NEW YORK,
May 30, 1983
SPALDEEN SUMMERS
Summer, when I was a boy in Brooklyn, was a string of intimacies, a sum of small knowings, and almost none of them cost money. Nobody ever figured out a way to charge us for morning, and morning then was the beginning of everything. I was an altar boy in the years after the war, up in the morning before most other people for the long walk to the church on the hill. And I would watch the sun rise in Prospect Park — at first a rumor, then a heightened light, something unseen and immense melting the hard early darkness; then suddenly there was a molten ball, screened by the trees, about to climb to a scalding noon. The sun would dry the dew on the grass of the park, soften the tar, bake the rooftops, brown us on the beaches, make us sweat, force us out of the tight, small flats of the tenements.
And if dawn was a tremendous overture, endlessly repeated, the days were always improvisations. How did we decide what to do with our time? We didn’t; the day decided. The day had its own rhythms. I don’t remember ever drawing up plans, or waiting for some agent of the state to arrive and direct us. Usually, the day would tell us to meet on the corner, with a pink spaldeen and a stickball bat. All through the war, there had been no spaldeens, and the few survivors had been treasured or replaced with those gray furry tennis balls we all despised, because we had never seen tennis played, had no idea what it was about, worshiped no tennis players. When spaldeens returned, stickball entered a golden age. Two blocks away, on 14th Street beside the Minerva Theater, the Tigers played gigantic money games, with pots as large as $300 and audiences jamming the sidewalks. Our games were smaller. We were still amateurs. Literally lovers. Lovers of that simple game with its swift variations on basebalclass="underline" one strike and you were out, no bases on balls, six men on a team, sewer tops for bases, scoreboards chalked on tar. We made bats from broom handles, and there was an elaborate ritual of transforming broom to bat: clawing away the wire that held the straw by jamming the broom on a picket fence; then burning away the end of the straw; then sanding off splinters and taping the handle. Those brooms made beautiful bats, thin at the handle, thicker at the end. Today, commercially made stickball bats are sold in stores, products of Super Glut; they are terrible bats, as straight and untapered as poles. Playing with them is like playing with a mop handle.
Stickball wasn’t always a team game. We played variations called catchaflyerup (or, more literally, catch a fly, you’re up), in which a batter kept hitting until someone caught a batted ball on the fly; roly-poly, where you rolled the spaldeen, after it was hit, toward the bat, which lay flat across home plate (if the ball hit the bat, bounced, and the batter missed it, the player who rolled it became the new hitter); and, most simply, tenhitsapiece, in which each batter was allowed to hit ten times. The simpler variations were played early in the morning, before everybody showed up on the court. When there were enough players, we started the full games, with their elaborate, specific ground rules: Off the factory wall was a home run, off the diner was a hindoo (a do-over). Around the city there were dozens of other variations.
We didn’t play much baseball because the equipment cost too much money, but we lived and breathed the game. Most of us were Dodger fans, from territorial loyalty, but also because it was one of the greatest of all baseball teams. In all of that neighborhood, I knew one Giant fan and one guy who unaccountably rooted for the Cincinnati Reds. Nobody rooted for the Yankees.
That was before television’s triumph, before so many children were turned into passive slugs, before the relentless tides of Super Glut had jammed or pacified so many imaginations. We didn’t have those giant $350 radios you see everywhere now (the radio in our house was shaped like a cathedral, and you had to hold the aerial in the back to hear clearly). But somehow we always knew The Score. Red Barber narrated the Dodger games on WHN, and we would shout into the bars — into Rattigan’s, Fitzgerald’s, Quigley’s, Unbeatable Joe’s — “Who’s winnin’ and who’s pitchin’ and who got the hits?” We knew; we always knew. The Score was like some insistent melody being played in another room, parallel to our own lives and our own scores.
But we also saw a lot of games at Ebbets Field. The Police Athletic League gave away Knothole Club tickets, and so — reluctantly, fearful of the taint of betrayal — we would go into the 72nd Precinct each spring and sign up for the PAL so we could get Dodger tickets. They were almost always in the bleachers, when the worst teams (and poorest draws) were in town against the Dodgers, but we didn’t care. There was Dixie Walker, over in right field, and Pete Reiser, playing out the shattered autumn of his career, his brilliant talent broken against the walls of the great ballpark. And on different days in different summers, Reese, Snider, Billy Cox, Stanky, Furillo, Hodges, and the rest, HIT SIGN WIN SUIT, said Abe Stark’s sign under the Scoreboard in center; the sign was three feet off the ground, and it would have required three simultaneous outfield coronaries for any batter to bounce a baseball off that sign, but it was a crucial part of the furnishings. And there, jittery and wonderful, dancing off third base, ready to steal home, rattling the pitchers, was Jackie Robinson. That was part of being a Dodger fan then: You were forced to take a moral position. To be a Dodger fan in those days was to endorse the idea that a black man had a right to steal home in the major leagues.
Ebbets Field became our second home. We knew how to scale the fence if there were no PAL tickets; we knew where we could rob programs and scorecards. We developed a variety of techniques for getting in; we had one crippled kid in the neighborhood whom we carried out like a prop, telling the guards he had three days to live, or had been hit by a car driven by a Giant fan, or had been caught in Europe during the war and bombed by the Nazis. The guards always let us in. We knew where to wait for the ballplayers when they came out, and which one signed autographs and which didn’t. Tell me I’m fourteen and I’ll tell you I just saw Cookie Lavagetto.
We collected baseball picture cards, which came with bubble gum, and there was an elaborate system of games and trading that revolved around the cards. We hated the Yankees so much that we despised the entire league that housed them, so there was no value at all to most players from the American League. If a National League player wasn’t a Dodger, he had to be good to be valued; if he was good, we feared him, and that meant we saved Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, Sal Maglie, Johnny Mize, and, later, Willie Mays.
Because there was no television, we came early to newspapers. They would lie under their two-by-four on Pop Sanew’s newsstand: the News, Mirror, Times, Herald Tribune, Journal-American, World-Telegram, Post, PM, Brooklyn Eagle, and Brooklyn Times-Union. In that neighborhood, we thought the Post was edited by Joe Stalin, just as other neighborhoods thought that the Daily News was edited by Francisco Franco. But we didn’t care about any of that. Somehow, with deposits from milk and soda bottles, we bought papers: to read Jimmy Cannon in the Post, Frank Graham in the Journal, Dan Parker in the Mirror, and, most important of all, Dick Young in the News. Young was the greatest writer in history, we felt, better than Tommy Holmes or Harold C. Burr in the Eagle (which I delivered after school, and had other people deliver when I went to ball games), better than anyone we were forced to read at school. He was always going after the bosses, after Branch Rickey and then after the infamous Walter O’Malley. The dream job was to grow up and be Dick Young.