to imagine.
The team grew old. The Dodgers deserted Brooklyn. Wreckers swarmed into Ebbets Field and leveled the stands. Soil that had felt the spikes of Robinson and Reese was washed from the faces of mewling children. The New York
Herald Tribune
writhed, changed its face and collapsed. I covered a team that no longer exists in a demolished ball park for a newspaper that is dead.
Remembering and appreciating the time, which was not so very long ago, I have found myself wondering more and more about the ball players. They are retired athletes now, but not old. They are scattered wide, but joined by a common memory. How are the years with them? What past do they remember? Have they come at length to realize what they had?
Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the
major league
reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed as in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments.
Memento mori.
What, then, of the names that rang like chords: Erskine and Robinson, Labine and Shuba, Furillo and Cox. One evening, for no useful reason, I telephoned Billy Cox at his home in Newport, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and said I’d like to drive out for a drink. I hadn’t seen him for fourteen years.
“You come all the way out here to visit me?” Cox sounded surprised. “It’s hard to get to now. The commuter train from Harrisburg, it’s discontinued.”
“I’ll find my way.”
“I’m tending bar at the American Legion Club. You know, it’s at the top of the hill. How do you like that, they discontinued the Harrisburg train.”
Cox, the third baseman, was above all lithe. Now, at the Legion bar in Newport, he was a fat man. His hair was still black but before him he carried Falstaff’s belly. “Hey,” he cried when I came in. “Here’s a fella seen me play. He’ll tell you some of the plays I made. He’ll tell you.” Three stone-faced old trainmen glared from the bar, where they were drinking beer.
“Billy, you were the best damn glove I ever saw.”
“See,” Cox said to the trainmen. “See. An’ this man’s a writer from
New York.”
It was as if New York were a light-year distant, as if Cox himself had never played in Brooklyn. The experience had so diffused that it became real now only when someone else confirmed it. Most of the time there was no one.
“What do you do now, Bill?” I said. “What is it you like to do?”
“Watch kids,” he said. His eyes gazed cavernous and blank. “Watch little kids play third. They make some plays.”
One thing a writer has, if he is fortunate, and I have been fortunate, is a partnership with the years. In the 1970s, our own confusing, crowded present, I have been able to seek out the 1950s, to find these heroic Dodgers who are forty-five and fifty, in lairs from Southern California to New England, and to consider them not only as old athletes but as fathers and as men, dead as ball players to be sure, but still battling, as strong men always battle, the implacable enemy, time.
Already time has dealt some fiercely. Roy Campanella, the cheerful, talkative catcher, is condemned to a wheelchair; he has been through a divorce like something out of
Lady Chatterley.
Gil Hodges, the strongest Dodger, and Jackie Robinson have suffered heart attacks. Duke Snider, who dreamed of raising avocados, has had to sell his farm. Carl Erskine, the most compassionate of men, is occupied at home with his youngest son. Jimmy Erskine is an affectionate child. Most mongoloid children are said to be affectionate.
“Sooner or later,” the author Ed Linn observes, “society beats down the man of muscle and sweat.” Surely these fine athletes, these boys of summer, have found their measure of ruin. But one does not come away from visits with them, from long nights remembering the past and considering the present, full of sorrow. In the end, quite the other way, one is renewed. Yes, it is fiercely difficult for the athlete to grow old, but to age with dignity and with courage cuts close to what it is to be a man. And most of them have aged that way, with dignity, with courage and with hope.
“Now entertain conjecture of a time.”
R.K.
THE TROLLEY CAR THAT RAN BY EBBETS FIELD
I
That morning began with wind and hairy clouds. It was late March and day rose brisk and uncertain, with gusts suggesting January and flashes of sun promising June. In every way, a season of change had come.
With a new portable typewriter in one hand and a jammed, disordered suitcase in another, I was making my way from the main terminal at La Guardia Airport to Eastern Airlines Hangar Number 4. There had been time neither to pack nor to sort thoughts. Quite suddenly, after twenty-four sheltered, aimless, wounding, dreamy, heedless years, spent in the Borough of Brooklyn, I was going forth to cover the Dodgers. Nick Adams ranging northern Michigan, Stephen Dedalus storming citadeled Europe anticipated no richer mead of life.
