Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (41 page)

The
Record,
the paper which had for so long tormented Williams, died as a separate entity in 1961 when it merged with another tabloid, the
American.
Where there had been seven papers fighting each other for news about him, by 1988 there were only two left in Boston.

Forty years later Williams could still remember that last game of the 1949 pennant race. “Oh, God, that cheap hit, that cheap goddamn hit,” he said. “It’s like it’s yesterday. Coleman is up. Tex makes a good pitch. A damn good pitch. Then Bobby is going back and Zeke is coming in. Oh, Jesus, I can still see it with my eyes closed. Zeke is diving for it, and then I see it squirting to the foul line. It’s funny how you can remember something so painful so clearly. God, the locker room, it was silent. Like we were all dead. McCarthy was graceful. He had to be in terrible pain, but he went over to the Yankee locker room to congratulate them. Managers didn’t always do that. Me, I couldn’t talk. I could not speak at all. I felt as if someone had died. It was the worst thing that had ever happened. That cheap hit. Forty years later I can close my eyes and still see it, still see Zeke diving for it, and the ball squirting to the line ...”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
HAT SUMMER, I HAD
just turned fifteen years old. Fifteen is a difficult age for a boy anyway, and I was, I think, a less successful fifteen-year-old than most. I was small for my age, thin, and bespectacled. I was not particularly good at things boys are supposed to be good at; instead I was good at things (schoolwork) grown-ups want them to be good at but which, of course, win them no approval from their peers. Naturally enough, I soon solved that dilemma by becoming less skillful at my schoolwork. In 1948, my father suffered the first of two heart attacks, and he recovered only partially. There was a sense of foreboding in our home. There was good reason for it—a year later he died.

No wonder, then, that the world of baseball seemed infinitely more real and appealing than the world around me. I could understand what was happening in baseball. In addition, it was rewarding. I was a Yankee fan, and the Yankees, if they did not always win (the 1949 season was to be the first of five consecutive championships), were at least always competitive. Encouraged as I was by Mel Allen and countless sportswriters, I believed I knew the Yankees not only as players but as people—they were part of my extended family.

I was introduced to the Yankees when I was five. Before the war we lived in the Bronx, some seven blocks from the
Stadium. In 1939 my father, who was an avid sports fan and a good athlete himself, took me to Yankee Stadium and pointed out the great DiMaggio. He explained to me why DiMaggio was remarkable, and what a great base runner he was. Watch him go from first to third on a single, my father said. A five-year-old remembers few of his parents’ many admonitions, but I remember that that afternoon I tried to see what I could not really comprehend: the grace of the great Yankee center fielder. Sitting with my father in that beautiful ball park and listening to him explain the game are among my clearest memories of the time we spent together.

When the war started, my father went back into the service, and we moved to Winsted, Connecticut. New England is generally Red Sox territory, but that part of Connecticut fell within the range of Mel Allen and WINS, 1010 on my dial. It probably has more Yankee fans than Red Sox fans. By carefully rigging the radio in our home, we could hear the Yankee games. During those years my uncle Harry, who lived in Boston, visited us a few times. He was the father of two girls who did not care about baseball, and he was intrigued by a ten-year-old nephew who studied the
Sporting News
and the local sports pages and who was a fountain of baseball statistics and trivia. Uncle Harry said he owned
season tickets for all Red Sox games.
If my knowledge of batting averages impressed him, then his ownership of season tickets awed me. It was not something people in families of modest circumstances like ours did. His seats, he said, were right behind first base. He told me he loved sitting there because he could see the players’ faces up close, as they made the turn at first. They were such clean-looking young men, he said. Could this really be true? I wondered. Could he have seats this good? It struck me that if it were true, then Uncle Harry, if not on speaking terms with these heroes, was at least on
seeing
terms with them—the mighty Williams, the graceful Doerr. Pesky’s name, he told me, was
actually Paveskovich. Mel Allen, to my knowledge, had never mentioned this. Uncle Harry promised to take me to Fenway when the war was over, and take me he did. The seats were as good as he promised. So I grew up with at least partially divided loyalties: I loved the Yankees, but I liked the Red Sox and I admired Williams. I thought him a great hitter and I could never understand why he was booed in Boston.

After the war we moved to a new home, near Tuckahoe in Westchester County. I did not feel accepted there, and, in turn, I never accepted it. So it was that during the 1949 season, at loose ends in most of the rest of my life, I was completely absorbed with the Yankee-Red Sox pennant race. Sometimes I would sneak off from school with my friend Martin Hopkins; we went to five or six games in the Stadium that year. I remember how I felt that season with remarkable clarity: my concern when DiMaggio was unable to play in the beginning of the season, and my elation when Tommy Henrich, who was my favorite player, carried the team in his absence.

Some forty years later, when I decided to do this book, I was meeting men I had once admired as heroes. As I interviewed them, I saw them as mortals, seventy-year-old mortals at that. Doing the book was pure pleasure. To give one example—I spent two wonderful days with Tommy Henrich at his retirement home in Arizona. I told him how much he had meant to me as a boy, and in our first phone conversation I recalled a moment in 1948 when he had almost broken the then-record for grand-slam home runs—I had been seated in a car listening to Mel Allen’s call as the ball hooked foul. Henrich, with what seemed like almost total recall, finished my description for me. He loves, more than anything, to talk baseball. As we sat and talked, me in my fifties and he in his seventies, I was struck by how boyish we both must have seemed.

