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A Series About Childhood Memories |
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 Maury Allen at 11, proud cousin to a baseball hero. |
Major leaguer in the family?
Imagine the pressure on a kid
By MAURY ALLEN
of TheColumnists.com
The kids in
my neighborhood in Brooklyn in the early 1940s were stickball
two sewer guys, passionate punch ball sluggers and ring-o-levio
rowdies. I could
run like hell then (the stairs inside my house get higher every
year now), so I was considered pretty much a street star.
We shoveled snow off the playground courts for three man basketball
in the bitter cold of New York January days when I was 9, 10
and 11 years old.
All of this mattered a little when I squeezed in a little school
work, a good book on sports or a double feature down at the Highway
movie house for 11 cents.
The Brooklyn Dodgers mattered a lot.
We collected in front of the local candy store each spring and
summer night, waiting for the Daily News and Mirror, so we could
read the box scores, look at the latest pictures of Pee Wee Reese
or Pete Reiser or fantasize that this year was really the fabled
“Next Year” we had always waited for to realize a Brooklyn
Series win. I hated those Yankees.
Then Harry Eisenstat entered my life.
Eisenstat, a kid from Brooklyn and a graduate of James Madison
High School, a school I would later attend, pitched for Brooklyn
from 1935-1937. He was traded to the Detroit Tigers in 1938 and
actually beat Bob Feller when the Cleveland fireballer set the
strikeout record at 18.
It was 1938, when I was still too small to notice, that he married
my cousin, Evelyn. They had known each other in high school and
later met by chance on a Brooklyn street after Eisenstat signed
with the Dodgers.
By 1940, at age 8, I was aware enough to know that I was somebody
special on my street. I actually had a cousin who was a big league
baseball player. What a thrill. What status. What glory.
Evelyn and Harry lived in Detroit (Eisenstat was a roommate of
Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg on the road) so he visited Brooklyn
infrequently. He was as handsome and sweet a guy as could be,
never impressed with his Valhalla status as a real, honest, legitimate
big league baseball player.
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as could be, never impressed with his Valhalla status as a real, honest, legitimate big league baseball player." |
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My uncle, his father-in-law, probably pushed a little humility on Eisenstat when he first showed up for a date with Evelyn after losing a game in Ebbets Field with the Dodgers. The Dodgers were first for most of us in Brooklyn in those days. God, country and family were tied for second.
Eisenstat knocked on the door and when Uncle Manny saw him standing there with roses for Evelyn, he slammed the door shut in his face with a scream, “How could you throw a curveball?”
Evelyn rescued Eisenstat and they have lived happily ever after for some 63 years together by now and still counting. Harry Eisenstat is a chipper 86 years old.
I knew I had a big league relative and I knew that was very important to me. What I didn’t know was that nobody on my street would believe me unless they met Harry and got his autograph.
In 1939 he was traded to Cleveland for future Hall of Famer Earl Averill. The pressure was building on me to put him up or shut up by the middle of 1940 when I was a smart alecky eight year old.
“My cousin is a big league pitcher and he played for the Dodgers,” I would shout when questioned about my knowledge of the game.
“Yeah,” Yuchie would bellow, “how come we ain’t never seen him?”
“He’s pitchin’, he’s pitchin’,” I crowed back. “He ain’t got no time to come to Brooklyn.”
that night I burst into tears when I told my father how the other kids were torturing me about "making up" a big league relative. I had to show him. I just had to. Or else. My father, who had taken me to my first Ebbets Field game when I was 5, understood.
He looked in the paper. He saw that the Indians would be playing the Yankees in two weeks in Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, a 40 minute subway ride from our Brooklyn house. He called his brother.
They worked out some sort of deal. Harry and Evelyn Eisenstat would be visiting in Brooklyn one night during the series against the Yankees in the Stadium. Only day games were played then.
It came down to a Wednesday in July. I listened to the game on the radio. Harry Eisenstat’s name was mentioned over the loudspeaker when he came into the game in relief. I can’t remember what he did.
I was having trouble talking for a couple of hours after the game ended because more than two dozen neighborhood kids had gathered in the street in front of my house. My older brother had informed them of the projected Eisenstat landing.
The clock moved slowly. No Harry Eisenstat. The other kids exchanged baseball cards, argued about the Dodgers against the Yankees or Giants and made fun of me for fibbing.
The light was fading on a gentle summer early evening. A car pulled up in front of my house. My uncle stepped out. My aunt followed. Then I saw my cousin Evelyn. Then the big leaguer was there, walking slowly, smiling, looking about 18 feet tall, patting the heads of kids gathering around him, waving to me with a grin on his face I will never forget.
I have interviewed Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, Mickey Mantle and Jimmy Brown, Tiger Woods and John McEnroe. All in a day’s work for a sportswriter
The day Harry Eisenstat walked into my house more than 60 years ago was my epiphany.
© 2001 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©
2001 by Jim Hummel. The baseball illustration is from IMSI's
Master/Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael,
CA, 94901-5506, USA.
You
can comment on this column or contact Maury Allen with an email
to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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