by Roger Kahn
“Two-to-one they change it on you,” Young said.
“If not the deskman, then the printer,” I said. “I’ve tried to get ‘cerebration’ into the Tribune four times this season and it’s always come up ‘celebration.’”
Anderson grinned, but turned less cheerful when he saw a copy of the Eagle. Someone indeed murdered his pleasant pun. His published story read, “The Milwaukee Braves died with their boots on.” On. Not even Dante conceived an inferno for sodden copyreaders.
No Dodger team before had won two pennants in a row. No National League team before had clinched a pennant so early. That bright September even the McCarthy wickedness waned. Lucille Ball confessed that she had registered as a Communist during the 1936 elections to please “my radical grandpa.” No one seemed to care very much, and “I Love Lucy” persisted as the most popular program on television.
Sal Maglie never hit Carl Furillo in the head, but another Giant pitcher, Ruben Gomez, plunked his wrist. Furillo trotted to first, paused and, ten seconds later, charged at Leo Durocher in the Giant dugout. Durocher met him and the men rolled on the ground. Furillo clamped Durocher’s skull in his right arm. The top of the bald head turned purple. Monte Irvin, Jim Hearn and several other husky Giants pulled Furillo off Durocher. One of them stamped Furillo’s hand, cracking a bone. Furillo could not play again until the World Series. He had been hitting .344. His average stayed there and he won the batting championship. In this Brooklyn season even the injuries were advantageous. At last, not next year but now, the Yankees were ready to be taken.
In the first inning of the first game of the World Series at the Stadium, the Yankees knocked out Carl Erskine and scored four runs. A day later, Mickey Mantle walloped a two-run homer off Preacher Roe and the Yankees led, two games to nothing. A number of writers composed leads around the theme: “It looks like Chuck Dressen’s Dodgers is dead.”
My father telephoned after the second loss and began: “Somehow your friends have the unerring knack of playing bad baseball when they most need to play good baseball.”
“I didn’t figure Roe would lose. I don’t understand it.”
“Who’s pitching tomorrow?” Gordon asked.
“He has to come back with Erskine.”
My father grunted concurrence. “And you’ll be on the front page?”
“That’s the rules. We’re back in Ebbets and I write the lead story in Brooklyn.”
“Well, try to spell Erskine’s name correctly.”
“O-i-s …”
“The ‘oy’ is silent,” Gordon said, then—citing a line from some forgotten vaudevillian—“like the cue in billiards.”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Good luck, son.”
Erskine set a World Series strikeout record in chilly sunshine the next day, October 2, 1953. I sat between Rud Rennie, a courtly man who professed boredom with all things but pretty women, and Red Smith, who approached sports with resolute, professional irreverence. In passionate silence, I rooted for Carl. During the eighth inning, with the World Series, the ball game and the record still in doubt, a number of spectators left. My stomach was knotted. As I made notations in the scorebook, my hand shook. “Why in the world,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and steady, “would anybody leave a ball game this exciting right now?”
“Numerous reasons,” Rud Rennie said. “Their feet may be cold. Mine are. They may want a drink of something more than beer. I think I’d like a highball. They may want supper. Did you think of that? It’s getting pretty close to suppertime. Or, somewhere they may have a young lady waiting.”
I bit a lip. Here I was the junior man, the lead-story writer to be sure, but the junior man, and I had to play the kid. I stretched, in contrived nonchalance, and placed my chin against a wet palm as the ninth inning began.
Red Smith called my name. “Would you pass me a piece of copy paper, please,” he said. A stack of yellow Western Union paper already stood before him.
“Huh? Oh, sure, Red. Here.”
Holding his hands at eye level, Smith used the paper to wipe sweat from his palms. “This,” he announced, “is a brute of a ball game.” Rud Rennie gazed toward center field, eyes filmed as by a nictitating membrane.
I had perhaps forty minutes to compose a story. It came quickly:
Back from the dead yesterday came Carl Erskine, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. Erskine blazing his way to a strikeout record, Robinson and Campanella supplying the punch and the revitalized trio driving the Brooklyn Dodgers to their first 1953 World Series victory, a bitterly earned 3-to-2 triumph over the New York Yankees.