There was a certain schizophrenia to my life at that point:
My last book,
The Reckoning,
which was about American industrial decline, was still on the best-seller list. I would go off to lecture to very serious and proper groups, like the National Governor’s Association. Then I would sneak off to upstate New York to interview Vic Raschi. With a few exceptions the players were remarkably generous with their time, and their memories were remarkably clear. The events they were describing might have taken place the day before. I saw almost every living player, missing only a few because of scheduling conflicts. Of the people I tried to interview, only Joe DiMaggio resisted. Obviously he is a man pursued by endless writers wanting endless amounts of his time. My early attempts got me nowhere, so I enlisted the help of our mutual friend Edward Bennett Williams. Williams, a generous-hearted man, though very ill, was quite helpful; it was a book, he said, he would like to write himself. He gave me DiMaggio’s telephone number and told me it was all arranged. I called, and spoke to a very wary former center fielder. He said he would see me, and thereupon avoided all further entreaties. So be it; if there is a right under the First Amendment to do books such as this, there is also a right not to be interviewed. I’m sorry he didn’t see me; he still remains the most graceful athlete I saw in those impressionable years.

It was, however, the only bad moment in the book. I was the envy of my male friends who shared my enthusiasm for baseball in those years. Caught up in more mundane tasks in journalism or Wall Street or the law, they would gladly have traded jobs with me. I could, I suppose, have been like Tom Sawyer and auctioned off some of the interviews. But I did not, and so I am left with the pleasure of having finished the book and, of course, the even greater pleasure of the doing of it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HE INFORMATION IN THIS
book was largely obtained from my own interviews. Most of them were done in person, and most of them lasted several hours. I found the players unusually helpful, and in several cases, after the original interview, I would call back and the interviews would continue as I checked out additional information or asked better questions. Arthur Anastos, then with the
Boston Globe,
was extremely helpful in clipping and photocopying old copies of the
Globe.
Rose Dreger did the same thing with
The New York Times.
Barry Shapiro at
Sport
was extremely helpful in letting me look at the old
Sport
magazines from that era. Rob Fleder and James Rodewald of
Sports Illustrated
were equally helpful in making available old issues of that magazine. Glen Stout at the Boston Public Library was gracious in allowing me to look at the library’s files, particularly the notes of Harold Kaese from his private collection. Bob Fishel, though seriously ill at the time, was extremely generous in helping supply names and phone numbers of different players, aiding me, as I think he has helped countless other writers; Phyllis Merhige was equally generous with her time; Jim Ogle also helped in finding names of addresses of the retired players. Maury Allen was exceptionally generous with advice and assistance; Warner Fuselle lent me a number of books from his extensive sports library; and Robert
Montgomery Knight was valuable serving as Ted Williams’s press aide. Frank Sutherland, then editor of the
Jackson
(Tennessee)
Sun
helped find several of Ellis Kinder’s old teammates for me. Bill Dean of the Baseball Hall of Fame was helpful on a number of factual points. Vince Doria of the
Boston Globe
made that paper’s archives available to me. Thomas L. Weinberg was my connection with the late Bill Veeck. Nancy Medeiros and Carolyn Parqueth typed my notes for me and made my work infinitely easier. My friends Ray Caligiure and Jack Caligiure also helped me in checking facts.

Boston players: Matt Batts, Dominic DiMaggio, Joe Dobson, Bobby Doerr, Walter Dropo, Dave (Boo) Ferriss, Billy Hitchcock, Tex Hughson, Earl Johnson, Jack Kramer, Maurice McDermott, Sam Mele, Mel Parnell, Johnny Pesky, Chuck Stobbs, Lou Stringer, Birdie Tebbetts, Ted Williams, Al Zarilla.

New York players: Hank Bauer, Bobby Brown, Tommy Byrne, Spud Chandler, Jerry Coleman, Whitey Ford, Tom Henrich, Ralph Houk, Charlie Keller, Eddie Lopat, Cliff Mapes, Clarence Marshall, Gus Niarhos, Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds, Phil Rizzuto, Johnny Sain, Fred Sanford, Spec Shea, Charley Silvera, Jim Turner (pitching coach), Gene Woodling.

Players from other teams: Ernie Banks, Lou Boudreau, Lorenzo (Piper) Davis, Hank Greenberg, Al Kaline, George Kell, Tim McCarver, Don Newcombe, Pee Wee Reese.

Executives, reporters, announcers, and publicists: Maury Allen, Mel Allen, Red Barber, Joe Cashman, Lou Effrat, Leonard Faupel, Bob Fishel, Ed Fisher, Otis Freeman, Peter Gammons, Bart Giamatti, Hy Goldberg, Curt Gowdy, W. C. Heinz, Jerome Holtzman, Clif Keane, Murray Kramer,
Leonard Koppett, Sylvia (Mrs. Leonard) Lyons, Lee MacPhail, Bill McSweeney, John Morley, Dick O’Connell, Jim Ogle, Arthur (Red) Patterson, Harold Rosenthal, Frank Scott, Seymour Siwoff, Clare Trimble, Joe Trimble.

Others: Fred Baker, Ruth Cosgrove Berle, Jeff Cohen, Dick Clurman, George Digby, Emily (Mrs. Dominic) DiMaggio, John Graham, Abbott Gordon, Mary Jo (Mrs. Hank) Greenberg, Eileen (Mrs. Tommy) Henrich, Gordon Jones, Hazel (Mrs. Ellis) Kinder, Ray Lamontagne, Joe Lelyveld, John Lindell III, Marty Nolan, Buddy Patey, Edward Mills Purcell, Richard Rustin, Billy Schrivner, Nathan Shulman, Paul Simon, Terry Smith, Glen Stout.

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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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