by Roger Kahn
My contribution was one sentence, concluding the eight-hundred-word story. It read, in full:
Nine sportswriters also perished.
Black humor roots within its creators’ brains and makes them victims. By September I’d had enough of airplanes, and on this final flight, aboard a DC-4, relief flooded me when the pilot said, “Uh, folks, we’re in a hold. It’s a little foggy up around New York. We’re going to circle Allentown for a while.” Allentown lies east of Allegheny peaks, I thought. But the descent stretched on. Ten minutes. One cigarette. The honking noises came from the hydraulic system, but the creaking had to be the wings. What was it a pilot once told me? “A DC-4 in weather will snap twice as many struts as a Constellation.” Twenty minutes. As we dropped toward the city of skyscrapers, visibility was zero. Plane lights blinked. The fog glowed red. Otherwise everything was black. How would it be, the brilliant red death of exploding wing tanks, or sudden, utter, inconceivable dark?
“Hey,” Carl Erskine said. “Do you like poetry?” He had slipped into the seat beside me and meant to cheer me or himself, or both.
“Sure, Carl. I majored in English.”
“Ever hear of a poet named Robert W. Service?”
“Right.”
“A poem called ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’? Well, would you like to hear me say it?” And he was off:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Erskine’s eyes sought me. I nodded.
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows,
Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that “he’d sooner live in hell.”
Over five more stanzas the Arctic cold killed Sam. His body was placed in a furnace, where coals blazed. After a long time the door was opened to see if the cremation was done.
And there sat Sam, looking cold and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door!
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm—
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”
Robert Service’s envoi and our landing coincided. Carl winked. I said, “Good going.” And we went our separate ways.
By September 3 the Dodger lead over the Giants had dropped to five games. In almost empty Braves Field, Boston moved five runs ahead; then the big hitters rallied, tying the score in the fourth inning. Dressen called for Joe Black, and watching the big man stride in, you could tell. There would be no more easy scoring for Boston today.
Black had come on slowly and irresistibly. He possessed only a fast ball and a small, sharp curve. Dressen liked pitchers with varied weapons and he was reluctant to believe that Black could win with just two pitches. But Joe pitched strongly in Chicago. He won in Pittsburgh. “It isn’t all that hard,” he said. “When they say pitch high, I pitch high, and when they say pitch low, I pitch low.” His control was superb, but what probably won Dressen was a game when the Cincinnati bench sang a soft, derisive “Old Black Joe.”
Black neither responded nor changed expression. He simply threw one fast ball each at the heads of Cincinnati’s next seven batters. “Musta been some crooners in the lot,” he said. “That stopped the music.” Dressen admired Black’s unpretentious toughness. By mid-season, Black became the principal reliever on the team.
Now in September in New England, he overpowered the Braves. The game stayed tied until the eighth inning. Then Robinson hit a grounder which the Boston second baseman threw wildly. Robinson never broke stride, and slid safely into third. That was his way—stealing the extra base when it mattered. Furillo bounced out and Robinson had to stay where he was. Snider bunted at Ed Mathews, the third baseman. Mathews charged and Robinson charged with him, staying one step behind. Mathews gloved the ball. He glanced back at Robinson, who stopped short. He threw to first. As Mathews released the baseball, Robinson sprinted home. He scored the winning run, with a long, graceful slide.
“Helluva play,” I said in the clubhouse.
“No,” Robinson said. “Just the play you make in that situation. As long as I’m a step behind him, he can’t tag me. He can’t reach that far. And he can’t catch me. I’m quicker than he is. So he can do two things. He can hold the ball. Then I stay at third and Duke is safe at first. Or he can throw. Then I go home. But there’s no way they can get an out without giving up the winning run.”
The next night Dressen summoned Black into the seventh inning of a tie game. Joe held off the Braves until the eleventh. Then he tired and, allowing his first run in ten tense innings of relief, he lost. The next morning Dressen ordered Black to fly to New York. “If he’s around again,” Charlie said, “I might use him again, and I want to save him for them Giants. There’s one guy ain’t afraid of them Giants.” Without Black the Dodgers lost the final game and the evening train ride down the coast of southern New England was a cortege. No one spoke poetry.
