“The Dodgers won the pennant my senior year, must have been 1941. We all cut gym class to go see the game. We saw our teachers there, too.”
***
For a very long time, I’ve read about baseball in the 1940s and the 1950s. I’ve read about the glory days of baseball in New York, of Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Roy Campanella.
I’ve never, until tonight, actually talked to someone about it.
The way the face lights up, remembering one’s favorite players, how you could get into Ebbett’s field for $.10 and get a decent seat on the third base line for $.35, the despair when talking about the events of 1957…
Tonight, almost by chance, I had the chance to talk.
****
I’m in Florida for the weekend, and I’m staying with my grandmother.
I’ve known that Nana is a baseball fan and that she was a Dodgers fan, but not much more than that.
The dinner conversation tonight–over steamers, pizza and my brother’s steak sandwich–ambled like only a dinner conversation can, moving from one topic to the next.
First, it was food. Then Europe. Then art. Then a conversation about a house-museum in upper (way, way upper) Manhattan, and an off-hand remark about going to visit as a young girl.
“Nana,” I said, “I thought you said you grew up in Brooklyn?”
“I was eleven when I moved to Brooklyn. I was born in the Bronx and lived in Manhattan.”
I did not know this.
“So,” I said, having never before made the connection, “you got to see the original Yankee Stadium?”
“Of course,” she said. I can do the math in my head and realize that sometime between Nana’s birth and her move to Brooklyn, she got to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play. No wonder she likes baseball…
The conversation shifts, then, to the Dodgers, and to her memories of the team.
“Robinson, Reese, Campanella…I can’t remember who played first base.”
So begins a mad chase, my brother and I, using smart phones to try to pin down the first baseman. I suggest looking for the 1955 Dodgers–the year they won the World Series–but Nana says that’s too late.
That’s when Nana says she’s thinking of the year the Dodgers won the pennant, the year she cut gym class to go see, and that year had to be 1941.
So we look up the 1941 Dodgers on Baseball Reference, and I read off the names.
Owen.
Camilli. (Good old Dolph! )
Herman.
Reese.
Cooki– Lavagetto
Reiser.
Medwick.
Walker.
“We had some outfield.”
We read through all of the names, Nana making her comments about the ones she remembers–Medwick, especially, since she always sat by third base.
We compare the roster in 1955–more names I recognize–Campanella, Hodges, Newcombe, Podres, even a 19-year-old Sandy Koufax.
Then comes 1957.
“I never forgave them. I was done.”
That one line explains why I am a Yankees fan–there aren’t Dodgers in Brooklyn any more.
****
How often, I wonder, do mothers and daughters bond over baseball?
What about grandmothers and granddaughters?
We talk about baseball as something that’s passed from fathers to sons, and only recently from fathers to daughters, and yet, here I was, bonding with my grandmother, not over European art or literature or travel as we often do, but baseball (and a little Jets football, too).
So, sure, Nana can’t stand the Yankees, but I’ll give her a pass on that one.
She has memories, and with the memories come the stories, and just that little bit more texture to a world now relegated to books and old film.
Her stories make it real.