It had been an odd fall, but a good one, especially for my dad. My father, you see, was the best baseball writer of his generation—he really was—and in the fall of 1960 I believe he proved it. At a time when most sportswriting was leaden or read as if written by enthusiastic but minimally gifted fourteen-year-olds, he wrote prose that was thoughtful, stylish, and comparatively sophisticated. “Neat but not gaudy,” he would always say, with a certain flourish of satisfaction, as he pulled the last sheet out of the typewriter. No one could touch him at writing against a deadline, and on October 13, 1960, at the World Series in Pittsburgh he put the matter beyond possible dispute.
The series ended with one of those dramatic moments that baseball seemed to specialize in in those days: Bill Mazeroski of Pittsburgh hit a home run in the ninth inning that snatched triumph from the Yankees and handed it miraculously and unexpectedly to the lowly Pirates. Virtually all the papers in the country reported the news in the same soberly uninspired tones. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of the story that ran on page one of The New York Times the next morning: The Pirates today brought Pittsburgh its first world series baseball championship in thirty-five years when Bill Mazeroski slammed a ninth-inning home run high over the left-field wall of historic Forbes Field.
And here is what people in Iowa read:
The most hallowed piece of property in Pittsburgh baseball history left Forbes Field late Thursday afternoon under a dirty gray sports jacket and with a police escort.
That, of course, was home plate, where Bill Mazeroski completed his electrifying home run while Umpire Bill Jackowski, broad back braced and arms spread, held off the mob long enough for Bill to make it legal.
Pittsburgh’s steel mills couldn’t have made more noise than the crowd in this ancient park did when Mazeroski smashed Yankee Ralph Terry’s second pitch of the ninth inning. By the time the ball sailed over the ivy-covered brick wall, the rush from the stands had begun and these sudden madmen threatened to keep Maz from touching the plate with the run that beat the lordly Yankees, 10–9, for the title.
Bear in mind that the story was written not at leisure but amid the din and distraction of a crowded press box in the immediate whooping aftermath of the game. Nor could a single thought or neat phrase (like “broad back braced and arms spread”) have been prepared in advance and casually dropped into the text. Since Mazeroski’s home run rudely upended a nation’s confident expectations of a victory by “the lordly Yankees,”
every sportswriter present had to discard whatever he’d had in mind to say, even one batter earlier, and start afresh. Search as you will, you won’t find a better World Series game report on file anywhere, unless it was another of my dad’s. *8
But I had no idea of this at the time. All I knew was that my father returned home from the series in unusually high spirits, and revealed his startling plans to take us away on a trip over Christmas to some mysterious locale.
“You wait. You’ll like it. You’ll see,” was all he would say, to whoever asked. The whole idea of it was unspeakably exciting—we weren’t the type of people to do something so rash, so sudden, so un-seasonal—but unnerving, too, for exactly the same reasons. So on the afternoon of December 16, when Greenwood, my elementary school, dispatched its happy hordes into the snowy streets to begin three glorious weeks of yuletide relaxation (and school holidays in those days, let me say, were of a proper and generous duration), the family Rambler was waiting out front, steaming extravagantly, keenly even, and ready to cut a trail across the snowy prairies. We headed west, as usual, crossed the mighty Missouri River at Council Bluffs and made our way past Omaha.
Then we just kept on going. We drove for what seemed like (in fact was) days across the endless, stubbly, snow-blown plains.
We passed one enticing diversion after another—Pony Express stations, buffalo licks, a pretty big rock—without so much as a sideways glance from my father. My mother began to look faintly worried.
On the third morning, we caught our first sight of the Rockies—the first time in my life I had seen something on the horizon other than a horizon. And still we kept going, up and through the ragged mountains and out the other side. We emerged in California, into warmth and sunshine, and spent a week experiencing its wonders—its mighty groves of redwoods, the lush Imperial Valley, Big Sur, Los Angeles—and the delicious, odd feel of warm sunlight on your face and bare arms in December: a winter without winter.
I had seldom—what am I saying? I had never—seen my father so generous and carefree. At a lunch counter in San Luis Obispo he invited me, urged me, to have a large hot fudge sundae, and when I said, “Dad, are you sure?” he said, “Go on, you only live once”—a sentiment that had never passed his teeth before, certainly not in a commercial setting.
We spent Christmas day walking on a beach in Santa Monica, and on the day after Christmas we got in the car and drove south on a snaking freeway through the hazy, warm, endless nowhereness of Los Angeles. At length we parked in an enormous parking lot that was almost comically empty—we were one of only half a dozen cars, all from out of state—and strode a few paces to a grand entrance, where we stood with hands in pockets looking up at a fabulous display of wrought iron.
“Well, Billy, do you know where this is?” my father asked, unnecessarily. There wasn’t a child in the world that didn’t know these fabled gates.
“It’s Disneyland,” I said.
“It certainly is,” he agreed and stared appreciatively at the gates as if they were something he had privately commissioned.
For a minute I wondered if this is all we had come for—to admire the gates—and that in a moment we would get back in the car and drive on to somewhere else. But instead he told us to wait there, and strode purposefully to a ticket booth where he conducted a brief but remarkably cheerful transaction. It was the only time in my life that I saw two twenty-dollar bills leave my father’s wallet simultaneously. As he waited at the window, he gave us a bored smile and a little wave.
“Have I got leukemia or something?” I asked my mother.
“No, honey,” she replied.
“Has Dad got leukemia?”
“No, honey, everybody’s fine. Your father’s just got the Christmas spirit.”
At no point in all my life before or since have I been more astounded, more gratified, more happy than I was for the whole of that day. We had the park practically to ourselves. We did it all—spun gaily in people-size teacups, climbed aboard flying Dumbos, marveled at the exciting conveniences in the Monsanto All-Plastic House of the Future in Tomorrowland, enjoyed a submarine ride and riverboat safari, took a rocket to the moon. (The seats actually trembled. “Whoa!” we all said in delighted alarm.) Disneyland in those days was a considerably less slick and manicured wonder than it would later become, but it was still the finest thing I had ever seen—possibly the finest thing that existed in America at the time. My father was positively enchanted with the place, with its tidiness and wholesomeness and imaginative picture-set charm, and kept asking rhetorically why all the world couldn’t be like this. “But cheaper, of course,” he added, comfortingly returning to character and steering us deftly past a souvenir stand.
The next morning we got in the car and began the thousand-mile trip across desert, mountain, and prairie to Des Moines. It was a long drive, but everyone was very happy.
At Omaha, we didn’t stop—didn’t even slow down—but just kept on going. And if there is a better way to conclude a vacation than by not stopping in Omaha, then I don’t know it.
Chapter 5
THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE