“Go West, Young Man”
Horace Greeley never said that. He never said “Go West, young man,” the same way Humphrey Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam,” and the same way Cary Grant never said, “Judy, Judy, Judy.”
My American History teacher at Washington High told me that. What Greeley really said was, “If you have no family or friends to aid you, and no prospect opened to you there, turn your face to the Great West and there build up a home and fortune.” The guy who really came up with “Go West, young man,” was a newspaper man from Muncie or Terre Haute, and he never made a dime off it. But, when I was thirteen, my Dad took his advice anyway.
I was born in Trenton, New Jersey, but my parents and my older brother, Ed (who we all call Whitey), all moved when I was two years old to Staten Island. When people who aren’t from New York think of New York, they think of glittering skyscrapers and flashing neon lights and the Great White Way, or festering slums, drugs and violence; take your pick. Where we lived it was quiet and there were trees along the sidewalk and Whitey and me and the neighborhood kids all played ball in a park that was two blocks away from home. In Summer, we’d play until it was late and you couldn’t see the ball any more, but you didn’t want to stop because it felt so good to be out there, pretending you were in the big leagues, and pretending you were a big league ballplayer.
When I first started playing, I pretended I was Wes Westrum because I was the youngest and smallest and so they made me catcher, and Wes Westrum became my favorite ballplayer when I was eight years old because he was the Giants’ catcher then.
While I was busy being Wes Westrum, my brother, who had blond hair that got whiter as we spent more and more time playing ball during the Summer, imagined he was Whitey Lockman, the Giants’ left fielder. Whitey (my brother) was eleven when I was eight, and he could hit line drives harder than the kids three or four years older than he was and he played left field like he knew what he was doing, so he became one of “them” and they didn’t mind when he started bringing along his runt brother to play catcher, which was the least important position out there. It was me, or they’d just wait until the pitch stopped rolling.
This was 1951, and by the time July was over something had happened that made me want to do anything I could so that I could play center field. The something that happened was Willie Mays, and the first time I saw him play I knew he was the greatest player I’d ever see. It was at the Polo Grounds, and we were playing Cincinnati in a Sunday double-header. I had never been to a big-league game before, and I nearly went nuts for two weeks waiting for that day to come. We got up early and rode out to catch the ferry, then took a bus uptown through Manhattan. My Dad pointed out where his office was in mid-town, and then we headed out along Harlem River Drive, and then Whitey said “There’s the ballpark” — and I thought that it doesn’t look like no ballpark to me — and the bus pulled up and we were there.
My Dad handed us our tickets and we went through the turnstiles into this concrete and steel monstrosity of a stadium. Just inside the gate, there was a big guy selling programs who had the loudest voice I ever heard, yelling “PRO-GRAMS! Get ya PRO-GRAMS!” My Dad handed the fellow a handful of change and he handed my Dad two programs, which he then handed to Whitey and me. We headed up a ramp and through a crowd of people milling around at the beer and hot dog stands. My Dad kept looking back at Whitey and me, telling us “Stay with me,” and then he led us along the concourse and we stopped for a moment.
I’m sure my eyes got as big as baseballs when I got my first look at the field, so green and perfect, and here and there were ball players — real ball players in real uniforms — playing catch with each other. Until now, the only ball players I’d ever seen were on baseball cards or in black-and-white pictures in the newspaper. My Dad walked us down the steps and we found our seats, about twenty rows up from the field, right even with third base.
We’d made it in time to watch batting practice. Dad and Whitey were old hands at this, but I was in absolute awe. Everything about the stadium — its unusual shape, like a giant framework bath tub, the green of the grass and the brown of the infield skin, the flags around the roof, the clubhouse, which looked like an old brick warehouse perched over the notched cut-out in deep center field, with a gigantic cigarette and the slogan “Always Buy Chesterfield” in big letters (in the smoke ring it said “A hit!”) under the huge Longines clock, and the stands, suspended on steel webs like rickety old bridges — was amazing to me. I drank it all in while Whitey pointed out the players. There was Joe Adcock, and Ted Kluszewski, and there was Johnny Wyrostek, all Reds guys.
“Is that Mays?” I remember asking.
