Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Dick Conners, who still lives in North Albany and was a friend of Pitts, told me the Pitts story.

  The owner of the Senators in 1935 was Joseph Cambria, who put Albany into the International League, where it played from 1932 to 1936. Cambria, a noted figure in Baltimore laundry circles before entering baseball, heard about Pitts’s talent, met him at the Sing Sing gate when he was paroled, and brought him to Albany. Albany’s greatest local hero at that time was Johnny Evers, a Troy native but an Albanian by adoption, who had played big league baseball for eighteen years, twelve of them with the Cubs; was the National League’s most valuable player in 1914, and part of the great double-play combination that Franklin P. Adams had so deftly defined in the New York World:

  Trio of bearcubs and fleeter than birds,

  Tinker to Evers to Chance.

  Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

  Making a Giant hit into a double,

  Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:

  “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

  After he left big-league baseball, Evers signed on with Cambria as general manager of Albany, and in June of 1935 he inherited Alabama Pitts. Cries rose up against a felon playing for the Senators, and William G. Bramham, head of the minor leagues, ruled against Pitts.

  Evers took the case to baseball’s commissioner, Judge Kennesaw M. Landis. Evers had already put himself squarely behind Pitts. “I have been in baseball all my life,” he said. “If this boy is not allowed to play, I will sever all connections with the game for good. That’s a broad statement, but I mean every word of it.”

  Landis ruled for Pitts, who came to Hawkins Stadium to play outfield, and, as Ring Lardner once put it, although he was a mediocre fielder he was also a very poor hitter. However, he was deft at cards, and Dick Conners took him to play (across the street from my house) with Dr. Jay McDonald and Jake Becker, among others; and on the way home Pitts told Dick: “Don’t stay in the game when I raise a second time. I can read those cards.”

  Of course Dick imparted this news to the others and that was that for Alabama’s poker-playing in North Albany. He concluded his days four years later with another kind of gambling—knifed to death in Gastonia, North Carolina, while dancing with another man’s wife.

  Pitts only lasted in Albany for six weeks, but the Senators went on for twenty-three more years, peaking in 1948 when attendance reached 210,804, or about 3,100 per game—and standing room only for Sunday doubleheaders. They went on to win the pennant in 1949. But a decade later professional baseball died in Albany, with attendance down to forty thousand, and in 1960 the splendid Hawkins Stadium was razed, and sold to developers who put up a large cut-rate store called Topps. A friend of mine spoke for all baseball fans when she said, “Topps is the bottoms.”

  Baseball came back to Albany in 1983 when the Albany-Colonie Athletics, farm team of Oakland, was established in Heritage Park, near Albany Airport. In 1985 the team became the Yankees—a New York Yankee farm—and that year 324,003 people came to watch, an all-time seasonal attendance record for Eastern League baseball. I live on the other side of the river and since the games are no longer in my backyard, I follow them with great goodwill, but chiefly in the morning paper; and soon that too will pass, for the local Yankees are moving to Long Island. At this writing the local baseball scene looks very bleak.

  When I left North Albany for the first time I took a job at the Glens Falls (N.Y.) Post-Star as a sportswriter. I covered all sports, wrote a column, and became a dogged fan of Red Smith, Joe Palmer, and Jimmy Cannon, who were heroic sportswriters of that age; and when I was drafted during the Korean War my time with sports served me well. The army made me a sports editor of a weekly newspaper, and so for the next two years I was so immersed in games that the rest of the world was minimalized.

  This, of course, was temporary insanity, and at the end of my stint with the army I abandoned sports for the police beat, politics, and fiction, more expansive ways of indulging dementia. But sports, and especially baseball, lurked insidiously in my imagination and, when I began to write long fiction, the figures from childhood and sportswriting days demanded attention. Their stories seemed then, and now, elemental to my own life and the life of my family.