“Mr. Thompson?”
A stocky man, with quick eyes and white hair, said, “Yes. I’m Fresco Thompson. You must be the new man from the
Herald Tribune.”
Fresco Thompson, vice president and director of minor league personnel, stood at the entrance, beside a twinengined
airplane, all silvery except for an inscription stenciled above the cabin door. In the same blue script that appeared on home uniform blouses, the Palmer-method lettering read “Dodgers.”
“How do you like roller coasters?” Fresco Thompson said. “On a day with this much wind, the DC-3 will be all over the sky. Perfectly safe, but we’re taking down prospects for the minor league camp and a lot have never flown.” He gestured toward a swarm of sturdy athletes, standing nervously at one side of the hangar, slouching and shifting weight from foot to foot. “We may call on you to be nursemaid,” Thompson said. “Some ball players are babies. Let’s go on board. The co-pilot will see about your luggage. We’ll sit up front. Might as well keep the airsickness behind us.”
Thompson smiled, showing even teeth, and put a strong, square hand on my back. “Come on, fellers,” he shouted over a shoulder, and the rookie athletes formed a ragged line. Looking at them, eighteen-year-olds chattering and giggling with excitement, one recognized that they were still boys. The only
men
in the planeload, Thompson indicated by his manner, were the two of us. We had flown and earned a living and acquired substance. We were big league. Entering the DC-3 under the royal-blue inscription I felt with certitude, with absolute, manic, ingenuous, joyous certitude, that the nickname “Dodgers” applied to me. Beyond undertaking a newspaper assignment, I believed I was joining a team. At twenty-four, I was becoming a
Dodger.
The fantasy (“He performs in Ebbets Field as though he built it; this kid can play”) embraces multitudes and generations (“Haven’t seen a ball player with this much potential since Pistol Pete Reiser back in 1940, or maybe even before that; maybe
way
before”). I strode onto the plane, monarch of my dream, walking up the steep incline with the suggestion of a swagger and dropping casually into seat B2. “What the hell!” Something had stung me in a buttock. I
bounced up. A spring had burst through the green upholstery. A naked end of metal lay exposed. “What the hell,” I said again.
“Nothing to worry about,” Fresco Thompson said. “The people who maintain the springs are not the same people who maintain the engines.” He paused and raised white brows. “Or so Walter O’Malley tells me.”
“Seat belts,” the pilot announced. Fresco turned and counted heads. “Eighteen,” he said, “and eighteen there’s supposed to be.” The little plane bumped forward toward a concrete runway and the seabound clouds of the busy March sky.
In the end, I would find, as others since Ring Lardner and before, that Pullman nights and press box days, double-headers dragging through August heat and a daily newspaper demanding three thousand words a day, every day, day after blunting day, dulled sense and sensibilities. When you see too many major league baseball games, you tend to observe less and less of each. You begin to lose your sense of detail and even recall. Who won yesterday? Ah, yesterday. That was Pittsburgh, 5 to 3. No, that was Tuesday. Yesterday was St. Louis, 6 to 2. Too many games, and the loneliness, the emphatic, crowded loneliness of the itinerant, ravage fantasy. Nothing on earth, Lardner said, is more depressing than an old baseball writer. It was my fortune to cover baseball when I was very young.
From brief perspective, the year 1952 casts a disturbing, well-remembered shadow. It was then that the American electorate disdained the troubling eloquence of Adlai Stevenson for Dwight Eisenhower and what Stevenson called the green fairways of indifference. That very baseball season Eisenhower outran Robert A. Taft for the Republican nomination and, hands clasped above the bald, broad dome, mounted his irresistible campaign for the Presidency. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy rose in Washington and King Farouk fell in Egypt. Although the Korean War killed 120 Americans a week, times were comfortable
at home. A four-door Packard with Thunderbolt-8 engine sold for $2,613 and, according to advertisements, more than 53 percent of all Packards manufactured since 1899 still ran. Kodak was rising from $43 a share and RCA was moving up from $26. The New York theatrical season shone. One could see Audrey Hepburn as
Gigi,
Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh as
Caesar and Cleopatra,
Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer in
Venus Observed,
Julie Harris in
I Am a Camera
and John Garfield, who would not live out the year, bearing his special fire to Joey Bonaparte in a revival of Odets’
Golden Boy.