“No,” said Whitey. “That’s Irvin.”
My Dad leaned toward me and pointed toward the Giants’ dugout, where a fellow in a Giants’ uniform stood, holding his glove with both hands while he talked with two men in suits.
“That,” my Dad said, almost low enough so that only I could hear it, “is Mays.”
I glued my eyes to the figure on the field, trying to keep from blinking so that I wouldn’t lose him in case he wandered off. He wasn’t very big, I remembered thinking, and he looked around himself a lot when he talked. Another man came out of the Giant dugout and joined Mays and the men in suits. He had big ears and a big nose and you could see the red in his cheeks from clear across the field.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
My Dad and Whitey answered at the same time.
“Durocher,” they said, only my dad made it sound like a brand of rat poison: “Dro-shur.”
Leo Durocher. The Giants’ manager. I thought he was great. My Dad hated him. So did Whitey. They remembered him when he managed Brooklyn just three years before. He was the only manager I knew with the Giants. My Dad remembered John McGraw and Bill Terry and Mel Ott as managers. To him, Durocher was a loud-mouthed little son of a bitch who couldn’t hold a candle to any of the guys who managed the Giants before him.
“He’s a Dodger. He belongs back over in Brooklyn,” he said, but quiet enough so that only Whitey and I could hear. Whitey nodded. I just stared at him and Mays.
Right about then, Mays turned around and I saw the big 24 on his back. It was the most perfect thing on Earth. 24. He couldn’t have worn any other number.
The first game was pretty lousy. The Giants got beat around pretty good. Ken Raffensberger was pitching for the Reds, throwing nothing but garbage all day long (I knew this because my Dad kept saying, “Jesus, can you believe the garbage this guy throws?” all day long) (“And they keep swinging at it!” he’d add) and they had us 6-0 in the seventh. In the bottom of the seventh, Mays came up and I leaned forward on my seat.
“Come on, Willie!” I screamed in my thin, little-kid voice. “Hit one out of here!”
Raffensberger threw. Mays swung. Everybody stood up. A roar started to grow, and then it exploded. The guy in the seat ahead of me turned around and looked at me, a grin and a cigarette on his lips.
“Not bad, kid,” he hollered at me, smiling. “How’d you know that?”
I smiled back. Whitey shook his head at me.
“Nice guess,” he said. Nice guess, as in ‘you got lucky.’
I hadn’t seen a thing. By the time everybody settled back in, Willie was back in the dugout picking up his glove. I looked up at the big scoreboard and saw that they had put up a 1 for the Giants. I predicted a home run, but I sure didn’t get to see it.
The Reds scored again in the eighth and the crowd got pretty quiet. We were still down by six runs when we came up for our last try in the bottom of the ninth, and hardly anybody got excited but me when Al Dark got on for us with a base hit. I got excited because I had been watching Willie swinging his bat in the on-deck circle while Dark was at the plate.
The guy with the cigarette turned around to face me again.
“He gonna do it again?” he asked.
I nodded and grinned. My Dad laughed. Raffensberger (who was still throwing garbage) (which the Giants were still swinging at) wound up. Mays waited, and then he swung. Everybody stood up and cheered again. This time I jumped up on my seat to watch. I didn’t see where the ball landed, but I cheered along with everyone while I watched Willie circle the bases.
The guy with the cigarette turned around and laughed, then he reached over to shake hands with me.
“How does he do that?” he asked in the general direction of my Dad, who clapped me on the shoulder.
“If we knew that,” Dad said, “I’d have him pick the horses so we could make it rich.”
The Giants still lost, but then they won the second game without my help and we went home happy.
Over the next few weeks, I tried to predict when Willie would hit another one, but it never worked for me like it worked that Sunday afternoon, and even without me, Mays was the talk of the town. He had sixteen home runs in barely two months — as many as Bobby Thomson had playing since opening day — and everyone knew he was going to lead the Giants to great things for a long time. I loved him. A couple of evenings later, my Dad came down to the field to get Whitey and me, and when the inning was over and I trotted in from center field to hit, he yelled over to me, “Come on, Mays, time to go home.” After that, I wasn’t Wes Westrum any more.