  One of my great-uncles was Eddie (Coop) McDonald, a third baseman who was a maestro of the hidden-ball trick. He had three years (1911–1913) with Boston and Chicago in the National League that were respectable but less than stellar, and another ten or more great years with minor-league teams in Birmingham, Chattanooga, and Little Rock as a player and manager. He was a beloved figure in the family, in my own memory, in Albany, and in the baseball world, and I drew on his baseball experience, but not on his personal life, when I created Francis Phelan, the derelict hero of Ironweed. Francis was a drunk, Coop a teetotaler.

  There is a quasi-mystical postscript to the Ironweed–Albany Senators connection. When the film was shot in Albany the old all-night Boulevard Cafeteria, one of my youthful haunts, empty in 1987, but its stained-glass windows and murals still handsomely intact, was refurbished by the movie crew and used as the Gilded Cage, the saloon where Francis (Jack Nicholson) and his friend Helen go, and where Helen (Meryl Streep) sings so memorably. The Boulevard building was, and is, owned by Matt (Babe) Daskalakis, a first baseman for the Senators in the team’s latter days in the mid-1950s. Since the movie, Matt has opened the place as a saloon, restaurant, and the only place in town where you can dance to the music of the 1930s and 1940s. Some things, clearly, were meant to be.

  If I have come full circle from those games of catch and fungo in the mid-1930s to a latter-day faith in the annual ritual of baseball, it is not with any speculative or mythifying baggage, or any abstract rationale for what has come to pass, but rather it is with the still-visible specifics of memory: my uncle Peter swinging a bat and revealing to me what he looked like when he was fourteen; umpire Mike Pantone wearing a catcher’s mask too small for his head, but protecting his nose; that rainmaker of a flyball that Gehrig hit; that jazz of language that came out of a Jimmy Cannon column.

  These things accumulated and did what they did to me, and now here I am again, about to enter into my annual six months of daily anxiety over the fate of the New York Mets. I have good reasons for this, of course, as you now know.

  1992

  Family:

  My Life in the Fast Lane

  Dana’s Ironic Hiccups

  Snapshots: Two Grandfathers

  My Life in the Fast Lane

  The Knights of Columbus existed for one boy, who became one young man, as a never-quite-accessible playland where what could not be was always superior to what was. Things could not be for the boy because at the outset he was too small to lift the bowling balls or catch the medicine ball, too short to reach the functional level of the pool table, too young to smoke the cigars that the card players (playing pinochle, incomprehensible game) were smoking. Sometimes he spat in the shallow but wide brass spittoons and felt accomplished, and he learned to call the players by name: Tom Riley and Pete Burns and Freddy Whitmore and Hooks Keenan and Bill Fealey and John Corscadden, John who preferred kibitzing to playing and was a champion at his preference.

  The club, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization, was built in 1872 at 131 North Pearl Street in downtown Albany, a three-story brownstone with a large hall suitable for basketball, bingo, and holiday bacchanals of a restrained order. One became a full member after taking three symbolic degrees—events of prayer and ritual, the third of which was so mysterious, exciting, and astonishing that George M. Cohan wanted to produce its equivalent as Broadway theater. But, the degree being secret, that was not allowed.

  The boy’s father, uncles, cousins and assorted neighbors were full members of the Knights, as the club and its building were both called. One favored great-uncle, Pat McDonald, erstwhile sportsman, gambler and politician (a common Albany hybrid), was club superintendent, and when the boy visited Pat’s and his wife Lizzie’s third-f
loor apartment, the whole club seemed like family real estate.

  One entered up several stone steps and, with difficulty, pushed open the huge right door that gave onto the main hallway, which had about it the odor of stillness. To the left were the front and back parlors, empty of people but full of handsome furniture that discouraged comfort. To the right a semicircular staircase led up to the second-floor cardroom, always busy after four in the afternoon, and to the library, always empty at any hour. It also led downstairs to the basement, wherein were manifested the club’s magical elements: two pool tables and six bowling alleys.

  Dike Dollard and Patsy Mulderry, both elderly millionaire paving contractors, might be playing pool for pennies, then quarreling over the outcome, while the aging former police court judge from the North End, John J. Brady, waited to play the winner.