A day later the team lost a double-header to the Giants. The Giants had come to within four games, and they would play the team three times in the next two days. If the Giants swept, momentum would carry them to another pennant.
“I gotta think,” Dressen said in the clubhouse at the Polo Grounds. “Gotta get me a pitcher for tomorrow.”
“Is that the most important decision of the year?” I said.
“Yeah, kid. I gotta go home. I gotta think.”
Near midnight Dressen decided to start Preacher Roe, although the Polo Grounds, with its short foul lines, emphasized Roe’s wounding flaw. He threw home runs. “Ah don’t know why people git on me ‘bout my hitting,” he said. “Ah takes care of things the other way. Ah’ve throwed some of the longest balls in history.” Elwin Charles Roe, an Arkansas doctor’s son, had been to college and taught high school mathematics, but the role he liked to play was hillbilly. “Hillbilluh” he pronounced it.
His face was angular and his body was bony and he liked to puff a pipe. “You ever been in the Ozarks?” he asked once.
“What’s down there?”
“Hills,” Preacher said, “and hillbilluhs. Some say it’s quiet, but we like it.”
“What do you do?”
“Hunt. I got me some real fine pointers. You know about Mr. Rickey’s dogs after I had mah first real good year? Nineteen forty-nine, I believe it was, I won fifteen and lost only six. Led the league in winning percentage, I do believe.
“Well, that winter, I got back home and told myself, ‘Preach, you sure are a pretty good pitcher. Now it’s time you made pretty good money.’ So I set there, awaitin’ for Mr. Rickey to send me my contract. And each day I waited, I thought I ought to have a little more. When that ol’ contract finally came, I was gonna look for a comfortable sum.
“Contract never did arrive in the mail,” Preacher said. “ ‘Sted, down the road one sunny winter day come Mr. Rickey himself, driving a station wagon and makin’ a lot of dust. He pulled up and climbed out and joined me on the porch. The two of us set there a while, just rockin’.
“Then Mr. Rickey says, ‘Preacher, you’re a fine pitcher. You’re a wonderful pitcher.’ I thank him, and we’re still rockin’.
“ ‘Now, Preacher,’ Mr. Rickey says, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’m so proud of you, it’s like you were my own son.’ I thank him again. ‘Preacher,’ he says, ‘what should I pay you? It’s like paying my own son. But, look, I bought you a present.’
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br /> “Just then a couple of hunting dogs jump out of the back of the wagon. ‘They’re for you, Preacher,’ Mr. Rickey says. I sets to admirin’ them, and Mr. Rickey gets up, and reaches in a pocket and hands me a paper. ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘here’s your contract. The figure’s blank. Fill in what you think is right, son.’
“After he’d gone, I commenced thinkin’ what a fine thing he’d done and how much trust he put in me and I took that original figure I had and knocked a thousand dollars off it. Day or so later I go hunting. I run the dogs up and down the hills and bagged me a mess o’ quail. Got back, thought some more. Knocked off another $2,500.
“Went hunting again. Had the best day ever. Brought the dogs into the yard, locked the gate and went out on the porch and commenced more thinkin’. All the great huntin’ an’ the great dogs and Mr. Rickey’s trust made me ashamed to be greedy. I took that contract and filled in a number $10,000 under my original figure. I got up offa the porch and walked down to the corner and put the signed contract in the mail.
“When I got home, those two huntin’ dogs had jumped the fence and taken off. They didn’t stop running till they got back to Mr. Rickey’s house in Brooklyn.”
Roe underplayed his talents. “I got three pitches,” he said. “My change; my change off my change; and my change off my change off my change.” In essence: slow, slower, slowest. But he could throw hard and, after watching for a while, one saw in this sharp-nosed, bony, fidgety man an absolute master of guile. Even his fidgeting was planned. It was an essential to his spitball.