A crowd of 35,270 fans, largest ever to squeeze and elbow its way into Ebbets Field for a series contest, came to see a game the Dodgers had to win. They saw much more. They saw a game of tension, inescapable and mounting tension, a game that offered one climax after another, each more grinding than the one before, a game that will be remembered with the finest.
It was a predominantly Brooklyn crowd, which was fitting because it was a Brooklyn day. Robinson, the power behind the first two runs, and Campanella, who powered home the winning run with an eighth-inning homer off Vic Raschi, made amends for weaknesses in the first two games. But Erskine, unable to last beyond the first inning in the first game, held center stage and the Erskine role was most dramatically enacted.
Fans Mize for Record
The soft-spoken twenty-six year old Hoosier, a twenty-game winner for the Dodgers this season, struck out fourteen Yankees, a record, snapping by one the standard set by Howard Ehmke, of the Philadelphia Athletics, when he beat the Chicago Cubs in the first game of the 1929 World Series.
Four times Erskine struck out Mickey Mantle, the Yankee center-fielder and most-advertised star. Four times he struck out Joe Collins, the Yankees’ first baseman. Once he struck out Johnny Mize, the home-run slugging pinch hitter, and once was enough. That was in the ninth inning and that was the strikeout that broke the record.
The Dodgers won the next day, tying the series, but after that content fled from Brooklyn. The Yankees won the fifth game, when Mantle, batting lefthanded, lined a screwball into the upper left-field stands. Casey Stengel’s Yankees became the first team to win five consecutive world championships on October 5 at the Stadium, when Billy Martin, who had saved the ‘52 Series, slammed one of Clem Labine’s good sinkers on a low line up the middle for a single in the last half of the ninth inning. Gil McDougald had straightened past third and was nearly home. Snider stuffed the ball into his hip pocket and ran from the field, his head bobbing. Long afterward he thought, “I should have thrown. Suppose McDougald had fallen down.”
The Dodger clubhouse was sepulchral. The men sat in front of the strange lockers in the large alien carpeted dressing room. Reporters and photographers burst in. If you knew the players and saw them silent, humiliated, it was like crashing into a sick room. Photographers popped bulbs. Reporters hurried to Carl Furillo, who had tied the game by rocking a home run off Allie Reynolds in the ninth. “I showed ‘em,” Furillo said. “I showed ‘em I could come back after breaking that hand.” This black-haired powerful man was dominated by his private triumph. Five minutes after losing the Series, he was issuing victory statements. Everywhere else the men, with whom I had traveled for two years, and whose vitality I so enjoyed, were motionless and sorrowful and waxen.
“Nice try,” I said to Reese, who sat head down on a three-legged stool. There was no swivel chair for him at the Stadium. Reese looked up, recognition in his eyes and hurt. “That’s all it was,” he whispered and lowered his head again, foreclosing conversation.
“Good to see you hitting,” I said to Robinson. Jack had taken off his gray uniform shirt. A roll of fat collared his neck. He shook his head. Jowls stirred. “I’d trade every fucking hit if we could have won.”
Labine had removed his baseball cap and slumped on the locker stool, head between his arms, with only the light-brown crew cut visible. His chest moved oddly, and
when I came closer, I heard sobs issuing from this man who above all things was proud of his poise. Duke Snider caught my eye. “I still say we’re the better team,” he said.
“I know.” I felt cheated. “That’s the hell of it. That’s the rottenest thing in this life, isn’t it? The best team doesn’t always get to win.”
Jesse Abramson, the skilled hard-boiled boxing writer, said my dressing-room story showed excessive emotional involvement. Bob Cooke and Irving Marsh agreed. The transpontine madness had me in thrall. “Take a week off,” Cooke said. “Get some perspective.”
I read the newspapers. Nigel Bruce, the great Watson, died at fifty-eight, deserting his confederate, Rathbone-Holmes. Kathleen Ferrier, who made men weep as she sang Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, died of cancer at the age of forty-one. After Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General to President Eisenhower, investigated the personal finances of Joe McCarthy, he cleared the Senator of breaking criminal statutes. That Wednesday night, as ever, I visited my parents for a resumption of Ulysses according to Olga Kahn. We tried the chapter in which Joyce describes the birth of Mina Purefoy’s baby at 10 P.M., on June 16, 1904, the progress of the language and the development of the embryo coinciding in laborious labor. We drove through it for a listless hour, after which Olga prepared coffee.