  The boy learned from his father and his most proficient uncle how to use a cue, how also to palm and roll the small duckpin balls; and so at an early age a pool table, boy-size, appeared at home, and bowling became a sport to grow into. It was pursued with intense pleasure, then with fanaticism: bowling four nights a week by the time college came along.

  Its appeal increased, for as practiced nighttimes at the Knights, bowling reconstituted, indoors, the allure of the baseball diamond (a depopulated and fading area of concern by late adolescence); which is to say it offered team competition among peers, with individual skills highly prized, and the sense of play and the quest for camaraderie fulfilled.

  In his association with women, the young man grew equivalently fanatical; but women came to the Knights only for parties, dances and bingo; club life excluded them otherwise. John Corscadden remembered some members sending their women friends to the movies across the street while the men nightly, every night, hung around the club. One of Johnny’s pals, Eddie Fisher, remembered the pattern of taking his date home and then going to the club, where life went on until perhaps midnight, adjourning finally to the Grand Lunch across the street for “coffee and.”

  Corscadden and Fisher were pals of Pete McDonald, a wild man who was the boy’s principal uncle, a man who did many basic things well: bowling, talking, shooting pool or darts. Eddie Fisher remembered the night Pete put a newspaper over the dart board and said, “Name a number,” then hit it, said “Name another,” and hit it, and like that.

  Corscadden was fast and good at basketball and brought a team into the gym in the early thirties and made money for the club. He was offered a basketball scholarship at a prep school with the understanding that it could lead him to Colgate; but he declined. “I was too smart,” he said. “I wanted to be around with the gamblers. I was a dope, really. That’s the answer to it.”

  Fisher had a 202 bowling average, very high, and didn’t even own his own ball. He used one left in a locker by Sullivan the undertaker. Then one day Sullivan took the ball home and Fisher’s average dropped twenty points.

  Bowling was central to club life, the alleys busy all week (no mixed leagues until the forties). Joe Falcaro, the world champion, bowled at the Knights once. Johnny Corscadden remembered Falcaro putting ointment on his thumb to keep it from cracking, which reminded Fisher of the trip the K of C team took to a tournament in Detroit, where Fisher met a man with a cracked thumb. Fisher showed the man how to keep coating the crack with New Skin and cotton until a cloth scab developed; and the man went on to be the tournament’s high scorer.

  Some of the men bowled five-dollar jackpots after the league action at the club, which was when the boy’s father made the double-pinochle split (4-6-7-10 pins)—“In my whole life I never saw it made,” Fisher said—and earned a twenty-dollar tip from a gambler who made money on the match.

  Pete McDonald rolled a 299 game in one of the jackpot matches (his team lost the match) and told the boy (and the young man for years after): “When you roll 300, come around and talk to me.” Pete was there ten years later when the young man rolled a 299 himself and therewith shut Pete up about the 300.

  The young man joined the Knights at seventeen but found life had changed. He played pool okay, yes; bowled 256 on alleys five and six and led the league with high single for a while; and he sang in the glee club as best he could (“I can’t sing but I will,” was his motto), but the uncles weren’t bowling anymore, and neither was his father. His uncle Pat, still superintendent but very old now, was tending to his dying wife.

  Life in the club was dying also, for several reasons. The Catholic bishop wouldn’t let the club open a bar, not even a beer bar, and members defected, the boy’s father among them, though he never drank. Men joined the Elks Club over on State Street, for that had become the principal sociopolitical bowling alley in town: the place where the significant Albany pols hung out. At the bar.

  In the sixties the K of C would be bulldozed to make room for a highway, and the remaining members would begin a new life in a new building uptown. But even in the early fifties the club, for the young man, was little more than a group of empty rooms with nostalgia racing through them, just as he had when he was a boy. Bowling had degenerated into respectability, and pool seemed a sin no one committed seriously anymore. Sadly, it was no longer important to belong to the club: not this club, not any club.

