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 So, Los Angeles' new manager is Joe Torre of the Marine Park section of Brooklyn.
Another piece of Brooklyn goes west, fifty years after the Dodgers
left for the City of Angels. Actually, the Dodgers are playing
their 51st season in Los Angeles this year. Those of us
still remaining in Brooklyn who remember the team as the Brooklyn
Dodgers have only occasional flings with the nostalgia of the halcyon
days when New York City had three center fielders named Willie,
Mickey and the Duke
All these many years, we have driven past
Ebbets Field and seen a huge housing complex standing on the infield
once the property of Pee Wee and Jackie, Cox and Hodges.
We hummed
Joe Raposo’s “There Used
to Be a Ball Park Right Here” and strained to hear the roar of the
crowd.
Nothing happened.
It is 2007, and
there is no roar and no crowd and no ball park.
Just the cold fact
of fifty years of Los Angeles Dodgers and no Ebbets Field.
I was
recently asked what was the greatest day of my life.
My answer was
automatic:
the 1949 All-Star Game at Ebbets Field.
I was twelve
then.
I had waited months for the game, and the gray, threatening
skies couldn’t dampen the excitement of seeing Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams,
Stan Musial and Joe DiMaggio all on the same field.
 I lived three blocks from Ebbets Field,
and I could almost roll down the hill to the Montgomery Street left
field entrance.
I watched the wild American League 11-5 victory with
delight.
On my way home, I stopped at Rae’s candy store and had a
huge twenty-five cent vanilla frappe to end a perfect day.
Since that day, I have been graduated
from three schools, married, fathered three children and had three
grandchildren.
Many great days have come along in my life, yet that
Ebbets Field day forever stays with me.
It has been fifty years
since the Dodgers left Ebbets Field to a construction company.
The
field was demolished and with it a large part of Brooklyn’s heart
and soul that has never been replaced.
The Mets became the darlings of the old
Dodger fans, as well as capturing the hearts of the youngsters.
Yet,
I cannot forget the old ball park, the All-Star Game and so many
other games that gave meaning to my boyhood years.
Ebbets Field is
and always will be a landmark of my mind.
I was six when my father took me to my
first game.
I thought the pitcher’s mound was center field because
it was in the middle of the infield.
(My father said I was right.
I
eventually forgave him.)
A year later, I sold enough “war bonds”
to win two free tickets to a Dodgers-Phillies game.
I took my
mother, which was a mistake.
Aside from the fact that she knew
nothing about baseball, we sat about twenty rows up in the bleachers,
and my mother kept sending me down for peanuts and ice cream.
By
this time though, I knew where center field was.
Harry Petchesky was in my fourth grade
class.
His father was associated with someone who had a
part-interest in the Dodgers, so Harry invited a group of us kids to
attend a game free of charge, compliments of that part-owner, Walter
F. O’Malley.
I remember fans in 1957 saying that O’Malley
wouldn’t move the Dodgers out of Brooklyn .
It was Brooklyn ’s
team, after all.
In those days, there was a wonderful innocence
about baseball.
In fifth and sixth grades, sometimes I
wouldn’t come directly home from school during the baseball season.
Instead, a friend and I went down to Ebbets Field’s third base
entrance and waited for the ushers to open the gates for people who
would leave the game early.
We would sneak in to watch the last two
innings, hoping the game would go into extra innings.
It once went
fourteen innings, and my mother bawled me out for causing her to
worry.
(No cell phones then.)
Wherever I went in the neighborhood,
Ebbets Field would follow.
I’d be playing ball in the school yard
or the playground near the Brooklyn Museum when suddenly a roar of
the crowd would ring out.
My bedroom in our apartment faced directly
at the back of the left field stands.
I heard thunderous roars day
and night, and the arc lights were my beacon.
I would be walking
home from Eastern Parkway when throngs of fans would be walking up
the hill to the subway.
Imagine, thousands of people walking on my
street!
I was heartbroken when I was turned down for a job as a
vendor at Ebbets Field.
I wanted to be in that
ball park all the summers of my life with “the Boys of Summer.”
I look back to the humanity of that
Dodger team, to the importance it had to Brooklyn and to the country
(the Dodgers being the first truly “ America ’s team” by virtue
of being the first integrated team).
The Dodgers were an inner-city
team, a neighborhood team; and I grew up in that neighborhood.
Who
lives in the Flushing Meadows Park of the Queens-Long Island
Expressway-Grand Central Parkway Mets?
When the Dodgers moved to Los
Angeles , an identity with Brooklyn was taken from us.
Our children
would never know the feeling of belonging to this Ebbets Field and to
each other during the six months of baseball spring.
I remember standing on line outside the
Ebbets Field bleachers; we were waiting to see a Saturday night game.
Suddenly, a thunderstorm swept into the area, and rain came down in
buckets.
We waited, hoping the storm would end and that the game
would not be postponed.
A man ran into the middle of Bedford Avenue
and raised his arms skyward.
He bellowed over and over again, “I’ll
all blow over!!” The rain didn’t stop.
It never blew
over for us.
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