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PART SEVENTEEN DISCOVERING AMERICA
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What bonded Gerald and his dad was loving baseball
of TheColumnists.com
Despite our remote relationship, my father and I set out in the summer of 1953 to conquer America, or at least to see some of it. He was 51, I was 15. How would we manage, thrown together for six weeks, forced to confront each other constantly, without my mother to intervene or my school and his job to keep us apart most of the time?
I worried what we would ever find to talk about, almost literally. He was a glib speaker and I, perhaps out of a pressure to please him, was still a stutterer. It must have troubled, if not embarrassed, him--an actor who spoke so easily in a roomful (a theater full!) of people--to have a son who had such trouble communicating.
The merriest sound I recall in our home is of my father holding forth with friends in the living room as I sat on the top upstairs step listening. (“Lenny, tell the story about…”). I can see him in his chair, legs crossed, cigarette clamped in his mouth, squinting through smoke as he tells one of his stories (never “jokes”). Never without his pack of Chesterfields and a silver Ronson lighter, he wielded his cigarette like a prop,
The night he laid out our cross-country trip, a cigarette dangled from his lips with a two-inch ash at the end. I don’t recall any conversation about the trip beforehand. Like most events in our house, it was a fait accompli, and I was just expected to be ready on the appointed day of departure, June 15, a week after school let out. It was an exciting and scary notion, taking a train trip to Virginia with several major stops along the way.
The trip may have evolved out of my father’s attempt to know me better, or perhaps his wish to show me the world, wise me up, take me out of myself, give me a little sophistication and perhaps cure me of what he saw as my fears and inhibitions. A year before, he’d encouraged me to take a summer job at the state fair selling orange crush with my friend Don Miller, whom my father felt was “a good influence.” Don had an innate charm I lacked, also flair, looks and confidence, more my father’s son than I.
I don’t recall my mother’s role in any of this, just as I don’t remember much of her presence in my early life. My dad was so dominant a figure that her place in my childhood is hard to bring into focus. I have warm but indistinct feelings. A faint figure in my youth, she emerges more full-blooded after he died, when I was out of college and we grew into friends, far more alike in temperament than my father and I. About all I recall is them embracing when he got home from work and her padding down to fix breakfast on weekend mornings. In my boyhood, she remains a silhouette in his large shadow.
For some reason, one of my most vivid memories is watching my father pack a suitcase, a thing of beauty that typifies his precise, tidy, authoritative nature. He would neatly lay everything out on his bed next to the suitcase, then sit at the end of the bed, cigarette in his mouth, studying all the clothes, mentally packing them beforehand. Then, with great resolve, in total silence in what was an almost religious ceremony, he would carefully, delicately, fold each item into squares and rectangles so that everything fit against everything else perfectly, like a cloth jigsaw puzzle.
First he arranged the shoes in their heavy wooden shoe trees (relics today), then his shirts, then rolled-up socks around the shirts, then the sweaters and pajamas and shorts, then two belts wound and tied with a rubber band. When he finished, there was an even flat surface in the suitcase on top of which he gently laid his folded slacks, jackets and neckties, wrapped around an old magazine, the ends pressed flat inside. Only a small hole remained, into which he set his shaving kit. Everything fit snugly, nothing jammed into place, no forcing the lid shut. He snapped the clasps closed and was ready to go.
I recall few details of the train trip itself, except sitting in the “Vista Dome” and watching the countryside pass by outside, as in a movie, with forever shifting scenery. I was also fascinated ordering meals in the dining car, a whole new concept. Puzzlingly, you had to write out your own order instead of the waiter writing it down. Couldn’t the waiters write?, I wondered, or was this some odd union rule or railroad rite? All the waiters and porters were, of course, black and friendly, at our beck and call. Sleeping in a cramped Pullman berth was a big part of the adventure, rocking to and fro until you nodded off to sleep like a baby in a cradle.
The trip was also notable as the time my teenage libido really kicked in, perhaps triggered by the train ride itself. Trains are as sexy as they are mysterious, the setting of countless thrillers and film noir classics, from “North by Northwest” to “Strangers on a Train” -- an entire movie genre, really. Walking up and down the narrow corridors brings you up close and personal with fellow passengers, like a college-age girl I couldn’t take my eyes off of across the aisle in our car and slyly managed to brush up against on my way back to our compartment. She didn’t bat a pretty eyelash but I dreamt about her that night as the train sped toward Denver, our first stop on the way to Chicago.
I remember nothing of Denver, except it was hot, the first hint of the horrid heat and humidity we encountered during the entire trip. I had never experienced truly hot, damp, sticky humid weather before, not to mention monsoon-like thundershowers and warm rain. My dad and I had that much in common--we both hated hot weather.
Chicago was sweltering and moist, but it didn’t matter because I was about to see my first Major League baseball game at hallowed Wrigley Field. I was a baseball fanatic, my bedroom walls plastered with photos of my heroes--Billy Martin, Ted Williams, Stan Musial--and I followed the dramatic ups and downs of my hometown Oakland Oaks as rabidly as any fan in Chicago. Now, I was about to actually see some of the famous names I had only read about in Baseball Digest and The Sporting News. I knew all the numbers of the major players, their nicknames, even a few batting averages. I despised math but loved to pore over baseball statistics.