I got to see Mays and the Giants a couple of more times at the Polo Grounds that year, but I listened to every game I could on the radio. Russ Hodges and Ernie Harwell were as much a part of the Giants to me as were Mays and Bobby Thomson and Monte Irvin, and I drove my mother nuts talking back to the radio, doing the station identifications every half-hour (“This is 5-70 WMCA, New York”) and harmonizing with Russ Hodges on “And you can tell it bye-bye, baby!” whenever the Giants got a home run.
As we got into August, we were in second place, but we were about a dozen games back and Brooklyn looked unstoppable. I’m absolutely positive that it was then that I became a sworn Dodger-hater for life. I began to hate everything about them. Their players. Their uniforms. Everything. Hated them in Brooklyn. Hate them in L.A. To the day I die, I’ll hate them.
My birthday was August 11. I had known since the first day I got my Giants’ schedule back in April that we were playing the Phillies that day, and I told my Mom that for my birthday I wanted to go to the game. My Mom must not have thought much of the idea, because on August 11 I was at home having my birthday party while my team was out getting shot down, 4-0, by Robin Roberts and Philadelphia. Some birthday present. Right now, I couldn’t tell you what kind of presents I got that year, but I always will remember what I didn’t get: a Giants’ win. The Dodgers split a double-header with the Braves that same day, and now we were a full thirteen games away from first. Some birthday.
“We’re dead,” Whitey told me.
“No we ain’t.”
“Yeah we are.”
I didn’t say anything else, but I knew, I really knew, that we weren’t dead, maybe. We were a good team. I kept looking at our records. We were 59-51. We were doing good. The Dodgers were 70-36. They were doing real good, but I knew they couldn’t keep it up. I hated them too much for them to keep it up.
Then, right after my birthday, the Giants started something. We swept a double-header against the Phils, knocked them off once more the next day, and then beat the Dodgers three straight at the Polo Grounds. Picking up momentum, we beat the Phillies three straight again, this time at Shibe Park in Philly, and returned to New York to beat Cincinnati twice in a row, took one from St. Louis, and then smothered the Cubs four straight by winning back-to-back double-headers. Sixteen straight wins, just like that, and now we were breathing down Brooklyn’s neck, just five games back. Whitey and I walked around for days as if we were in a dream.
“We’re gonna get ’em,” I’d say.
“Sure, we’ll get ’em,” he’d say.
As the season moved into September, Whitey and I would crowd over the old Zenith radio my Dad had given us, staring at it like you stare at a TV (which we didn’t have yet), imagining the game as Hodges and Harwell described it to us. I cut all the stories out of the Daily News and stuck them in a scrapbook which I would thumb through for hour after hour as we listened. Whitey had saved his allowance up and had bought a Giants’ cap, black, with a brilliant orange “NY” emblazoned above the bill, and I begged my Mom to get me one, too, and she did. And there we’d sit, listening to every pitch, sometimes wearing our baseball gloves — anything to help our team — and never saying a word to each other unless something good or something bad happened.In the middle of September, the Giants pulled off another streak of ten wins in a row, but the Dodgers kept winning, too, and we were still four and a half games behind them with only two weeks to go. On the twenty-first, the Giants had a day off, so we tuned to the Dodgers’ game from Ebbets Field and rooted for the Phillies. It worked. The Dodger lead was now four games. We played the Boston Braves the next day and beat them, and the Phils bumped off the Dodgers, and now we were only three back with six games left in the season.
Whitey, being older, had developed a strong regard for superstition and had taken to wearing his Giants’ cap all day and all night. He believed that, in the great cosmic balance of things, his hat had something to do with all this. I refused to argue with something that was probably bigger than both of us, so I took to wearing my cap all day and even to bed at night.
“It’s going to make you go bald,” my Mom told us.
It was a chance we’d have to take.
The next two days we bumped off the Braves again, while the Dodgers beat the Phillies and then had an off day, giving us another half-game in the standings, and then we switched opponents to finish the season.
With Jim Hearn going seven innings on Tuesday, we beat Philadelphia on the road, 5-1, while the Dodgers were up in Boston for two against the Braves. In the first, Warren Spahn beat Brooklyn 6-3, and in the second Boston creamed them, 14-2.