When wetting a pitch, Roe touched his cap and his sleeve, tugged his pants, dabbed his brow and, as his fingers rested at the forehead, he spat quickly into the heel of his hand. Then he pretended to pull his belt with his pitching hand. In the process fingertips touched wet heel. Now he was ready to throw the spitter.
We watched him from the press box through binoculars. In fidgeting, Roe always went to his forehead and belt, so we never could tell just when he “loaded” the ball. Nor did we know how he was doing it. Plate umpires, urged on by batters and opposing managers, sometimes demanded to see the ball. Whether it was wet or not, Preacher nodded and carefully rolled the ball the sixty feet to home. The evidence always dried in the dirt.
In the first inning at the Polo Grounds, Roe seemed more nervous than usual. He could not stand in one place. Through binoculars you could see his lips moving. He was chattering to himself. Alvin Dark doubled. Whitey Lockman singled sharply, and for all Roe’s wiles, the Giants were ahead, 1 to 0.
But the team, whose courage was so frequently maligned, refused to die. In the second inning, Gil Hodges, pale with tension, stepped into one of Sal Maglie’s curves and hit it into the upper stands in left field. An inning later Reese slammed a line drive into the lower field seats. Shuba and Cox hit home runs in the seventh. And Preacher, having made two early mistakes, made no others. He showed the Giants fast balls at eye level, and broke arching curves around the knees. When they waited for the curve, he slipped hard sliders under their hands. When they set for spitters—his spitter dropped—he’d loose the fast one and break their timing. He faked a hundred spitballs. Perhaps he threw ten. Or perhaps five. Muttering, fidgeting, always two thoughts ahead of the batter, Roe did not give the Giants another hit until the ninth inning. The Dodgers won, 5 to 1. The lead was again back to five. The next afternoon Dressen tried another lefthander, Ken Lehman, who had recently completed two years with the U.S. Army in Korea. Lehman was fair-haired, handsome and very bright. “I think,” he said, “I’m gonna sit next to Preacher, rub against him. Maybe some of that stuff will rub off on me.” But he was gone after one inning and two runs. Black relieved, expressionless and fierce. This day he did not back Giant hitters from the plate. Instead, he flattened them. At least three Giants barely ducked under fast balls. The Giants lost poise and power; behind Black’s ferocity the Dodgers pulled far ahead.
This was Durocher’s game, destroy the enemy, sow salt in the infield, and he was losing it. “Come on. In the ear. The big pitcher. Forty-nine. We’re gonna get him.” In the seventh inning, a Giant reliever threw toward Black, and missed. Black was backing away at the windup. His response an inning later was to deliver the single most terrifying pitch I have seen.
The object, supposedly, is to frighten, not to maim. Against a journeyman white outfielder named George Washington Wilson, from Cherryville, North Carolina, Black drew the perfect line. Wilson, who batted lefthanded, dug in his spikes, cocked his bat, and Black powered a fast ball at the body, shoulder high. Wilson ducked, in absolute if understandable panic, pulling his head down with such force that his baseball cap came off. The pitch sailed through narrow daylight, no more than a foot, between the cap and cranium of George Washington Wilson. He got up quickly, utterly ashen, and popped up the next pitch, with a quarter swing. The Dodgers won, 10 to 2. The pennant was sure. The Giant tide, like the questioners of the team’s courage, had at last been properly dammed.
On a Sunday afternoon in Boston, Joe Black, starting for the first time, overpowered the Braves and the Dodgers clinched a tie for the pennant. Five hundred fans met the team at Grand Central Station. They cheered as the players appeared through a runway and waved signs in the air. One read: “FOR PRESIDENT, JOE BLACK, MOST VALUABLE PLAYER.”
The Dodgers secured the pennant in their next game, on Tuesday night, September 23, by defeating Philadelphia, 5 to 4. The starting pitcher, a slight, handsome righthander named John Rutherford, threw a grand-slam home run, but Shuba homered for the team and Snider, magnificent since the benching, drove in the winning run with a long double. My story cited the charges that the team never won big games and commented: “Perhaps. But they sure won a lot of little ones.”
“Hey,” Duke Snider shouted, as he sipped champagne in the clubhouse. “How was that goddamn perfect swing? How’d you like that one?”
