Veracity / Baseball
The Glory Days
By Jerry Tallmer
Two snapshots from a year to remember:
Wednesday, August 15, 1951. The beach on Fire Island. Blazing sun. The whole scene is a-twitter with word that Marilyn Monroe – Lee and Paula Strasberg’s protégé – is among us. Suddenly, there she is – trotting along the water’s edge, calling to some friends to wait up. At this instant my tinny little portable radio says that Carl Furillo – oh Jesus! – is stepping into the batter’s box, with Billy Cox dancing off third. From her blanket six feet from me, Nancy Hallinan – great-looking, crazy, sexy Nancy, author of a fine first novel, The Darling Buds of May -- sneaks a look across the sand. “That fat little girl is Marilyn Monroe?” says Nancy, just as Carl Furillo swings his terrible swift sword. Clean over the whole moaning Atlantic Ocean you can hear the crack as bat hits ball. “It’s a fly to deep right-center field,” the radio yells. “Billy Cox is tagging up at third!” – Cox, one of the fastest runners on the Dodgers. “This will give Brooklyn the lead,” says the radio. “It’s heading for the deepest part of the Polo Grounds, 400 feet away. Willie Mays is racing for it, his back to home plate. He’s reaching up with one hand, he’s got it, he spins 180 degrees. Cox breaks for home. Wait a minute! Wait minute! The ball comes in to Westrum on the fly! Cox slides and Westrum cuts him down at the plate! Cox is out! Billy Cox is out! The inning is over. The game’s still tied. The Giants are coming to bat in the eighth -- ”
And there on the sand of Fire Island, even before Westrum hits a home run in the last of the eighth to put the Giants two runs ahead and win the game, I am, like stout Cortez on his peak in Darien, swept with a wild surmise: You know what? We could win this thing. The New York Giants we. Catch them, the damn Dodgers. Win the whole thing. Four days ago, on August 11, we were 13 games back. Today we’re only 10 games back. It’s never been done before, coming from that far back this late in the season, but who knows? If Willie could do what Willie has just done, nothing in this entire world is impossible. Maybe Marilyn Monroe will get to play Grushenka after all. “Marilyn from class,” as she will say to fellow Actors Studio actor Paul Sand in the sweetest Marilyn Monroe story I know. Marilyn, who on her return from touring Army bases in Korea will say to Joe D.: “Joe, you never heard such cheering in your life,” with Dimaggio quietly answering: “Yes I have.”
Wednesday, October 3, 1951. A skylight studio apartment five flights up on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. André Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, once lived in these rooms as a refugee from Nazi-dominated Europe. André Breton would probably not have understood baseball, though it was a countryman of his, critic and historian Jacques Barzun, who once notably said: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” André Breton probably wouldn’t have understood Russ Hodges screaming over the radio like a madman: “The Giants have won the pennant! The Giants have won the pennant!” in the seconds after Bobby Thompson, the Flying Scot from Staten Island, fired the shot heard round the world, a three-run homer into the left-field stands of the Polo Grounds. What Breton also wouldn’t have understood, and what no one now remembers, is what Russ Hodges was saying in the moment just before Thompson came to bat with Willie Mays on deck and the New York Giants trailing 4-2 in the ninth inning of the third and deciding playoff game of the National League pennant race of 1951 – a 154-game race in which the Giants have come from 13 behind in mid-August to draw even, neck and neck, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, in the final few days of the season.
What Russ Hodges had just been saying was: “If I were a Giant fan at this moment, I’d be down on my knees. Right now I’d be down on my knees.” I don’t think he used the word praying, but that’s what he meant.
As Bobby Thompson hit that home run, and second baseman Eddie Stanky ran out to jump into the arms of fellow dead-end kid Leo Durocher in the coach’s box at third base, this struggling writer in that Surrealist-imbued skylight studio apartment five flights up on West 11th Street, looked around at the furniture, the skylight, the fireplace, the bookshelves, and myself – at myself, there, on my knees, hand gripping hand, just as I’d been at the moment Bobby Thompson came up to bat with two outs, two men on, and Willie Mays waiting on deck.
And what I saw when I looked at myself was a 30-year-old so-called man on his knees in a skylight studio in Greenwich Village … because of a baseball game.
Larry Simon, on the other hand, was at that time an 8-year-old Brooklyn-born-and-bred kid who didn’t care all that much who won that particular game, or the whole 1951 National League playoffs, because he was – guess what – a New York Yankees fan. When the Yankees won the 1951 World Series over those same Giants (despite Eddie Stanky kicking a double-play ball out of Phil Rizzuto’s hands), Larry Simon wasn’t a bit surprised, though four years later, in 1955, when he was 12, young Simon was surprised and shocked by the Dodgers’ upset World Series win over his revered Yanks.