On Wednesday morning, I grabbed the sports page before my Dad. The paper was full of it — Dodgers this, Giants that, everywhere. The standings were:
NATIONAL LEAGUE W L PCT. GB Brooklyn................. 93 56 .624 — N.Y. Giants ............. 93 58 .616 1
We were closing in for the kill.
The next day, Monte Irvin ripped a double, a triple and a home run, and we pasted Philly, 10-1, but the Braves barely showed up for their game against Brooklyn and they lost, 15-5. We had Thursday and Friday off, unbelievably, and I know Whitey felt as helpless as I did, listening to the Dodgers play while the Giants sat waiting. We were going nuts, the both of us.
On Thursday, the Braves scraped up a run in the bottom of the eighth to break a 3-3 tie and held on to beat Brooklyn. We were only half a game out of first. Half a game. My nerves were shot. I wouldn’t leave our house except to go to and from school each day. I could hardly eat. Even Whitey was looking paler than he usually did.
On Friday, we listened as Carl Erskine blew a two-run lead and the Phils came back on a homer by Andy Seminick for a 4-3 win over the Dodgers. That was it. They were done for. We both had two games to play over the weekend, and we were dead even. The only thing was we were winning, and the Bums were coming apart at the seams.
I woke up at six o’clock on Saturday morning in that momentary blur that lasts until you realize that what you’ve dreamt all night isn’t real; when that passed, I felt the flush of realization that it was the weekend and that I could concentrate all my energy on the Giants. I sat up in bed.
“Hey.”
I turned around. Whitey was sitting up on the edge of his bed, fully dressed.
“Hey,” I said back to him. “Why are you up?”
“I couldn’t sleep any more,” he shrugged. Neither could I. We went quietly to the kitchen and had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and then began our vigil. The hours dragged on forever as we waited for the game to come on. Mom had me and Whitey help clean the house, but I wasn’t much help, wandering off every five minutes to check what time it was.
When we finally finished, we were still a bit more than two hours from game time. Whitey went to the closet and grabbed his jacket and put it on.
“Mom!” he yelled. “I’m going out bike-riding for a minute.”
“Stay in the neighborhood,” my Mom yelled back.
I asked Whitey if I could go to. He frowned for a second and then yelled, “Hey, Mom! Can John go, too?”
“Just be careful!”
We went into the garage and grabbed our bikes and went off riding down the block. I asked Whitey where we were going.
“You’ll see,” he said. “Just follow me.”
We rode for about five blocks, crossed New Dorp Lane, and then stopped on a street corner in a neighborhood that was pretty nice, but not quite as nice as our own. The houses were older, but the yards were neat and the trees were big and green. I asked Whitey where we were.
“You’ll see,” is all he said.
He looked around for a moment, then started off down another street. When we reached Flagg Place, he suddenly seemed excited. We slowed down.
“This is the place,” he said. We stopped in the street and Whitey kind of casually pointed with his chin in the direction of a white-painted house with a nice lawn and a big Lincoln in the driveway.
“What is it?” I asked.
“That’s Bobby Thomson’s house,” Whitey said.
“Bobby Thomson,” I said. “Bobby Thomson the ball player?”
“Yeah,” Whitey said, “that’s it right there.”
I looked at the house carefully. It seemed very strange to me that a real, live ball player would really live only seven or eight blocks away from me, right there in an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood. I had never really thought about it before, but I somehow figured that ball players lived away from ordinary people, because ball players weren’t ordinary people.
But there it was, Bobby Thomson’s house, right there.
“How do you know that’s his house?” I asked. It was too weird. What was Bobby Thomson doing living in New Dorp?
“Some guys I know in school told me. He signed autographs for them one day.”
“Wow,” I said, and I meant it. Wow — he just came out and signed autographs for them. “Does he ever play catch with them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
I thought about Bobby Thomson, maybe some afternoon when there was no Giants game, just wandering outside and seeing if the neighborhood kids wanted to get a game of catch going, or something. I’d die.
