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 JOHNNY PODRES ...dead at 75 |
Podres brought good cheer
wherever he went in life
of TheColumnists.com
Did you ever smile
when an old pal died? I did last week when Johnny Podres checked
out at the age of 75.
Podres was the most beloved pitcher in the history of the old
hometown team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, because he won two games
for the 1955 team that finally ended the World Series torture.
Brooklyn beat the Yankees four games to three that year for the
town’s only Series triumph.
Podres always laughed and always made everybody else laugh. He
saw baseball for what it really was, a joyous way to make a living.
It also beat mining iron ore the way his father did upstate New
York in the little town of Witherbee.
“I remember when I first came to Brooklyn and my teammate,
Don Zimmer, asked me if I wanted to go to the track with him.
I had never been before. I guess I’ve never missed since,”
he told me when I was writing "Brooklyn Remembered,"
my book about the 1955 World Champion Dodgers.
Podres, a handsome lefthander, had just turned 23 when he beat
the Yankees twice in 1955. The borough exploded with glee. Podres
was one of the most significant celebrants.
“I was young, a bachelor and I had just beaten the Yankees
for the Series,” Podres said. “We had this wild party
at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn. I drank a hell of a lot of
champagne. I see this beautiful girl across the room and I try
to give her my hotel key. How the hell would I know she was the
daughter of the farm director, Fresco Thompson, and she was only
15 years old?”
He would marry an Ice Capades beauty named Joan Taylor in 1966
after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, raise two sons with her
and keep their home in upstate New York.
Through the rest of his pitching years and his coaching time,
he was always good for reminiscence about his Brooklyn days or
a laugh about his horse racing adventures.
Unlike most teammates, the old Brooklyn Dodgers always kept in
touch with each other via reunions, card shows, phone calls...and
emails in modern times
“I got a call from Duke (Snider) a couple of weeks ago,”
he remembered in 2005 on the 50th anniversary of his Brooklyn
triumph over the Yankees. “He told me he had just heard
that Warren Spahn (old pitching opponent of the Dodgers) had
died. Then he asked me how I was.”
Podres told Snider, “I’m a lot better than Spahn.”
Podres liked his beer along with his laughs, so it was no surprise
that his body began breaking down when he got in his 70s.
He also started smoking as a young Brooklyn pitcher. He never
stopped.
“I remember when Pee Wee Reese was trying to stop. But he
kept bumming cigarettes off me. I asked him when he would buy
his own. ‘I’m trying to stop.’ ‘Yeah, I know
but you have been trying for three years.’ I think he didn’t
bum another for at least a week,” Podres laughed.
The 1955 victories for Podres and the Dodgers almost never happened.
“I was on the field after batting practice one day,”
he recalled. “They were moving the batting cage off the
field and they rolled the cage into my leg. I was out for the
next three weeks. When manager Walt Alston was making up the
Series roster he gave me one last chance with a September start
in Pittsburgh. I threw the hell out of the ball and got the Series
starts.”
He won the third game of that Series 8-3 after the Dodgers lost
the first two and won the seventh game 2-0 after Sandy Amoros
made a spectacular catch of a Yogi Berra fly ball to left field.
“When Yogi hit it out there I thought it was an easy out.
Then I saw Amoros running and running and running after it. He
stuck out his glove and got it. Boy, did I breathe easier after
that,” he said.
Elston Howard rolled out to Pee Wee Reese to end the Series and
Podres leaped off the ground. He was soon buried by his joyous
teammates.
“I guarantee there was more celebrating in Brooklyn that
day than there was for the end of World War II,” recalled
Buzzie Bavasi, 93, the Brooklyn general manager in 1955.
When I visited Podres a couple of years ago at his Queensbury,
New York home, the first reminder of days past was the license
plate on his car. It simply read, “MVP 55.”
I laughed at that. Johnny Podres, gone now, but never forgotten.
He made all the kids in Brooklyn laugh.
©2008 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
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