Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir Read online

  Praise for Wait Till Next Year

  “In a season awash in X-rated memoirs, Wait Till Next Year is an anomaly: a reminiscence that is suitable, in fact ideal, for a preadolescent readership of not just girls but boys too…. For self-esteem-building role models, for baseball lore and inning-by-inning action and for a lively trip into the recent American past, you could hardly do better. This is a 50’s success story that is able to acknowledge the strains in the prosperous decade as a fact rather than an indictment of the time.”

  —Ann Hulbert, The New York Times Book Review

  “Ms. Goodwin has … made familiar events seem fresh again, as if they were happening for the first time only a couple of days ago.”

  —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

  “A poignant memoir … marvelous … Goodwin shifts gracefully between a child’s recollection and an adult’s overview.”

  —Peter Delacorte, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  “Lively, tender, and … hilarious, … [Goodwin’s] memoir is uplifting evidence that the American dream still exists—not so much in the content of the dream as in the tireless, daunting dreaming.”

  —Jodi Daynard, The Boston Globe

  “Endearing recollections of a feisty girlhood in the prefeminist, prosperous, confident 1950’s on Long Island, in the orbit of the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

  —The New York Times Book Review (Bear in Mind section)

  “Skillful, entertaining, and just plain interesting … There is a charming but deceptive artlessness to her recounting of childhood escapades involving neighbors, merchants and church doings; it is the sort of surface artlessness that results only from a fine writer’s conscious mastery of her difficult craft. Like the best pianists, Goodwin makes the difficult seem easy because she is a fluent technician.”

  —Robert Finn, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Goodwin leaves room for readers to reminisce and to draw their own meaning from the small gem of a story. And by subtly entwining the threads of larger social issues that emerge—McCarthyism, integration, the threat of nuclear war—Goodwin succeeds in serving up a slice of America’s collective memory after which ‘nothing would be the same—in baseball, in sports, or in the country itself.’”

  —Amy Rogers, Creative Loafing

  “As the tenured radicals attempt to rewrite our nation’s history, the warm, witty, eloquent personal testimony of someone of Doris Kearns Good win’s stature is well worth reading.”

  —Maggie Gallagher, Baltimore Sun

  “In an era when memoirs are often characterized by salacious confessions, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin restores a refreshing element of innocence to the genre in Wait Till Next Year…. Such stability rarely exists anymore, in baseball or in life. Wait Till Next Year is a chance to savor it again.”

  —Jim Abbott, The Orlando Sentinel

  “It isn’t necessary to be a baseball fan or to have your own memories of the Brooklyn Dodgers to savor Goodwin’s touching and beautifully conveyed reminiscences.”

  —Bruce Nathan, Chattanooga Free Press

  “Readable as history, as a baseball story, or simply as the tale of a remarkable girl destined to become a remarkable woman, Wait Till Next Year is everything a literary memoir should be.”

  —Tom Cooper, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Come and get it, folks—this rarity, a happy memoir, about a girl, an era and a game.”

  —The Arizona Republic

  ALSO BY DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

  The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys

  No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt:

  The Home Front in World War II

  Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

  Wait Till Next Year

  DORIS

  KEARNS

  GOODWIN

  A MEMOIR

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  Copyright © 1997 by Blithedale Publications, Inc.

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  Designed by Edith Fowler

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Goodwin, Doris Kearns.

  Wait till next year : a memoir/Doris Kearns

  Goodwin.

  p. cm.

  1. Brooklyn Dodgers (Baseball team)—History.

  2. Goodwin, Doris Kearns—Childhood and youth.

  3. Baseball fans—United States—Biography.

  4. Historians—United States—Biography.

  I. Title.

  GV875.B7G66 1997

  796.357′092—dc21

  [B] 97-39766

  CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-82489-5

  ISBN-10: 0-684-82489-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-84795-5 (Pbk)

  eISBN-13: 9781-4-391-8858-3

  ISBN-10: 0-684-84795-7 (Pbk)

  In memory of my parents,

  MICHAEL AND HELEN KEARNS,

  and to my sisters,

  CHARLOTTE AND JEANNE

  PREFACE

  A FEW YEARS AGO, anxious to enrich his predominantly male cast with a passionate female fan, filmmaker Ken Burns interviewed me for his documentary on baseball. I talked about my childhood love for the Brooklyn Dodgers, my desolation when they moved to California, and my becoming a Red Sox fan—a rather ominous progression.