“Let’s go,” Whitey said, and he kicked his bike into motion. I wanted to sit there for a minute or two longer and check the place out. My God, Bobby Thomson’s bed was in that house. And his kitchen table, and his food, and his couch, and his clothes. And his bathroom. It was too weird. I finally got going and caught up with Whitey, checking off in my mind the directions to Flagg Place so I could find it again in the future. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends about it.
“Does Dad know that he lives there?” I asked Whitey as we rode back home.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Don’t tell Mom we rode all the way over there. She’ll skin us.”
“I won’t.”
Finally the game came on the radio. Whitey and I huddled up closer than we usually did, our eyes fixed on the dial. The Braves took the field in Boston, with Warren Spahn on the mound. Spahn had already won twenty-two games, but it didn’t matter. The Giants had already beaten him five times during the season, and the Braves’ bats were as miserable as the weather in Boston. The Braves went quickly and quietly, managing only five hits off of Sal Maglie, who picked up his twenty-third victory of the season in a 3-0 shutout.
“We’re in first,” I said to Whitey.
“For now.”
I shrugged. Until the Dodgers and the Phillies played that evening, first place was ours. If the Dodgers’ train derailed or their bus crashed on the way to Shibe Park, and they all died, we’d be the champions. It was an awful thought, I guess, but I assumed it would work. The Dodgers made it from their hotel to the ballpark with zero fatalities, however, and with Don Newcombe pitching, they shut out the Phils. Whitey and I headed off to bed with matching sets of shot nerves. I hated roller coasters. This was the world’s worst.
Sunday morning it was the same lousy thing. I woke up at about six and immediately rolled over. Whitey was already out of bed, getting dressed. I fell in line and followed him to the kitchen for breakfast. We weren’t about to change a thing. What worked on Saturday would sure as heck work on Sunday.
As the afternoon crawled on, we went to our room and clicked on the radio, only to find that the game was just getting started — because of the lousy weather, the teams agreed to move it up by a half-hour to make sure they got it in before it got too miserable. It was the 154th and final game of the regular season for the Giants, and Leo The Lip trotted out Larry Jansen to throw for us. It was a great choice. Jansen worked fast. He could beat the weather, and he could sure as anything beat Boston.
We fell behind 1-0 in the first as the Braves manufactured a run, but then Jansen toughened up and shut them down, and we came back to tie the game on a Bobby Thomson home run (his thirtieth), and then took a 2-1 lead in the third on back-to-back singles by Jansen and Eddie Stanky, a force play that moved Jansen to third, and then another single by Don Mueller. The game just sped along.
Meanwhile, Russ and Ernie kept us up to date on the story from Philadelphia. Preacher Roe, with his 22-3 record for the Dodgers, couldn’t last through the second inning, and the Phils were pounding Brooklyn but good, leading 6-1 early on.
In the fifth inning back in Boston, Alvin Dark singled, stole second base, and then came around to give the Giants their third run on a Monte Irvin base hit. The Braves were able to score once more, but that was it: barely two hours after they took the field, it was all over. The Giants were victorious, and could claim no worse than a tie for the National League championship. Whitey and me switched the radio to the Dodgers’ station. There was Red Barber, the voice of the Dodgers — no, the voice of the Devil himself. He sounded so sticky-sweet with that damned disgusting southern accent of his and that smooth style that masked the true evil of all things Brooklyn, and more specifically, all things Dodger. And there he was, live and direct from Shibe Park over WMGM, working his evil on the Phillies. I looked at Whitey. He was shaking his head slowly, as if the mere sound of Red Barber’s voice sickened him to his very soul. I had to admit, he made me want to retch, too.
Our joy over the Giants’ victory was brief. The Dodgers had scored a run in the fourth, three more in the fifth, and suddenly the laugher had become a ballgame at 6-5. Philadelphia stretched it back to 8-5, and the Dodgers came gnawing right back to tie it up at eight-and-eight on a two-run, pinch-hit double by Rube Walker. The Dodgers were sending everyone they could find out to the mound against the Phils, starting with Roe, then Ralph Branca, and then Clem Labine, and then Carl Erskine. Then Charlie Dressen marched out Don Newcombe.