“What was it you hit, Duker?”
“I hit a sinker, but it didn’t sink.” We laughed. “And in the World Series I’m gonna hit a screwball that doesn’t screw.”
“Whoop,” cried Campanella, wrapping an arm around my chest. “How’s that for fighting spirit?”
“We’ll take those Yankee bastards,” Robinson shouted.
“Son of a buck,” Carl Erskine said, with shining eyes.
Billy Cox waggled his finger and said, “Fuckit.”
A day later nine bottles of Scotch appeared in the press box, one for each man who covered the team. Joe Black had sent them with a note: “I know I threw the pitches, but the things you fellows wrote about me sure helped. Thanks.” The brand of Scotch he chose was important to him. Black and White.
Bob Cooke gave me three days off, dispatched me to a weekend football game at West Point and asked how I felt about writing the principal story on World Series games. “It goes outside,” he said. “Page one.”
“I’d like the lead on the games in Brooklyn.”
Behind eyeglasses Harold Rosenthal’s eyes looked merry.
“Might as well find out now,” he said, “if the kid chokes.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said. “And I can always write an AP lead.”
“Not for this paper, you can’t,” Cooke said.
“None of that ‘paced by the six-hit pitching,’ “ Rosenthal said.
“Yeah,” said Sol Roogow. “Rest in pace, get it?”
“The Series is nothing to worry about,” Cooke said. He began drumming his fingers on his desk, and looking about. “We’ve gone with you all year.” The fingers played a piano exercise. “The stories have to be eight pages long. Can you write an eight-page story in an hour?”
“And in English?” Roogow said.
Cooke’s drumming was making me nervous. “Yes,” I said. I wanted to get up and walk. “It’s no big deal.”
“No,” Rosenthal said heavily. “Front-page pieces are no big deal at all when you’re twenty-one.”
“Twenty-four.”
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�Look,” Cooke said. “Don’t be fancy. Just lead with the most important things.”
Joe Black won the first game of the World Series, 4 to 2. Robinson, Snider and Reese hit home runs. No Negro had won a World Series game before, but I had learned the Tribune’s curious definition of importance. “Home runs and Joe Black,” I began a conservative story, “the combination which brought a pennant to Brooklyn yesterday …” I was confined to writing hits and errors.
The Series built through climaxes. Erskine, assigned to pitch the second game, stood tiptoe on a ladder to peer through a clubhouse window, at the weather and at the excited people outside. He lost his balance and fell, striking his head against a radiator. He fainted, revived, but was knocked out in the fifth inning. The scene shifted to the Stadium. Roe outpitched Ed Lopat. The Dodgers led, 2 to 1, in games. Then Allie Reynolds struck out ten and beat Black, who allowed only three hits, and the Series was tied.
There are no free tickets to a World Series game. Six hundred places are assigned to working journalists (most of whom really work), but everyone else—players’ wives, visiting baseball men and the Commissioner of Baseball—pays for his seat. That is a message I had to learn by heart. No sooner did the Dodgers win the pennant than telephone calls started. Someone had known me as a high school sophomore; someone else was a casual acquaintance ten years before. The brother-in-law of a girl I knew and the brother of a girl who had declined to go out with me and, inevitably, Dan Golenpaul of “Information Please” telephoned. Each call began in praise and ended in supplication. “I really enjoy reading you in the morning.” Pause. Inhale. “Say, do you think you can get me a pair for the Series? I’ll pay for them.”
“There are no free tickets to a World Series game.”
“Oh? Well, even so, I mean, could you help an old friend?”
I bought a pair for each game, at $6 a ticket, spending a total of $84, which was $12 more than my weekly salary. Then I offered the tickets to friends who had not called. Both strips were gone in a day. All Brooklyn panted for my tickets, but as it did, I made a modest economic discovery. Once $84 is removed from a checking account, to be repaid in multiples of $6, it is gone. Friends gave me cash and checks, but the small installments always dissipated. It was months before my account recovered. Whatever the arithmetic, $6 times 14 never equals $84.