It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national self-satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent. Only a few people distinguished the tidal discontent beginning to sweep into black America.
I used to wonder
About living and dying—
I think the difference lies
Between tears and crying.
I used to wonder
About here and there—
I think the distance
Is nowhere.
On the book page of the
Herald Tribune
, Lewis Gannett called Langston Hughes’ “Border Line” “heartbreaking.” Hughes was an exotic taste, however, and not yet fashionable. Housewives followed Costain’s lastest,
The Silver Chalice. Important
books, commentators suggested, were Herbert Hoover’s
Memoirs and The Collected Papers of Senator Arthur Vandenberg,
adapted by his son, which were said to reveal “secret Roosevelt promises to Stalin at Yalta.”
My companion, on the silver DC-3 bucking toward a cruising altitude of four thousand feet, had brought neither important book with him. One can travel for weeks with baseball men and
see no books at all. He did carry the latest copy of
Look
magazine. Susan Hayward stared hotly from the cover, seductive in soft focus, but Fresco Thompson was concerned with something else. Clyde Sukeforth (
Look
announced), ex-coach of Brooklyn, tells “Why the Dodgers Blew the Pennant.”
“I wonder,” Thompson said, “if Sukeforth really does know why we blew the pennant, how come he wasn’t able to avoid it last October.” Thompson smiled, without warmth. “The man worked for the Dodgers for years. We kept him as a coach, paid him a good salary and as soon as he left he turned on us. For what? A few thousand dollars. We didn’t blow the pennant. We
lost
it. And to Sal Maglie, Bobby Thomson and a damn fine Giant team. I don’t understand people who look for the negatives in everything. Baseball is such a fine game. It’s such a fine business. Mr. O’Malley says it’s too much a business to be a sport and too much a sport to be a business. I came out of Columbia a young fellow and this game has been my life ever since—laughs and a fine living, accomplishments and great friendships.”
The cockpit door opened and the pilot, a tall, light-haired man wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt, said that the headwinds were increasing. “Flying time might be nine hours to Vero.”
Thompson grimaced. “Why don’t you hitch this thing to the back of a Greyhound bus?”
“You got a long enough rope?” the pilot said.
Thompson smiled the hard smile. “This man here has to make a game tonight in Miami. In six hours I want you flapping your arms, if necessary.”
The pilot laughed and retreated. “Whatever else they say about the DC-3,” Thompson said, “if anything goes wrong, you set it down in a parking lot. It’ll glide better than some planes fly.” Beyond the windows, whorls of cloud spun past. The plane continued bouncing on March winds. “Settle in and enjoy it,”
Thompson said. “There’s no place we can go and at least the telephone can’t bother us here.”
By reputation, Thompson was a wit and he proceeded to fill the morning with a brattle of baseball stories. His voice grated faintly, not unpleasantly, as an anvil moving over firebrick. His delivery was quick, practiced and caustic.
As a ball player, he had been fast, he said, and a good infielder but never an outstanding hitter. He stood five feet eight and weighed 150 pounds. In 1931 he was traded to the Dodgers and assigned a locker adjacent to one given Floyd Caves “Babe” Herman, a mighty batter who occasionally intercepted fly balls with his skull.
“Geez Christ,” Herman complained. “They’re makin’ me dress next to a .250 hitter.”
“Geez Christ,” Thompson said. “They’re making me dress next to a .250 fielder.”
He winked at my laughter and continued. Afterward, when he became a minor league manager, a surgeon in Birmingham, Alabama, a man with a bullying voice, became a leading critic. The team played poorly, and one evening Thompson had to guide his starting pitcher back to the shelter of the dugout, after four runs scored in the first inning. “Hey, Thompson,” the surgeon cried from a box seat, “another mistake.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Fresco called loudly in his gravelly voice, “but my mistake will live to pitch tomorrow.”
As an executive, Thompson constantly evaluated talent. A skinny pitcher named Phil Haugstad twice backed up the wrong base, and Fresco asked, “What can you expect of a man whose baseball cap is size 6⅛?” Haugstad’s matchstick calves were accentuated by the flapping knickers of his uniform. “But it’s nothing to worry about,” Thompson said. “His legs swell up like that every spring.” One minor leaguer, seeking to impress Thompson with his powers at self-analysis, said, “The reason I don’t hit better is that I swing an eighth-inch underneath good fast balls.”
