A book, an exhibition, an introduction to America and Baseball
What was it like, to be alive then? When New York City was the capital of baseball, with three of its five boroughs hosting big-league clubs and the World Series seeming to be municipal property? When the city hosted the greatest game, the greatest pennant race, the greatest teams, the greatest center fielders? When everything seemed bigger but somehow personal?
What was it like, to be home from the battle or to welcome a loved one’s return? To arrive at the golden door after surviving the ravages of war? To witness the welcome, to the nation and its pastime, of those formerly rebuked and scorned?
What was it like? With a book and an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York back in 2007 my colleagues and I sought to tell — but mostly show — younger visitors and readers why the era was both glorious and sad and why, for those of us old enough to remember, it seems only yesterday. The Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947–1957 was the title of that project at the Museum of the City of New York, one that gathered thousands of artifacts, some from the players and playing fields, but also many from the fans whose devotion made the era so memorable. The Glory Days formed a “people’s hall of fame” for baseball and the city for those years, reflecting Thomas Wolfe’s remark that baseball “is part of the whole weather of our lives, of the thing that is our own, of the whole fabric, the million memories of America.”
That’s it: like a ballpark, The Glory Days was a museum of memories, in which “museum quality” did not mean mint condition, to which only dollars attach. In a banged-up, dog-eared baseball card that has rippled in the wind of bicycle spokes, real life resides still. And so it does in that legion of improbable survivors, from a Knothole Gang membership card to a Knickerbocker Beer coaster. The best “collectibles,” the keys to revivifying an age, are those that by all rights should have been thrown away and in their survival bear the scars of love.
Heretofore when celebrated in print, the glory days of baseball in New York have been tinged in sepia, recalled with syrupy nostalgia. Nostalgia as the Greeks understood that word was not sweet but painful: literally the ache of not being able to return home. Neither New York nor baseball, nor any of us who recall the period, can turn back the clock. Yet skilled chroniclers of the era may summon it up the way it really was: colorful, raucous, hopeful, thrilling, crushing. Glorious.
Those were the days when I learned about America, and baseball, and came to love each, separately and together. I had come to this country in 1949 at age two and a half, the son of Holocaust survivors, from a displaced persons camp in Occupied Germany. Yearning to understand my new home, to feel at home, baseball — in particular, baseball cards — seemed to hold the answer. Though I lived in the Bronx for my first few years I quickly sensed that my baseball allegiance must be not to the privileged Yankees of that borough, nor to the Giants, just across the river in Manhattan. The Brooklyn Dodgers had been first to welcome an outsider — Jackie Robinson — so that was the team for me.
Today I’d like to offer a bouquet of quotations honoring Brooklyn baseball, particularly from those “glory days” of my youth. But first, let’s rocket back a century, when baseball was already a feature of Brooklyn, a separate city from New York (as it would remain until 1898). The opening scene in Ken Burns’s Baseball (1994) features a resonant edit of a newspaper editorial by Walt Whitman. “In our sun-down perambulations of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn,” he declared in the Brooklyn Eagle of July 23, 1846, “we have observed several parties of youngsters playing ‘base,’ a certain game of ball…. Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms…. The game of ball is glorious.” This obscure passage became famous as recited by Garrison Keillor, in the PBS film in which I played a part.
And now let’s return to The Glory Days, which began with the arrival in Brooklyn of Jack Roosevelt Robinson.
ALAN LELCHUK: “After a great victory in war, there was a feeling that merit would be recognized. It was like coming into a bright light. The feeling that not only had we made it through, we, children of immigrants, were on the way up.”
JOAN MAYNARD: “With all the world upheaval, people had come into Brooklyn by the bushel, and there was hope and a spirit of optimism, a feeling we had made it, had come through the Depression and the war. We went out to Fulton Street to shop and left the iron gate to our brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant open.”
MARNIE BERNSTEIN: “Many of us were first-generation Americans, and we were given strong doses of patriotic indoctrination. Assemblies began with a color guard processional, with a huge American flag. We were dressed all alike: girls in white middy blouses with red ties and navy pleated skirts, boys in white shirts, red ties, and navy pants. We sang a lot of hymns and all the Christmas carols, even though at least half of the children were Jewish. But no one seemed to mind.”