  And anyway, by then the young man had developed bowler’s finger: an ignominious traumatic arthritis that prevented him from throwing a hook; and his average dropped from the 180s to the 130s. Oh, the shame just to think of it. In a much later year, trying out a ball with a fingertip grip, he regained his hook; and soon thereafter, with little preparation, bowled a 600 triple. The restoration had begun.

  But alas, he then developed bowler’s groin, and chose at once to retire the sport and build a swimming pool. Today he no longer has need of nighttime games, much preferring the game of solitude. But he talks from time to time of adding a room to the upstairs of the house, with space enough for a pool table, regulation-size, such as might have been found in the basement of the K of C circa 1938. This, however, is largely talk. One doesn’t really need a pool table in one’s life. Everyone knows this.

  Postscript: Times do change. Now, in 1992, there is a pool table, regulation size, in the upstairs of the house. The past has been recaptured and it is almost as good as it used to be.

  1986

  Dana’s Ironic Hiccups

  What you are about to read is a scientifically researched, literary-related, medical article which also contains advice to newspapermen on a foolproof courtship technique. Consider yourself warned.

  The medical portion, which is the weighty part of this piece, begins early in 1964 when I was writing a story on Robert Frost’s grave in Old Bennington, Vermont. His gravestone was still absent, and unfinished, a year after his death, and on the existing stones in the Frost plot there were errors in the birth and death dates of his wife and three of his children, and the name of his son was misspelled. A poet devotes his life to precision and finds in death that his numbers are scrambled.

  I was in the throes of this irony when Dana, my wife, developed the hiccups. This was not unusual, but as we drove through the Vermont countryside, the hiccups kept on, and on, and on. I maintained a prolonged silence and then, remembering that sudden terror cured hiccups, I erupted with a fiendish yell into her left ear. The hiccups continued.

  She held her breath, slid down in the seat to change the gravitational pull on her esophagus, and the hiccups grew raucous, out of control, gave her a pounding headache. I stopped at a store and bought aspirin and got her a glass of water. The aspirin palliated the headache, but had no effect on the hiccups.

  As we rode along I saw her tear a piece off the small brown paper bag that the aspirin came in. She folded it to the size of a finger joint and put it behind her ear. Then there was silence, and no more hiccups. I waited a few minutes before I said to her: “I saw what you did and I don’t believe it.” She told me it was a Puerto Rican hiccup remedy her grandmother had told her about, and that she had just now remembered it.

&
nbsp; The months moved along, Dana got the hiccups now and then, dutifully put a piece of brown paper behind her ear, and away went the hiccups. I then began my twenty-eight-year-long bout of medical research to understand hiccups better, and I came to know that they are sudden, spasmodic contractions of the diaphragm, which produce sharp intakes of breath, this intake cut off when the windpipe constricts, thus creating the hic in hiccup. Anybody might hiccup, including a fetus.

  The diaphragm’s contractions can be brought on by such things as stress, hepatitis, alcohol, overeating, strokes, orange soda, sudden excitement, cold showers, and, in one case reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, by an ant crawling around on the patient’s eardrum.

  To cure the hiccups you hold your breath until you turn purple, or you breathe into a paper bag, or eat a teaspoon of sugar, or drink a glass of water upside down, or suck a lemon wedge soaked in Angostura bitters, or tickle your throat with a cotton swab, or sneeze, or have your doctor insert a soft rubber tube four inches into your nose and then pull the hose back and forth to stimulate the area behind your soft palate. Also you can take drugs: nifedipine, chlorpromazine, quinidine, phenytoin, valproic acid, carbamazepine, or, if drugs don’t work, you can ask your physician about having your phrenic nerves surgically cut. Because this latter cure could stop you from breathing, most physicians will probably tell you to go back to lemon sucking.

  Dana had no need to resort to any of these cures. She possessed the foolproof piece of brown paper. She did, that is, until the night we were parking at the Troy Country Club and she was stricken by a violent hiccup attack. We had no brown paper, for I was tiring of carrying paper bags wherever we went, so I said to her, “Why don’t you put a paper behind your ear?”