“We’ll make you a star immediately, ” Thompson said. “Simply insert eighth-inch lifts into your soles.”
With the longest story, Thompson turned on himself. In Havana once he had scouted Saturnino Orestes Arrieta Armas Minoso, called Minnie. The bases were loaded, with nobody out. Minoso, playing third, fielded a bouncing ball and looked toward home. It might be too late to make
that
play. Minoso glanced at second. The runner was leaping into his slide. Another runner flashed before him and by now the batter had crossed first base. Considering four outs, Minoso had gotten none. He walked slowly to the pitcher’s mound, holding the baseball in one hand and scratching his uniform cap with the other. “Right then,” Thompson said, “I concluded that this was the dumbest bastard in all Cuba. I caught the next plane home, and when I looked up, Cleveland had signed Minoso and he was batting .525 for their farm team in Dayton. Intellect isn’t everything in this game. They say Einstein wasn’t much of a hitter.”
The torrents of Fresco Thompson’s tongue shaped an idyllic beginning. No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day. The pitcher throws. Whsssh.
Klop.
Three-fifths of a second and the ball hits the catcher’s glove. It will be thirty seconds before the pitcher throws again. The infielders say, “Attaway! No-hitter. Youkindewitbaby!” The coaches say, “Takes one, only one, let’s go, Buck, get a holt of it, Bucko-lucko-boy.” Players in the dugout say, “Hey, Ump! In the blue suit! Who taught you to call pitches, Helen Keller?” And in the grandstand, among the beer peddlers and peanut pushers (“Here y’are. Salted right in the shell. Only a quarter and straight from Brazil”), the fan tires the clock with talking. “Lookit that guy in center. He’s too shallow. The Duker played it better. He played deep. The way this pitcher moves toward first reminds me of Whitey Ford. Except, of course, he’s
righthanded.
I saw a game once kinda like this. You know what the pitcher’s doin’. He’s letting that batter think. He’s got him all set for a curve and he’s givin’ him plenty
of time to think curve. so’s he can throw the fast ball. What’s that? Ball two? Who they got umpiring? Ray Charles? I saw a one-eyed ump one time in semipro. I played semipro two years. Whenever that ump called me out, I’d say, ‘What the hell happened, Buster? You wink?’ Get it?
Wink?
He only had one peeper. If he winked, he was blind. I was a helluva hitter in semipro.”
“I guess I’ve been talking a lot,” Fresco Thompson said.
“No. You’ve got great stories.”
“Well, I’ve been around the game long enough. I ought to. Say,” Thompson said, “isn’t it unusual, a young fellow getting assigned to the team?”
“I guess it is.”
“How did it happen?”
“A lot of luck, mostly.”
“Ah, it can’t be just luck that got you on this airplane.”
“It’s kind of complicated.”
“Did you play ball? Or maybe your dad? I’ll bet your dad played some ball.”
“That’s part of it.”
“I thought so,” Fresco said. He closed his eyes, content, and I let it go. How could I explain that what had gotten me aboard the Dodger plane that morning was nothing more than a succession of miracles?
Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory. In the house where I grew up, everyone liked to talk and, as I was growing, my father recalled increasingly what a remarkable hitter he had been. Talk? In that sprawling apartment, talk was bread, air, water, fire, life. My
grandfather, Dr. Abraham Rockow, was a dentist who asked a greater fate than probing bicuspids. Gray, handsome and assured, Dr. Rockow would wander from his office—it was the sunny front room of the apartment on the second floor at 907 St. Marks Place—and expound on pinochle, politics and art. Disease was caused by “a focus of infection, often in the gums.” Roosevelt was an untrustworthy patrician, “pretending to be concerned about the masses.”
Macbeth
(pronounced “Macbaat”) was a masterpiece, “but if you think it is a good play in English, you should read it in Russian.” Off a long center hallway, Dr. Rockow and I shared a bedroom that overlooked Kingston Avenue and trolley cars that ran by Ebbets Field.