  The reaction was startling. Almost everywhere, as I traveled the lecture circuit, I encountered people less anxious to hear my tales of Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, or the Roosevelts than they were to share memories of those wondrous days when baseball almost ruled the world. The enthusiastic intensity of their recollections revealed that they were remembering not simply the history of a team or a group of athletes but their own history, and especially their youthful days.

  In response, I set out to write a story of my own coming of age as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, a story that would be peopled not by leaders of the nation, but by Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Sandy Amoros, and the infamous Bobby Thomson.

  As I set to work, however, I saw that my early involvement with baseball was an indistinguishable part of my childhood in Rockville Centre, Long Island. Thinking about the Dodgers summoned recollections of my family, my neighborhood, my village, and the evolution of my own sensibilities. I could not talk about my experience as a fan without also telling the story of my life as a young girl reaching adolescence in that deceptively tranquil decade of the nineteen fifties.

  From something as simple as the small red scorebook in which I inscribed the narrative of a ball game, I saw the inception of what has become my life’s work as a historian. My early friendships, the adventures which took place in my home and on my block, in the butcher shop and the soda fountain, in my church and my school, revealed a microcosm of a time and a way of life shared by many who knew nothing of the Dodgers or even of baseball. These recollections unveiled my own qualities as a young girl, the experiences, the habits of thought and fantasy, the feelings which define
d me as a child and which were decisively to shape my life and work as an adult. Thus, my intention to write my baseball story was transformed into something different. I would write my own history of growing up in the fifties—when my neighbors formed an extended family, when television was young, when the street was our common playground, when our lives seemed free from worry, until one remembered the sweeping fears of polio, communist subversion, and the atomic bomb that hung over our childhood days like low-lying clouds.

  I soon discovered, however, that my own memory was not equal to my expanding ambition. Some of my most vivid private recollections of people and events seemed ambiguous and fragmentary when subjected to the necessities of public narrative. If I were to be faithful to my tale, it would be necessary to summon to my own history the tools I had acquired in investigating the history of others. I would look for evidence, not simply to confirm my own memory, but to stimulate it and to provide a larger context for my childhood adventures. Thus I sought out the companions of my youth, finding almost everyone who lived on my block, people I hadn’t seen for three or four decades. I explored the streets and shops in which I had spent my days, searched the Rockville Centre archives, and read the local newspapers from the fifties. From all this—from my own memory and the extended memory of others, from old pamphlets, documents, yearbooks, and picture albums—I have tried to re-create the life of a young girl growing up in a very special time and circumstance, and set on a path which led inexorably to a place she could not even imagine.

  Easter 1947.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN I WAS SIX, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball. After dinner on long summer nights, he would sit beside me in our small enclosed porch to hear my account of that day’s Brooklyn Dodger game. Night after night he taught me the odd collection of symbols, numbers, and letters that enable a baseball lover to record every action of the game. Our score sheets had blank boxes in which we could draw our own slanted lines in the form of a diamond as we followed players around the bases. Wherever the baserunner’s progress stopped, the line stopped. He instructed me to fill in the unused boxes at the end of each inning with an elaborate checkerboard design which made it absolutely clear who had been the last to bat and who would lead off the next inning. By the time I had mastered the art of scorekeeping, a lasting bond had been forged among my father, baseball, and me.

  All through the summer of 1949, my first summer as a fan, I spent my afternoons sitting cross-legged before the squat Philco radio which stood as a permanent fixture on our porch in Rockville Centre, on the South Shore of Long Island, New York. With my scorebook spread before me, I attended Dodger games through the courtly voice of Dodger announcer Red Barber. As he announced the lineup, I carefully printed each player’s name in a column on the left side of my sheet. Then, using the standard system my father had taught me, which assigned a number to each position in the field, starting with a “1” for the pitcher and ending with a “9” for the right fielder, I recorded every play. I found it difficult at times to sit still. As the Dodgers came to bat, I would walk around the room, talking to the players as if they were standing in front of me. At critical junctures, I tried to make a bargain, whispering and cajoling while Pee Wee Reese or Duke Snider stepped into the batter’s box: “Please, please, get a hit. If you get a hit now, I’ll make my bed every day for a week.” Sometimes, when the score was close and the opposing team at bat with men on base, I was too agitated to listen. Asking my mother to keep notes, I left the house for a walk around the block, hoping that when I returned the enemy threat would be over, and once again we’d be up at bat. Mostly, however, I stayed at my post, diligently recording each inning so that, when my father returned from his job as bank examiner for the State of New York, I could re-create for him the game he had missed.

