myself that he spent 1943 in Okinawa, hitting fungoes to Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. He was only traveling secretary, the most prominent player on the team was a Detroit Tiger named Pat Mullins, and it was fast-pitch softball Stateside.
My father used to look almost exactly like Dodgers coach Leo Durocher (“Nice guys finish last.”). When we were living in Los Angeles, the garbageman supposedly shook my father’s hand and said, “Sorry to hear about your marriage, Mr. Durocher.” Durocher had been recently divorced from the actress Laraine Day; the garbageman was being sympathetic in the male manner—so went the story. And for some reason I always thought my father stood atop the trash in the back of the truck, hefted garbage cans with one hand, and cursed The Fishbowl Which Is Hollywood, whereas in actuality he immediately told my mother about impersonating Leo Durocher, she cautioned him against stringing along the innocent garbage collector, and he chased down the truck to explain and make amends.
Before the game, there was a “Peace Run” around the field—some sort of marathon-for-a-cause which I didn’t quite catch because the PA system sounded like it was being filtered through a car wash—then the umpires strolled onto the Astroturf. This is Seattle, so they weren’t booed even a little, though, which disappointed my father. In 1940, he was the star student at a Florida umpire school run by Bill McGowan, who said my father could become “another Dolly Stark” (i.e., a Jewish umpire), but before reporting to Class D ball my father begged off, citing his poor night vision. He wound up umping Brooklyn College–Seton Hall games and once got whacked over the head with a walking stick when he called someone’s favorite son out at home with two on, two out, the score tied, and the light, I guess, failing. My father’s favorite Bill McGowan story concerned the time McGowan, a former amateur boxer, grew weary of Babe Ruth’s grousing and, during the intermission of a doubleheader, challenged the Babe to a fight. The Babe backed down. The hero of my father’s stories is usually someone else. It’s rarely him.
The Mariners scored three in the first. Keith Moreland looked painfully uncomfortable at third for the Tigers. Ken Griffey Jr. made a nice catch in the fifth. The game was devoid of much interest, though, for either of us (longtime Dodger fans)—as my father said, “like watching a movie when you don’t care what happens to the characters.”
Assigned to write an essay on his favorite sports team, he wrote, “I swore undying loyalty to the Brooklyn Dodgers when I was 8 or 9, maybe even younger. Looking back over the bridge of many years, it seems to me I took up my allegiance for the Dodgers with my mother’s milk. My feelings for the team ranked one emotional peg below what I felt for my family.” Just as the walls of my childhood bedroom were covered with pictures of the Los Angeles Dodgers, his were covered with pictures of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Zack Wheat. Dazzy Vance. Wilbert Robinson. His essay continued:
Ebbets Field, where they played, was the temple, and baseball—which they played at times with heartbreaking inefficiency—was a secular religion for me.
I learned the Dodgers’ lineup before I mastered the ABCs. And I became skilled at keeping an intricate scorecard before I could handle numbers in the classroom. Just a matter of priorities.
To give you an idea of the kind of fan—make that nut—I was: During the season, I would rush to the door of our apartment at 6 in the morning to grab the
to find out how the Dodgers had made out the day before. If they won, I’d be all smiles, sing a little song quietly so as not to wake the rest of the family, but if they lost, I’d sit at the kitchen table and sob. My sobs would be heard by my father, who would get up and try to comfort me.
“Milt,” he’d say, putting his arm around me, “who are these Dodger people you’re carrying on about? Why do you take it so hard? What happened—did somebody die?”
“You don’t understand, Pop,” I’d say through my tears. “They’re
“Whaddya mean,
Usually by this time my mother would get up to begin preparations for breakfast for the family. “Leave him alone, Sam,” she’d say. “He’ll get over it. Today it’s the Dodgers,” which my mom pronounced to sound like “Deitches”—which, freely translated, is “Dutch,” or “German,” in Yiddish. “Tomorrow it’ll be something else.”
I didn’t get over it, as my mom predicted, until I was 21 and other things claimed my loyalty and passion: girls, the trade union movement, journalism.
But before I gained some perspective and finally realized “it was only a game,” I suffered; oh how I suffered: my beloved Brooklyn Bums, as they were affectionately called, lost more of them than they won. In the middle of a Dodger losing streak, I’d ask myself why God, in His infinite wisdom, didn’t make me a Yankee fan.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1946, and apparently while my mother was suffering blackout spells during a late summer heat wave in 1955, he flew back to New York, ostensibly to attend his father’s 85th birthday party but, more particularly, to attend the World Series and, even more particularly, watch the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees and, more particularly still, watch Jackie Robinson steal home under Yogi Berra’s tag. I have my father’s pictures of press row at Yankee Stadium. Look at the snap-brim hats.
In our family mythology, this flight of my father’s was always painted in the darkest of colors, and yet when I was a child I, too, would look first thing each morning at the box scores, then cry ickily into my cereal if the Dodgers had lost. I remember defacing my Ron Perranoski baseball card when he failed to hold a huge lead going into the ninth, pushing over my grandfather’s television set when it broadcast Dodger right fielder Ron Fairly’s misplay of an easy flyball into a home run over the low right-field wall at Dodger Stadium, engaging in a weird sort of mock- Ophelia thing at the beach after the fiasco of the 1966 Series against the Orioles. What was this obsession we had with the Dodgers? “For me, it comes out this way,” my father wrote me the week after this Father’s Day visit. “I wanted the Dodgers to compensate for some of the unrealized goals in my career. If I wasn’t winning my battle to succeed in newspapering, union organizing, or whatever I turned to in my wholly unplanned, anarchic life, then my surrogates—the nine boys in blue—could win against the Giants, Pirates, et al. Farfetched? Maybe so. But I think it has some validity. In my case. Not in yours.”
Oh, no; not in mine; never in mine.
Although the Kingdome (since demolished) had, even by ballpark standards, notoriously bad food, we decided to stand in line at the concession anyway, not because we were so hungry but because we needed something to do while a wave was going around the stadium. My father and I both got a hot dog and a beer, and we shared a bag of peanuts—which came to an amazing amount of money, for a meal my father said had the nutritional quotient of a resin bag. To my father’s astonishment, I topped off this indigestible dinner with a chocolate malt, which looked almost purple and tasted as bitter as coffee. We returned to our seats. The wave was still rising and falling, or maybe it was a new wave.
Sixty years before, he was a sports stringer for the
He always used to send me the column he wrote for his tennis club newsletter. This was by far my favorite lead: “A hundred members and guests attended the annual Tennis Club meeting and, to coin a forgettable phrase, a helluva time was had by all and sundry. (Especially Sundry, who seemed to be having the time of his life.)” When I’m in certain moods, this Borscht Belt humor can completely convulse me.
Just as in order to express some sort of vague rebellion we didn’t stand up during the National Anthem, during the seventh-inning stretch we didn’t stretch, either, although I couldn’t help but watch the “full-matrix scoreboard,” which was flashing images of fans stretching. All 15,000 fans in the Kingdome were watching the scoreboard, waiting to find out whether they were beautiful enough to be broadcast, since virtually without exception the images were Pacific Northwest–perfect: sleepy babies wearing Mariners caps, energetic grandparents, couples kissing. The moment people were shown, they pointed at the screen, then they pointed at themselves pointing at themselves on the screen, then everyone pointed at them pointing at themselves pointing at themselves on the screen. I continued looking at the scoreboard, wanting my chance to point at myself pointing at myself on the screen, and then I looked over at my father, who hadn’t been watching the screen at all. He was