“Well,” Gordon said, “at least you can’t complain that it was an uninteresting baseball season. Your assignment certainly wasn’t dull.”
“No, but in the end I felt flat.”
“Maybe you’d enjoy covering another club next year.”
“I’ve got good sources on the Dodgers. I don’t know if I could build up others as good and, anyway, going through the whole thing again would probably bore me.”
“Suit yourself, but isn’t twenty-five early to worry about boredom? By the way, the Erskine strikeout piece wasn’t a bad story, not a bad piece of work at all.” We both felt tired. After coffee Gordon saw me to the door. He was smoking a Pall Mall behind a long, bent ash. His gray eyes were soft, but the deep voice grated from a cold when he said, “Good night, chief.”
The next day’s newspapers broke the remarkable news that Charlie Dressen was through. Ruth Dressen had written a harsh letter to Walter O’Malley, demanding a three-year contract and O’Malley immediately invited Charlie to the team offices, at 215 Montague Street. He slapped Charlie’s back, indicated a chair and said through a cigar, “Is what Ruth says what you feel you’ve got to have?”
“Yeah,” Dressen said, averting his eyes.
“Then I think we should call a press conference for tomorrow morning. The policy here, as you know, Charlie, is one-year contracts. At the press conference we can announce together that you’re leaving.” Dressen blinked and shook his head. “Me and my wife got to have security,” he said.
“Of course,” O’Malley said. “I wouldn’t try to hold you.”
O’Malley dismissed Dressen and summoned Bavasi and Fresco Thompson. Bavasi recalls that he was willing to argue for a two-year contract, but that Dressen and wife wanted three years or none. Thompson, who could anticipate O’Malley’s moods, lately had lost enthusiasm for Dressen. “It isn’t Hodges’ bat or Erskine’s arm that makes us win,” he had been saying. “It’s Dressen’s brain. We’re thinking of having it sent to the Hall of Fame, collect.”
O’Malley told Frank Graham, Jr., his publicity man, to announce a “very important” press conference for ten the next morning.
“What about?” Graham asked.
O’Malley placed a finger to his lips. “He was tired of Dressen,” Graham says. “I knew there was some resentment of Charlie’s manner and all the publicity he got for himself. But I didn’t suspect what was coming.”
The following morning O’Malley presided suavely. “I appreciate Charlie’s views,” he said. “Many of his colleagues are getting long-term contracts. However, the Brooklyn club has paid more men not to manage than any other club. The one-year contract is our policy here, and if it weren’t, I’d make it our policy.”
“My wife and I,” said Dressen, co-eulogizer of himself, “gotta have security.”
That quickly it was done. A fresh set of realities assaulted me. It was harsh, rather than pleasant, at the top of the baseball business, as it is harsh at the top of any business: survival depends not only on successful striving, as a manager pouring the totality of his being into a pennant winner, but also on avoiding missteps, and so on caution. To Dressen, success made one more strong, and he grew heedless. He did not realize that success, breeder of envy, simultaneously increases vulnerability. He saw himself as the heroic leader, who had managed the Dodgers to successive pennants. He did not see himself as the overbearing, semigrammatical encyclopedist whose indiscriminate chatter with the press, whose innate bluntness and whose blossoming pride made him an irritant to his employers.
I called Dressen on the morning after he was fired. It was Friday, October 16, cloudy but pleasant, and I was assigned to write the follow-up story. “Don’t worry about me, kid,” Dressen said. “I’m in real good shape. Thanks for callin’.” Sitting in his hotel apartment, he assumed that I was offering condolences.
“Bob Cooke wants me to write a story. Will you help me out?”
“Sure. Look. I wanna ride around. Come over.”