  When my father came home from the city, he would change from his three-piece suit into long pants and a short-sleeved sport shirt, and come downstairs for the ritual Manhattan cocktail with my mother. Then my parents would summon me for dinner from my play on the street outside our house. All through dinner I had to restrain myself from telling him about the day’s game, waiting for the special time to come when we would sit together on the couch, my scorebook on my lap.

  “Well, did anything interesting happen today?” he would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon’s contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day’s work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father’s undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did.

  Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, my father, was a short man who appeared much larger on account of his erect bearing, broad chest, and thick neck. He had a ruddy Irish complexion, and his green eyes flashed with humor and vitality. When he smiled his entire face was transformed, radiating enthusiasm and friendliness. He called me “Bubbles,” a pet name he had chosen, he told me, because I seemed to enjoy so many things. Anxious to confirm his description, I refused to let my enthusiasm wane, even when I grew tired or grumpy. Thus excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.

  These nightly recountings of the Dodgers’ progress provided my first lessons in the narrative art. From the scorebook, with its tight squares of neatly arranged symbols, I could unfold the tale of an entire game and tell a story that seemed to last almost as long as the game itself. At first, I was unable to resist the temptation to skip ahead to an important play in later innings. At times, I grew so excited about a Dodger victory that I blurted out the final score before I had hardly begun. But as I became more experienced in my storytelling, I learned to build a dramatic story with a beginning, middle, and end. Slowly, I learned that if I could recount the game, one batter at a time, inning by inning, without divulging the outcome, I could keep the suspense and my father’s interest alive until the very last pitch. Sometimes I pretended that I was the great Red Barber himself, allowing my voice to swell when reporting a home run, quieting to a whisper when the action grew tense, injecting tidbits about the players into my reports. At critical moments, I would jump from the couch to illustrate a ball that turned foul at the last moment or a dropped fly that was scored as an error.

  “How many hits did Roy Campanella get?” my dad would ask. Tracing my finger across the horizontal line that represented Campanella’s at bats that day, I would count. “One, two, three. Three hits, a single, a double, and another single.” “How many strikeouts for Don New-combe?” It was easy. I would count the Ks. “One, two … eight. He had eight strikeouts.” Then he’d ask me more subtle questions about different plays—whether a strike-out was called or swinging, whether the double play was around the horn, whether the single that won the game was hit to left or right. If I had scored carefully, using the elaborate system he had taught me, I would know the answers. My father pointed to the second inning, where Jackie Robinson had hit a single and then stolen second. There was excitement in his voice. “See, it’s all here. While Robinson was dancing off second, he rattled the pitcher so badly that the next two guys walked to load the bases. That’s the impact Robinson makes, game after game. Isn’t he something?” His smile at such moments inspired me to take my responsibility seriously.

  Sometimes, a particular play would trigger in my father a memory of a similar situation in a game when he was young, and he would tell me stories about the Dodgers when he was a boy growing up in Brooklyn. His vivid tales featured strange heroes such as Casey Stengel, Zack Wheat, and Jimmy Johnston. Though it was hard at firs
t to imagine that the Casey Stengel I knew, the manager of the Yankees, with his colorful language and hilarious antics, was the same man as the Dodger outfielder who hit an inside-the-park home run at the first game ever played at Ebbets Field, my father so skillfully stitched together the past and the present that I felt as if I were living in different time zones. If I closed my eyes, I imagined I was at Ebbets Field in the 1920s for that celebrated game when Dodger right fielder Babe Herman hit a double with the bases loaded, and through a series of mishaps on the base paths, three Dodgers ended up at third base at the same time. And I was sitting by my father’s side, five years before I was born, when the lights were turned on for the first time at Ebbets Field, the crowd gasping and then cheering as the summer night was transformed into startling day.

  When I had finished describing the game, it was time to go to bed, unless I could convince my father to tally each player’s batting average, reconfiguring his statistics to reflect the developments of that day’s game. If Reese went 3 for 5 and had started the day at .303, my father showed me, by adding and multiplying all the numbers in his head, that his average would rise to .305. If Snider went O for 4 and started the day at .301, then his average would dip four points below the .300 mark. If Carl Erskine had let in three runs in seven innings, then my father would multiply three times nine, divide that by the number of innings pitched, and magically tell me whether Erskine’s earned-run average had improved or worsened. It was this facility with numbers that had made it possible for my father to pass the civil-service test and become a bank examiner despite leaving school after the eighth grade. And this job had carried him from a Brooklyn tenement to a house with a lawn on Southard Avenue in Rockville Centre.