“I remember the church bells going off all over Brooklyn,” says the Larry Simon of today. “The church bells and the train whistles. You know, the two events in those years that drove people a little meshuga were the Brooklyn Dodgers winning that Series, their only one, and the assassination of JFK. That 1955 World Series did mean something to me. My team lost.” He also remembers another famous catch by Willie Mays, his over-the-head capture at the running track in deepest center field of a monstrous wallop by Vic Wertz of the Cleveland Indians in the World Series of 1954.
Larry the kid was not only a fan who went to games at Yankee Stadium and Ebbetts Field – “the Polo Grounds was too far away” – but played “lots and lots of both softball and hardball” as a third baseman and occasional first baseman on the Aces and other sandlot teams.
That kid grew up to be Larry Simon, Baruch College graduate, co-founder and chief executive of Ivy Asset Management Corp., husband, father, grandfather, and – for six years now – a trustee of the Museum of the City of New York.
It was his head out of which, a year and a half ago, sprang the idea for “The Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947-1957,” a wondrous pick-me-up of an exhibit – or “exhibition in ten innings” – that’s up there at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, to make our days and nights better through December 31, New Year’s Eve.
The “ten innings” – as curated by Ann T. Meyerson -- roughly correspond with that phenomenal decade during which New York City, alone in this country, possessed three Major League baseball teams which, in combination or separately, participated in 10 out of 11 World Series. A truly golden era, says Larry Simon.
The overview – in the exhibit and in The Glory Days book, edited by John Thorn (Collins, $34.95), that parallels it – stretches “inning” by “inning” from “Breaking the Color Barrier: More than Jackie … ” through Fans, Media, Ballparks, World Series, Great Games and Great Moments, Great Players and Managers, etc., to “What Comes Next: The Legacy.”
Believe me, you’ll find it hard to put down. Unless you’re André Breton. Come fo think of it, much of baseball’s memorabilia – in the show, in the book, everywhere – is pretty surrealistic. Breton might be right at home. Safe at home, that is.
For one who, like myself, remembers the breaking of baseball’s color barrier all the way back to when Jackie Robinson was at Montreal in 1945, soon after the close of World War II, Inning 1, or Chapter 1, of The Glory Days is of particular merit. This is because the author of that chapter, San Francisco State University’s Jules Tygiel, pulls (to mix metaphors) no punches.
Tells it like it is, as people would somewhat later start saying.
And that barrier-breaking wasn’t all roses and honeydew. Better yet, worse yet, watermelon.
We are reminded by Professor Tygiel what we at least – I at least – had forgotten, or blanked out. That the language and other manifestations of hostility toward Jackie Robinson and other breakthrough players of color was truly hideous. That one of my heroes, Eddie Stanky (see above), could in the heat of warfare shout at Robinson: “Stick that bat down your throat, you black nigger son of a bitch.” That Casey Stengel, another hero (I mean, since ’62 I’ve been a Mets fan), could speak of blacks as jigs, jigaboos, jungle bunnies, etc., and say (of Yankee catcher Elston Howard): “When I finally get a nigger, I get the only one that can’t run.”
And so forth.
And yet it did happen, the walls did come down, are still coming down, now the inverse is true.
“Baseball is sort of the hook that connects people, connects everybody,” says Larry Simon. “Here, there, everywhere, even Japan. It’s now a melting pot.”
He pauses a reflective moment.
“One moves to a career,” says the kid who was born in Brooklyn in 1943. “One continues to play baseball. Get married [and stay married, to Sandy Kenger of Brooklyn and Long Island]. Have three sons, all of whom play baseball. Have five grandchildren, with one more on the way.
“That’s how this whole thing – this museum show – came about. I was chatting with my oldest grandson, Ryan Simon, who’s just 8, and he said: ‘Grandpa, what was baseball like when you played?’ This was maybe 18 months ago. At the next meeting of the trustees [of the Museum of the City of New York] I said: ‘I have an idea for an exhibition that could be a catalyst to bring three generations to the museum. People could see things perhaps they’ve never seen. Jackie Robinson. Yogi. Campanella. Willie Mays catching that ball. Imagine having three teams all in one city for 10 golden years! There’ll probably never be anything like it again.’ ”
Did Simon contribute any items of memorabilia to the exhibit?
“I contributed items of money,” he said dryly.
Is he still a Yankees fan?
“Yes, in a miserable mood” – it having been a week in which, for the Yankees, loss was piling up on loss. “But baseball’s the thing that keeps all of us young in heart.”
In heart and in mind, as Jacques Barzun was saying.