All Dressen’s friends had preceded me into his paneled suite at the Hotel Granada. There was Red the Florist, short, sharp-featured and with eyes as furtive as Dressen’s. Jerry the Stockbroker, square-faced, guttural, seemed strangely ominous. Herbie, the balding wire-service photographer, would beg Dressen to put on a cotton-picker’s hat during spring training “so we can get a caption about you weeding out rookies.” Invariably, Dressen obliged.
The hotel living room was furnished in neat, nondescript, overstuffed pieces, covered with flowered patterns. Dull prints hung on the walls, but there were no photographs, no trophies, no plaques, no sign that any person, any couple, lived here.
“Where’s Ruth?” I said.
“In the bedroom,” Dressen said, “brushing the little poodle’s hair. Baby. That’s the name of the little poodle.”
“You gonna write a story about O’Malley?” Jerry the Stockbroker said. “That’s what we got you here for.”
“We’re gonna tell you some things,” Red the Florist said.
“Put them in your paper,” Jerry said.
“The car’s downstairs and Charlie wants me to drive,” Herbie, the bald photographer, boasted.
The Granada Hotel stood at an edge of downtown Brooklyn, between the creeping wasteland of Bedford-Stuyvesant and still lively Flatbush Avenue. Across the street rose the Brooklyn Academy of Music, dun-bricked and massive, where Olga Kahn had heard Serge Koussevitzky propel his Bostonians through Sibelius. Now Koussevitzky was gone, dead for more than two years, and the B.S.O. had been passed on to Charles Munch.
“Get this fucking O’Malley,” Jerry ordered, as we crowded into Herbie’s car.
“Show us somethin’,” Red the Florist said. “Charlie will tell ya. All you gotta do is write it.”
Each of these men, a pretender to Dressen’s friendship, was urging him to attack Walter O’Malley, one of the most important men in baseball. Three fight managers were shoving a middleweight into the ring against Rocky Marciano, crying, “Slug him, punish him, deck the bastard, baby.” There was a survival instinct in Dressen, as well as pride and lunatic optimism, and on this one autumn morning he held his tongue. “The guy in Oakland, Brick Laws,” he said. “I got a job with him. I’m gonna manage Oakland next year. O’Malley offered me forty thousand dollars. The deal in Oakland is the minors again, but it’s maybe gonna pay more. I got some attendance bonuses and like that.”
The photographer drove out of downtown Brooklyn to Eastern Parkway, and then to Interboro Parkway, the oldest of New York City’s expressways. The Interboro rolls narrowly from Brooklyn toward Queens, winding among cemeteries. Outside the windows soldiers’ headstones freeze sergeant and private in pe
rfect formation, equal now and tidy in death, except where frostheaves have broken ranks. Elsewhere marble angels look toward no one’s home. Mausoleums, obelisks and smaller stones cramp one against the other until a man remembers death defined as joining the majority.
“You have to keep driving around here?” I said to Herbie the photographer.
“Charlie likes this highway,” Red the Florist said.
“You’re the only reporter in the car,” Jerry the Stockbroker said.
“You oughta be grateful, not complainin’, the story we’re givin’ you,” Red the Florist said.
What an end, I thought. Three years of a man’s life, the wine of press conferences, two pennants, the exultation of two million fans, come down to driving nowhere with strange men, scowling and cursing among gravestones.
“You’ll be all right with another manager, kid,” Dressen said, suddenly. “At least you ain’t no pallbearer. You didn’t like to see me beat. You’ll be all right.”
“I guess.” Dressen punched my knee, and it struck me for the first time and very hard that the team as I had known it was no more; it was broken up now, history with the tombstones. Whoever managed it, and however well, it would not again be this small-eyed, thick-bodied man, who had never read a book and had mixed his Scotch with black cherry soda and had been boundlessly generous to me.
“Two of ‘em called,” Dressen said. “They wanted me to stay. You can guess.”
“Who?”
“Reese, and the best ball player I ever managed, Robi’son.”
“Well, stay, goddamnit.”
“Nah. I got this here deal in Oakland.”
Back at the Tribune, I looked up records for the Oakland franchise. In 1952 the Oakland Oaks had finished seventh. Over the entire season they had drawn 135,784 fans, a good four days of Giant games at Ebbets Field. Charlie’s attendance bonus looked like a promissory note from Willie Sutton.