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had never seen anything quite as spectacular as Chicago's Wrigley Field. |
Baseball was the major strand that tied my father and I together, the one passion we shared. He had taken me to many ballgames at home, often with his friend at the store, Sam Bercovich, or close pals Ted Hirsch (his jovial doctor) and Jack Posner, portly fellow bridge-players who could make my father laugh, cracking jokes either too sophisticated or too dirty for me to grasp. These were the guys, with their wives, who comprised my dad’s circle of jolly card-playing cronies. We always had great seats along first base because Sam and his brothers were big supporters of semi-pro baseball in Oakland and sponsored a team on which the great Curt Flood had once played, along with Vada Pinson and other great black players who came out of Oakland’s ghetto.
Going anywhere with my father was a big
occasion, and I see now that I followed his lead in all sorts
of ways--even marrying at the same age he had, 28; fate or accident?
Going to a baseball game with your father was, in the Fifties,
a male tribal ritual (see “Field of Dreams”), and I
was always flattered when he took me along. Buying your son a
bat and a baseball glove was like an ancient warrior handing
his boy a spear and a shield. Taking me to a game was also a
way of being together, of fulfilling a parental duty, without
really engaging each other; we sat side by side with our eyes
on the field.
Emeryville, “The Home of the Oaks,” was a dingy section between Oakland proper and (improper) Berkeley that, in the 1980s, became a kind of low-rent artist’s colony. Oaks ballpark was a crumbling stadium made of wood, ringed by liquor stores, poker parlors and pool halls, but it had an intimacy much prized now in new stadiums that try to mimic the old “ball yards” in formerly crummy, now gentrified, areas.
It was intimate, yes, but also pretty seedy despite the quality of players in the Pacific Coast League, where you could see legends on their way down (Johnny Vander Meer, Ernie Lombardi, Augie Galan) or legends-to-be on the way up (Billy Martin, Luke Easter, Minnie Minoso). The 1948 Oaks won the PCL pennant, an event of historic proportions in Oakland, and the manager was a battered old geezer named Casey Stengel (20 years younger than I am now) who became manager of the New York Yankees the next season and then a baseball immortal.
The shabby Oaks ballpark had always been my image of where professional baseball was played, so I was not prepared for the splendor of Wrigley Field. We had only been in Chicago a day or two when my father announced that his old boyhood pal, Louie Fleischer, had got us tickets to a Cubs-Phillies game the next day. I’d heard of Wrigley Field but it had not yet achieved its current mythic status. To me, it was just another Eastern park, like Crosley Field in Cincinnati or Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.
It hadn’t occurred to me then that Wrigley Field had any connection to spearmint gum, but it had a wonderful sound, like “the Polo Grounds,” “Ebbetts Field” and “Fenway Park.” As a Pacific Coast League kid, totally wrapped up in the fortunes of the Oakland Oaks, I had no rooting interest in any Major League teams--just far-away names to me then, unlike the very real Portland Beavers, Sacramento Solons, San Francisco Seals and Seattle Rainers (I had no idea what a “solon” was, nor a “Rainier”). The National and American League existed in another galaxy, one I visited only when my sometime pal Russ West and I sprawled on the grass after playing catch, trying to stump each other with trivia (“Number 8 for the Yankees?” “That’s easy. Yogi Berra!”).
Of course, it was a day game, long before
lights were installed at Wrigley
Field and night games permitted, then anathema to Cubs fans.
One of the great moments of the trip, of my life up till then,
was walking through the shadows under the stands at Wrigley into
the sunlight and grandeur of the biggest, greenest outfield I
had ever seen. You had to be there and you had to be 15. I was
overcome, more speechless than usual.
I had no idea that a baseball park could be so vast and so beautiful and so--well, intensely green, a bright emerald green I’d never seen before, not a blade of grass out of alignment. Here was a lawn I would gladly mow. Wrigley Field seemed 10 times as big as the ramshackle Oaks ballpark in Emeryville--not just wider but so much higher; I’d never been in a stadium with an upper deck, like an open-air opera house.
It was hard to believe that the diamond was the same size as the one at home--the diamond at Wrigley was so much smoother, the dirt the color of milk chocolate, the infield carefully manicured with sharply defined foul lines and not a pebble to disturb the satiny surface. And against the outfield brick wall, of course, tumbled the fabled ivy, baseball’s Hanging Gardens of Babylon. In Oakland, the outfield fences were plastered with advertisements for Big Ben Overalls and Hertz Shoe Repair.
As luck would have it, the Phillies pitcher that day was their ace, Robin Roberts, whose name sounded fictitious, too alliterative to be genuine, like a hero out of one of the John R. Tunis baseball books I devoured. Yet there Roberts stood on the mound, big as life, bearing down as I’d seen in many a wire photo in the Oakland Tribune. I didn’t pay much attention to the game itself, so mesmerized was I by the setting and by the surging sound of the crowd when it roared, unlike the Oaks crowds of 5,000-10,000 fans.
We sat on the third-base side, in the lower deck, above the dugout, where my father kept score, as he always did, in his neat legible hand, saying little but watching intently, never cheering or booing, a true spectator of the sport.
It was just a routine midweek ballgame, but for me it felt like the seventh game of the World Series, and no game since has come close to surpassing the rush I felt that afternoon in Chicago--not even when we got to New York and took a subway to Ebbetts Field to see a Brooklyn Dodgers game in which Jackie Robinson stole home. Next to Wrigley, Ebbets Field looked puny, a bandbox stadium that reminded me of the Oaks home in Emeryville. No park could ever match Wrigley Field that green day in 1953.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This special extract from a work in progress is published by special arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this work should be directed to the author by use of the Talkback feature below. This excerpt first posted here June 11, 2007.
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