Posted on behalf of guest blogger, Peter Stern, for the December 23rd Carnival of Courage.
My grandfather was a baseball man. When I knew him, in his seventies, eighties and nineties, he had hands that were gnarled and twisted by arthritis, but he always said it was because he took too many foul-tips on his fingers when he was a catcher.
Grandpa played baseball, watched baseball, followed baseball, analyzed baseball, taught baseball and talked baseball. He talked about other things too, of course. He talked about walking a mailman’s route near Coney Island for 30 years and how friendly neighborhood dogs followed him like some kind of government-issue Pied Piper. He talked about how his best friends were gassed during World War I and came home, but were never the same again. He talked about how he worked in a thermometer factory but escaped before the chemicals could poison his nervous system as they had the old men who worked there, giving them the “mercury shakes.”
He talked about old-time Brooklyn and old-time baseball which, in his mind, was pretty much the same thing. You can’t talk about Brooklyn and not talk about the Dodgers.
“I saw Zack Wheat play at Ebbets Field the year it opened,” Grandpa remembered. No one remembers Zack Wheat anymore. That was 1913. Grandpa went back year after year, until the old place closed. Like a great many men his age, who, later in life were scattered around the New York area, my grandfather believed that the three biggest villains of the 20th century were Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner who took the team to Los Angeles in 1957.
Of course, when he first saw the Dodgers play, in the years before Ebbets Field, they were not yet the Dodgers. They were the “Superbas” and before that, unfathomably, the “Bridegrooms.” They did not take on their more familiar name until 1911. In those years, so many streetcar tracks cris-crossed Brooklyn that its citizens took their lives in their hands when crossing streets at intersections where as many as six lines converged. Some didn’t make it. In the early 1900s, hundreds of pedestrians a year died in streetcar accidents. Hence, the residents of the borough were nicknamed “Trolley Dodgers,” a name that the ball club shortened to “Dodgers.”
My grandfather was a baseball man, but his father was not. He was a teamster when that was a job description and not just the name of a union. He worked at Bossett’s Lumber Yard in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Before there were fork-lifts, a stack of lumber moved from one end of the yard to another only if a gang of strong men loaded it onto a heavy wagon pulled by a team of enormous draft horses. My great-grandfather drove the team, a task that required physical strength which he had in no short supply. A short, barrel-chested German immigrant, he resembled nothing more than a beer keg with arms and legs. Grandpa often made it clear that his father was not hesitant about using his strength in any way he saw fit. At this point in any such story, Grandpa would point to his own head, indicating the places where his father’s hair would not grow because of the scars acquired in the conflicts and confrontations of his youth in Bavaria.
Grandpa liked to tell about returning by streetcar from a rare Sunday outing to Coney Island with his father, mother and two sisters. There were three young men – “punks,” he called them – talking loudly and using language that offended the sensibilities of the day. Grandpa’s father told them nicely that he didn’t think that they should be using words like those in front of his wife and children and asked them to please quiet down. They ignored him. He told them, not so nicely, that they had better shut up or suffer the consequences. They still ignored him. He then threw – physically, bodily, literally, threw – first one, then another of the punks from the rear platform of the streetcar. The third left the car voluntarily.
According to Grandpa, his father had but three things in his life: work, family and God. He worked from sun-up to sun-down six days a week, spent every evening with his family, and on Sundays he prayed. He had no time and little patience for frivolity like baseball. He did not care to watch his son play the game and, in fact, did only once.
The ball fields of my grandfather’s youth were hardly the manicured diamonds of major league baseball. Often, they were simply open lots large enough to lay out the base paths with some room left over for the outfield. To a field such as this, Grandpa persuaded his father to come one Sunday afternoon after the family had attended mass at St. Leonard’s Church. Grandpa played left field that day in the uniform of the “St. Leonard’s Juniors.”
At this particular lot, there were no walls or fences. Only a shallow ditch separated left field from Bedford Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s main thoroughfares.
It is the second inning and the inevitable happens.Thwack, the opposing team’s beefy clean-up hitter launches a towering shot to left. Joe Soeder, left fielder, knows by the sound how far he will have to run. Back he goes, to the limit of the playing field, down one side of the ditch and up the other. Still further, he goes back and finally camps where he knows the ball will come down – directly between the rails of the trolley tracks in the center of the street.
Clang, clang, from his left, a motorman rings out a warning.
(Get out of the way? Or wait for the ball to come down?)
There is no choice, really. My grandfather is a baseball man. As he sights the ball through the thicket of overhead wires, brakes are applied fully, steel wheels screech along iron tracks. Sparks fly.
Clang, clang, clang, the bell is more insistent now.
(Hold on, just a little longer.)
Thwap.Horsehide ball settles into leather glove.
Only then, did my grandfather take his eyes from the ball. He looked left to see the motorman’s face, florid and breathing fire, inside the cab of the car where it had stopped, not more than ten feet from where Grandpa stood. Then he looked right, searching for a barrel-chested man along the sidelines and found him. The man with the stout build and patchy hair shook his head from side to side, turned and slowly walked away. Grandpa played on.
Trolley Dodgers? Not my grandfather. He was a baseball man.
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