RED BARBER: “Part of the modern tumult at Ebbets Field on nights, Sundays and the big games is not difficult to locate. It stems from Section 17, behind the Brooklyn bench on the first-base side, and the perpetrators are now known as the Dodger Sym-phoney. My claim to fame is that I named them. MacPhail thought in terms of the customer who paid for his seat in the ball park. What else could he do to please the fan in the stands? Why not music? Miss Gladys Gooding was brought into Ebbets Field to preside at the console of an electric organ. She is one of the few woman in the public eye (or ear) with a full-time job in baseball.”
MIRIAM KITTRELL: “Many of the teachers were Irish women. And they all loved baseball and the Brooklyn Dodgers. World Series time they would bring in radios, and we would stop classes, listen to the games.”
MAX WECHSLER: “My dad pointed out a dark red brick house with a high porch. Suddenly the front door opened. He was dressed in regular clothes, coming out of a regular house in a regular Brooklyn neighborhood, a guy like anyone else, going for a newspaper or a bottle of milk. He came right toward me. Seeing that unmistakable pigeon-toed walk, the rock of the shoulders and hips I had seen so many times on the baseball field, I had no doubt who it was. Hi Jackie . . . do you think the Dodgers are gonna win the pennant this year? ‘We’ll try our best.’ We shook hands and I felt the strength and firmness of his grip.”
CARL ERSKINE: “In Ebbets Field our bullpen was down the right field line. The bullpen bench was against the wall, just in foul territory. The right field fence was only 297 feet from home plate but had a 30-foot-heigh screen. The player in the bullpen who sat next to the foul line had an important daily assignment that required him to keep a towel on his lap and stay ready. With men on base for the Dodgers and less than two outs and a fly ball hit to right field, the runners couldn’t tell whether the right fielder could catch the fly ball or whether it would hit the fence above him for a base hit. Our man with the towel could see that easily. Whenever the ball was going to hit the fence above the fielder, our man would wave the towel, and all of the runners would go. We scored many a winning run with this home field advantage.”
ROGER KAHN: “Ebbets Field was a narrow cockpit, built of brick and iron and concrete, alongside a steep cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue. Two tiers of grandstand pressed the playing area from three sides, and in thousands of seats fans could hear a ball player’s chatter, notice details of a ball player’s gait and, at a time when television had not yet assaulted illusion with the Zoomar lens, you could see, you could actually see, the actual expression on the actual face of an actual major leaguer as he played. You could know what he was like!”
MEYER BLOCK: “In those days, fans on the lower level were allowed on the field after the game to exit to Bedford avenue through the outfield gate. What a thrill. We would wait by the hot dog stand on McKeever Place, listening to Red Barber, until the guard, only slightly older than us, gave us the high sign, and we would dart in.”
ANN DERMANSKY: “It was a dark, mysterious place that smelled of urine and mildew, low ceilinged, damp, dangerous (I, of course, was safe: I was with my daddy), intensely glamorous. You stepped out of the shadows into brilliant light, the field a perfect, crayola-color green.”
STANLEY BARKIN: “Home runs over the right field screen reached Bedford Avenue where we waited with gloves on to retrieve the balls. There was a gas station across the street, but more towards centerfield was an automobile showroom which often suffered broken windows from blasts over the scoreboard.”
RED BARBER: “I must select this Series [1947] as the most exciting that I know anything about. The involvements of MacPahil, Rickey, Durocher, Shotton and Harris set it up. Jackie Robinson giving his marvelous base-running exhibition as the first Negro to play in a Series — no Dodger starting pitcher lasting past the fifth inning, and Hugh Casey relieving — the Bill Bevens - Harry Lavagetto climax in game four — Joe DiMaggio hitting a home run off Barney — Allie Reynolds and Frank Shea pitching steadily, and in the seventh game Joe Page turning in the winning job — the catch by Al Gionfriddo against DiMaggio in the Sunday game. Finally, as the winning Yankees stormed happily into their clubhouse, MacPahil announced he was retiring as president of the club.”
BRANCH RICKEY: “He must be a great player. I must be sure that the man was good on the field, but more dangerous to me, at that time, is the wrong man off the field. It didn’t matter to me so much off the field that he was temperamental, — righteously subject to resentments. I wanted a man of exceptional intelligence, a man who was able to grasp and control the responsibilities of himself to his race and could carry that load.”
RACHEL ROBINSON: “People have a need to think of Rickey, and this is what racism is all about, as being the dominant person and having manipulated Jack as though he were some kind of puppet. To this business of Mr. Rickey’s saying after two years, ‘Okay, Jack, now the wraps are off, you can be yourself,’ well, that didn’t happen. Jack knew when things were settled down enough. Rickey was never the arrogant white man nor paternalistic. He made himself a partner in ‘our’ enterprise.”
BILL FEIGENBAUM: “We used to go to Ebbets Field — local synagogue groups, left-wing groups. All the left-wingers, who were mostly Jews, were great champions of liberal causes at that time. It was a big victory for them when Robinson got into the major leagues. We’d sit in the bleachers and watch Jackie Robinson and cheer more for him than anyone else.”
BRANCH RICKEY: “Possibly the very next generation will look back with incredulity upon everything that was a problem to us today in this country, and wonder what the issue was all about. I know that America is more interested in the grace of a man’s swing, in the dexterity of his cutting a base and his speed afoot, in his scientific body control, in his excellence as a competitor on the field than they are in the pigmentation of a man’s skin, or indeed in the last syllable of his name. God hasten the day when Governors of our States will become sufficiently educated that they will respond to those views.”
ROGERS HORNSBY: “Negro players should be developed and then remain as stars in their own leagues. A mixed ball team differs from other sports because ball players on the road live much closer.”
GEORGE DIGBY, Boston Red Sox scout: “Personally I think it [integration] is the worst thing that can happen to organized baseball I don’t think anyone should go in and start a lot of trouble — especially at this time.”
DON NEWCOMBE: “There was no consciousness of discrimination in my realm of thought when I joined the Eagles. I was a Negro in Negro baseball. Negroes were barred from organized ball and it looked as if the ban would never be lifted. In fact, I was so little interested in white ball that I did not see a big-league game until 1946 when I saw the Yanks and Dodgers play at Yankee Stadium.”
BUCK O’NEIL: “We were elated [after Robinson signed] but it was the death knell for our baseball. But who cared?”
LARAINE DAY (actress, wife of Leo Durocher): “Many of the players were Southerners and a protest had been drawn up and signed by most of the important players. Robinson would undoubtedly help the team, but if the presence of a Negro ballplayer were to bring about a strike, Leo might have no team at all. Leo was talking with the disaffected players one by one. This is probably the hardest work Leo has ever done in baseball. Talking is his favorite pastime but this was talk meant to overcome deep-seated feeling of centuries. There were nights when he returned from one of those meetings worn out from the strain. By strenuous effort the players were slowly being won over…. The only holdout was Dixie Walker.”
BOB GRUBER: “April 10, 1947, Robinson was promoted to the Dodgers from the Montreal Royals farm team. A day later, I was walking on Bedford Avenue on my way to Erasmus Hall High School. As I passed Martense Street, a young black man in a late model car stopped and, in a distinct voice, asked me, ‘Excuse me, fella, which way to Ebbets Field?’ I replied: ‘Keep going about a dozen blocks up Bedford.’ As he thanked me I realized that it was Jackie Robinson. He was to play as a Dodger for the first time that afternoon, in an exhibition game against the Yankees. When I told the story in the school lunchroom that day, the few black kids there came over and shook my hand.”
ALAN LELCHUK: “A team that had been one of comedy and futility now, suddenly, with the introduction and acceptance of Robinson and then other black players, become one of the two great teams of the postwar era. In the years after the war nothing symbolized the feeling of hope and optimism more than the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
LYLE SPATZ, on Game 3 of NL playoff, October 1951: “The class ended during the Giants ninth, and so several of us moved to the hall near the staircase to hear the end. Of course we were hoping to celebrate, so when Thomson hit the home run we were all in shock. Bobby Siegel took the radio, it was a little red Emerson, held it over his head and then heaved it down the stairway.”
CARL ERSKINE: “No more perfect a place existed than Brooklyn for the type of social transformation that Robinson would lead. I don’t think [the fans] realized at the time just how much they meant to the civil rights movement.”
The Glory Days was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.