Don Newcombe. I tried to think. It didn’t make sense. He had pitched the day before. All nine innings. He had thrown the shutout on Saturday. He had to be dead tired. Dead tired. It was stupid. Dressen was stupid. The pennant was ours.
“We just won the pennant,” Whitey said matter-of-factly.
I nodded. It was in the bag. Bring on the Yankees. We were going to the World Series.
Boy, were we wrong. If Newcombe was dead tired, somebody somewhere along the line forgot to tell him. The game went to extra innings, and Newcombe kept throwing, inning after inning. Yeah, he was dead tired.
It took until the twelfth inning for Newcombe to show some signs of slowing down. After retiring one man, the Phillies loaded the bases with Del Ennis coming up.
Whitey was grinning like a maniac.
“This is it,” he said, rocking back and forth. “This is it. All we need is a base hit or a deep fly.”
We. Suddenly, Philadelphia had become a part of “us.” They were united with us in our struggle to become the National League champs. Ennis, a good power hitter, stepped in with the bases jammed. My heart started pounding. Just a base hit or a deep fly out, that’s all we — the Giants and the Phillies and Whitey and me — needed to sew up the pennant. We didn’t get it. Newcombe blew strike three past Ennis, and there were two down.
Whitey shook his head in amazement.
“A base hit,” he said. “That’s all he needed. Or a fly ball. For Christ’s sake, that’s all.”
I shook my head, too. Now it would take a base hit for Philly to win. Eddie Waitkus was the hitter.
“Come on, Waitkus,” Whitey muttered, “come on, buddy. Just a little base hit”
“Come on, Eddie,” I whispered, suddenly on a first-name basis with a guy I didn’t know from Adam, and who now held our destiny in his hands.
We clenched our fists. Newcombe delivered. Waitkus swung, pulling a liner right past Robinson at second base. The crowd roared. Robinson threw his body toward the ball, reaching, stretching; he pulled the ball in. The inning was over. The Phils stranded three. Whitey fell back on his bed and spat out “Damn!” The good news was that, in his effort to snare the ball, Robinson was down in a heap at second base, knocked senseless. Good, I thought. Get the big lousy idiot out of the game. His Dodger teammates scraped him off the field and guided him shakily back to the dugout. He may have saved the game, but he was finished for the day. Good riddance.
The Dodgers, thankfully, went without a whimper in the thirteenth, and Newcombe marched back out one more time in the bottom of the inning to face the Phils. After getting the first two men he faced, he lost the next two, walking them both. Whitey and I started breathing again. Here was another chance for us.
Only now, Newcombe was clearly finished. Dressen came out and yanked him, replacing him with Bud Podbielan.
“Clarence,” Whitey said, to no one in particular.
“What?”
“Clarence,” he repeated. “Podbielan’s real name is Clarence.”
I nodded and filed it away. Clarence Podbielan – Bud to his friends, family and teammates – warmed up, got the third out, and the Dodgers got another shot at redemption. Robin Roberts, the Phillies’ ace, was working in relief. He got Pee Wee Reese on a pop-up, got Duke Snider to do the same, and then Jackie Robinson stepped up to the plate.
“What’s he still doing in there?” Whitey said.
Robinson was still looking a bit shaky from his injury, according to Red Barber. Roberts threw a strike to Robinson, then missed with a ball, and then Jackie stroked one, hard, deep, to left field, up into the stands. Whitey fell back onto the bed again, muttering “Damn, damn, damn,” over and over again under his breath.
When it came time for the Phils to come back in the bottom of the fourteenth, Richie Ashburn opened with a single, advanced to second on a sacrifice, and then watched as Podbielan got Del Ennis to pop out meekly to Gil Hodges, and Eddie Waitkus flied out to Andy Pafko in left. That was it. The Dodgers won, 9-8. The Giants and the Dodgers each finished with 96-58 records.
Instead of going to the World Series, the Giants were going to Brooklyn to begin a three-game playoff to decide the National League championship. I felt miserable that the Giants hadn’t won the pennant outright, but I knew that they had finished strong and definitely had the momentum going in. The Dodgers had staggered in, falling apart, frayed at the edges, barely hanging on down the stretch. The season wasn’t over yet, but now the championship would come down to a fight to prove who was best.