“I wish I read more often. I wish I read, period. And cooked. My aunt made the most delicious Jelly Tots.”
“I baked some last night. They’re in the car.”
1962 THROWN A CURVE BALL IN NEW YORK
My stepfather Harvey and I were both enjoying our birthday toys. Our birthdays were only two days apart in early April. My present was a transistor radio that Harvey and Mom let me pick out at Brach’s downtown. I remember going out to my stepfather’s brand new Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway, knowing that I’d find him inside, sitting in the driver’s bucket, patiently waiting for the game to start. Harvey was listening to Frank Sinatra on the car radio as I got inside, my new leather-slipcased radio in hand. A thick, sweet cloud of smoke nebulized by his Tiparillo hung in the air.
“We can listen to the game on my new radio,” I offered, holding up my birthday present. (I think it was the rule in 1962 that eleven-year-old boys were supposed to be given transistor radios for their birthdays — especially in families that had qualms about BB guns.)
Harvey took a puff from his slender plastic-tipped cigar, which had just come on the market. He shook his head. “Save the juice in your 9-volt, Scoots. We’ll listen to the bug radio.”
My stepfather knew a thing or two about batteries. He worked for Schenectady’s big General Electric company. He and his fellow scientists and engineers were in the process of inventing the world’s strongest superconducting magnet. Harvey’s team was competing against Bell Telephone Labs for an impressive prize: several cases of top-shelf Scotch — to be sent by the losers to the winners. Harvey probably didn’t tell the Bell folks that he didn’t drink Scotch. His potable of choice was Rheingold, the official beer, as it turned out, of the New York Mets, whose very first game we were about to listen to on station WGY, courtesy of WABC out of New York City.
Harvey was from St. Louis, and a little conflicted. The Mets were playing the Cardinals in Busch Stadium, and Harvey had always been a big fan of Stan “The Man” Musial. On the other hand, he’d lived in New York for the last twenty years and was just as fixed in his belief that the state deserved a National League team — after the demoralizing departure of the Dodgers and the Giants — as the most adamant of Gotham’s born-and-breds. In fact, it was the tragedy of losing those two powerhouse teams and all the sentimental feelings lingering in their wake that played a big role in the Mets acquiring one of the worst teams in baseball.
“A real Geritol bunch — all these former Dodger and Giant coots,” my stepfather joked when he found out whom the team had signed. And he made a similar assessment that day in the car, as one of the broadcast’s three announcers, Bob Murphy, presented the lineup for his radio listeners. Each name elicited either a chuckle and a shake of the head or the designation “Gramps” or “Methuselah” or “No Spring Chicken by any Goddamned Metric.” Harvey didn’t watch his language when it was just him and me. He smoked. He drank his multiple bottles of Rheingold (close at hand this day in a little ice chest on the back seat). He gave me a taste every now and then, so long as I didn’t tell Mom. “Gil Hodges has got to be pushing forty!” he exclaimed when the first baseman’s name was announced. “And Richie Ashburn’s not that far behind him. Oh, good Christ, did I ever tell you the story of Richie and that poor Mrs. Roth — the wife of the sports editor down in Philadelphia?”
I had heard the story before. It’s not a story you forget, but I pretended that I hadn’t and shook my head.
“It was back in ’57, when Richie was playing for the Phillies — he hits this foul ball right into the stands, and wham! The unlucky bastard breaks the poor woman’s nose. And this equally hapless Mrs. Roth, they’re getting her all laid out on the stretcher and the game picks back up again and — sweet Jesus in a hammock — Ashburn beans her again, right there on the goddamned stretcher! It’s like the gods of misfortune just aren’t gonna be happy until the poor woman gets sent up to that disabled list in the sky.”
Although I already knew the answer, I asked anyway: “And was Mrs. Roth — did she end up being okay?”
“Oh, sure — sure. I think she and Richie even became friends after all that.”
Murphy announced that Don Zimmer would be playing third base for the Mets. “Now you talk about your bad luck. Did I ever tell you about Zimmer’s shit-for-luck magnet head for wild pitches?”
“He got hit in the head too?”
“Right in the temple, back in ’53, when he was playing for the minors in St. Paul. Put him in a coma for two weeks and they had to drill a bunch of holes into his head — to relieve the pressure, I guess. I think he wears a steel plate to this day. Anyway, they told him he was finished in baseball, but he proved them all wrong. Came back stronger than ever so he could get himself beaned again in ’56 in Cincinnati — broke his motherloving jaw.”
As Murphy was announcing the Cardinals’ lineup, Harvey sat up straight. I knew he was listening for Musial’s name and once he heard it, he couldn’t hold back a big grin. “Busch, Sportsman’s Park — whatever the hell it is that we’re supposed to call it now — it’s one of the best parks in the majors for left-handed hitters like Musial. Babe Ruth hit three homers in two different World Series games back in ’26 and ’28.”
“Harvey, how is it you know so much about baseball?”
“I know so much about everything. You think your mother married me for my looks?” Harvey grinned even bigger than before and chucked me under the chin. Then we both got quiet and listened to the opening innings of the inaugural game of the New York Mets, which was also the first game of the 1962 major league baseball season. New York City was thrilled to finally have a second team. There was to be a big parade down Broadway in Manhattan the next day. A special ceremony with Mayor Wagner was scheduled for City Hall.
Today’s game had been postponed from the day before because of rain. The outfield was soggy and the fielders had to wear football shoes to get any traction. The Mets’ pitcher, Roger Craig, struggled against the Cards in the early innings, but for everything that had been said about Gil Hodges and his advanced years (in baseball terms, that is, and only by my stepfather Harvey — Murphy and Ralph Kiner and their broadcast booth colleague Lindsey Nelson being far kinder), the first baseman knocked the ball out of the park in the fourth inning (his 362nd career homer).
“Gil, you son of a bitch!” my stepfather howled, and then turning to me: “I take back everything I said about that old geezer.” To punctuate his mea culpa, he took a big swig of beer and passed the bottle to me. “Yeah, I’m a bad influence. Sue me.”
Harvey laughed, his whole face radiating happiness. Then suddenly the joy evaporated. He turned the volume knob of the radio so that Kiner’s voice dropped to a mumble and the crowd noises were reduced to a hum. The spell that had been cast over us by the game was now broken.
There is something about listening to baseball on the radio, something indefinably gratifying, that has stayed with me well into my later years — past that disastrous first season for the Mets, in which they won only one out of every four games they played (and finished the season 60 ½ games behind the Giants) and even beyond their redemptive Cinderella year, 1969. Even today I can still close my eyes and picture myself at the ballpark, first the Polo Grounds and then the spanking new Shea Stadium. I imbibe the vocal restlessness of the fans — supportive, forgiving, but this being New York, always displaying a kind of ballsy bluntness, a sort of tough love for a team that stumbled just as often as it walked or ran. If I listen close enough, I can even hear the cries of the hotdog and peanut vendors: the perfect ambient embroidery to the drone of that vibrant crowd.