Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (26 page)

There was a moment of frozen silence. Then Vin Scully spoke the words I had waited most of my life to hear: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.” Later, Scully was asked how he had remained so calm at such a dramatic moment. “Well, I wasn’t,” he said. “I could not have said another word without breaking down in tears.” Just as Campanella leaped up on Podres, I jumped up and threw my arms around my mother. We danced around the porch, tears streaming down our cheeks, as we watched Campanella, Reese, Hodges, Robinson, and all the Dodgers converge on the mound, with thousands of delirious fans in pursuit.

After the final out of the seventh World Series game, which earned the Dodgers their first ever Series victory, pitcher Johnny Podres jumps high in the air as Campanella rushes toward the mound, literally walking on air. As we watched the Dodgers converge on the mound, my mother and I danced around the porch, tears streaming down our cheeks.

“We did it! What did I tell you, we did it!” my father bellowed merrily when he reached us minutes later. His call was one of tens of thousands made between 3:44 p.m. and 4:01 p.m., as parents, children, friends, and lovers exchanged screams, shouts, and expressions of joy. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange virtually came to a halt. On that afternoon, the phone company later estimated, it had put through the largest volume of calls since VJ day a decade earlier. “Listen,” my father said, holding the phone to the open window of the Williamsburg Bank. “Do you hear the horns, the church bells, the factory whistles? It’s absolute pandemonium. There’s going to be one grand celebration here tonight. You two have got to come in. Take the next train and meet me at the bank as soon as you can.”

My mother paused only to change her clothes, and the two of us were on the train heading for Brooklyn. We emerged from the subway into a crowd of hundreds, then thousands of people dancing in the streets to the music of a small band that had occupied the steps of the Williamsburg Bank. Bunting and banners flew from the windows, pinstriped effigies of Yankee players hung from the lampposts, confetti sifted down onto the sidewalks. The traffic was at a complete standstill, but no one seemed to mind. Finding his bus trapped at an intersection, a bus driver abandoned his vehicle and joined the revelers on the street.

My father suggested dinner at Junior’s, a landmark delicatessen on Flatbush Avenue, just two long blocks north of the bank. The place was packed: eight or ten people crowded every booth. Some leaned against posts, many laughed, shouting and jumping ecstatically. We stood happily for an hour or more, hugging each new celebrant who walked in the door, until we finally found seats. In the booth next to ours, an old man boisterously announced that if he died the next morning he would go happily to
his grave. We ordered corned-beef sandwiches, topped off by Junior’s famous cheesecake.

Someone at Junior’s said that the official celebration was taking place at the Bossert Hotel, where the Dodgers were scheduled to hold their victory dinner and dance that night. With scores of others, we took the subway to Brooklyn Heights and got off at Montague Street. There, standing behind police barricades, we joined tens of thousands of Dodger fans hoping to catch a glimpse of our heroes as they made their way into the old-fashioned hotel with its marble pillars and ornate ceilings. As the players walked in, they greeted the crowd. Even after their dinner began, they kept returning outside to wave to us again. Walt Alston posed with a group of teenagers while the crowd serenaded him with “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” A gray-haired woman in a wheelchair reached up to Johnny Podres and he bent down to kiss her. Even the reticent Carl Furillo was caught up in the exuberance of the night. “Oh, God, that was the thrill of all thrills,” he later said. “I never in my life ever seen a town go so wild. I never seen people so goddamn happy.” At last, Robinson appeared and spoke to the crowd. “The whole team knows it was the fans that made it for us,” he told us. “It was your support that made this great day possible. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

No one wanted the night to end. When my father turned to ask my mother how she was holding up, she replied she felt twenty again. He led us to the foot of Montague Street, where a promenade overlooking the East River offered a view of the Statue of Liberty and the lights of Manhattan. Ever since the day in 1898 when Brooklyn had given up its proud history and independent status to merge with New York City, Brooklynites had lived in the shadow of Manhattan. Each new slight—including the demise
of the famed
Brooklyn Eagle
earlier that year—only reinforced the perception of second-class citizenship. But this night was Brooklyn’s night. This night, Brooklyn, not Manhattan, was the center of the world.

Never again would Dodger fans have to wait till next year. The world championship was theirs. As the
Daily News
proclaimed in the next morning’s banner headline: “This IS next year!”

D
URING THE NEXT
few years, as the world of my childhood began to slip away, I would often remember that magical evening. I would remember my mother as she stood at the edge of the river overlooking the city, the soft light from the street lamp smoothing the lines of her face. I would recall the laughter of my father, the merry vitality of the crowd, and the Dodger players who returned our adoration with a devotion of their own. My life had been held fast to a web of familiar places and familiar people—my family, my block, my church, my team, my town, my country. They were part of the way I defined myself. I was not only Doris Helen Kearns, but a Catholic, a resident of Southard Avenue, a Dodger fan, a Rockville Centre girl. Everything was wonderfully in order. But things would soon change, and when they did, I, too, would be different.

For as long as I could remember, our family had been on intimate terms with every neighbor on our block. I
knew the layout of our neighbors’ houses as well as I knew my own. So familiar were the print sofas in Elaine’s living room, the texture and smell of the stuffed chairs in the Lubars’ sun porch, the thick rugs in the playroom at the Greenes’, the round kitchen table at the Rusts’, that I could have maneuvered my way in the dark through every house on our block.

The Goldschmidts were the first to move. As more families migrated to the suburbs each year, automobile sales continued to grow. Mr. Goldschmidt’s Chevrolet dealership flourished, and the family built a new home in an affluent section of the neighboring town of Merrick. The Lubars were next to go. Beginning as a distributor of ladies’ apparel at twenty dollars a week, Mr. Lubar had risen to become an executive vice-president at Robert Hall. His success made possible the purchase of a more spacious house in the adjoining town of Baldwin. Though they were sad to leave, the lure of more bedrooms and larger rooms proved irresistible. For Mr. Greene, the move was the “opportunity of a lifetime.” Dow Chemical had developed a new property called “Styrofoam” which was reported to be superior to cork for insulation. When the company began awarding distributorships for promotion and marketing in various sections of the country, Mr. Greene applied for a position on the West Coast. Though he talked about how much he would miss the autumn leaves, the crisp winter air, the sleds on the snow-covered streets, he was excited when Dow granted him exclusive rights to sun-soaked southern California, a grant that eventually made him a very wealthy man.

The ties which had held our block together began to loosen. As each year passed, more of our weekday hours were absorbed by school activities. The street was no longer our common ground. Television, once a source of
community, had become an isolating force. The corner stores continued to provide a common meeting place, but competition from two new supermarkets, Bohack’s and A & P, would soon diminish traffic to the butcher shop and the delicatessen. The soda shop and the drugstore were no longer our hub of activity. The supermarkets would eventually be followed by two chain drugstores in the downtown area. In the years to come, one by one, the family-owned stores would disappear: the soda shop would be the first to go, then the butcher shop with Max and Joe, and finally the drugstore.

In the summer of 1956, when I was thirteen, Elaine announced that her family was moving to Albany. Her father’s bank, a small institution where he had been happily employed as vice-president in charge of commercial loans, merged with Bankers Trust. Though he retained his job, he lost the authority he had once enjoyed and increasingly felt decisions were being made behind his back. He grew so unhappy in his new situation that he began staying home. Elaine and I would return from school to find him sitting disconsolately on the stoop, withdrawn and silent. In June, Mr. Friedle had gathered his family together and told them he had accepted a new job in upstate New York. The move was set to take place at the end of the summer. Elaine’s mother was grief-stricken at the thought of moving. The clapboard house, the garden, the tree-lined street, the corner stores were her world. Now she had to abandon the home she had created with loving care.

Elaine’s impending departure suffused our friendship, lending an ominous, melodramatic, last-time quality to everything we did. At the very end of June, in celebration of Gary’s graduation from high school, the Friedles put on a lavish party to which the entire neighborhood was invited, along with all their Jamaican relatives and Gary’s friends.
An elaborate buffet was laid out on the dining-room table. Towering piles of presents which Gary intended to open at the end of the evening stood on the kitchen table. The basement was set up for music and dancing. My parents stayed briefly, but the night was hot and the noise deafening, so they retreated to our porch, where they sat by the big electric fan and listened to the merriment next door.

While everyone was occupied upstairs, Elaine led her favorite uncle Roy to the basement so they could dance to the Four Freshmen’s “Graduation Day.” Roy had lost his wife, Elsie, to diabetes a few months earlier, and Elaine’s mother feared he had sunk into depression. On this night, however, he seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly, dancing Elaine around the floor. Suddenly he made what Elaine later described as terrible rasping sounds. At first she thought he was teasing and implored him to stop; then she realized that something was terribly wrong. He slumped to the floor and Elaine raced upstairs for help. Her father and several guests accompanied her back down to the basement, but by the time they reached him, Roy was already dead.

When the news spread to the party upstairs, Gary swept all his graduation presents off the table in one swift, violent gesture, and Dolly threw herself to the floor screaming. Soon relatives were shrieking and sobbing all around me. I ran home to tell my parents and stayed in my house while the police and ambulance arrived. Much later that night, Elaine called to me from her window. Her voice trembled. The romantic death of James Dean had not prepared either of us for Uncle Roy’s death on the floor of her basement. On the occasion of Dean’s death, we had talked half the night. Now all I could think of to say was, “I know, I know,” trying to convince her and myself that I understood how she was feeling and that I felt it, too.