by Roger Kahn
He seemed enduring as granite in Ebbets Field. It shocked me to see him playing in Los Angeles. Without the old wall, he had lost his native backdrop. He ranged an Antony without the Capitoline, a gladiator in a cardboard coliseum.
I had not kept close track of Furillo when Newsweek magazine dispatched me in 1959 to Los Angeles, where the Dodgers and White Sox thrashed through a World Series. In a crowded press row, I found myself beside the Hollywood columnist for the Herald Tribune, who had been ordered to cover the Dodger clubhouse and complained periodically, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I haven’t seen any baseball since I was thirteen, and I never liked it.”
Furillo was no longer starting, but that day he pinch-hit a single with the bases loaded. The ball scooted up the middle, hopping narrowly over the shortstop’s glove. It was not an old-time Furillo hit, but it won the game. (And the Dodgers went on and won the Series.) Some ninety thousand people cheered, and I told the columnist, “If you think that’s something, you should have seen the homer Furillo hit off Allie Reynolds.”
The columnist frowned. Near dusk I saw him alone in the press row, crumpled yellow paper scattered about his typewriter. He seemed near tears. “I can’t write anything,"he said. “I don’t know these people, so I thought I’d write down quotes and look at their backs and get the numbers and check the program later and see who it was who’d said what. But”—terror touched his face—“they take off their clothes in the dressing room. They weren’t wearing shirts. Who is the black-haired, handsome guy who talks in short sentences?”
That is how I came to write three sports stories for an infirm Herald Tribune under the by-line of a gossip columnist. It was fun trying my hand again and the columnist provided ob-bligatos of Hollywood chatter, plus door-to-door transportation in the Mercedes-Benz he said had been given to him by Lauren Bacall. But among the shine of walnut dashboards, the glitter of pool parties, I thought, what a hard way for stolid Carl to finish: pinch-hitting in a strange town and being interviewed by people who were surprised to discover that a baseball was stitched with red yarn.
That next spring the Dodgers fired Furillo. Newspapers told a fragmented story of lawsuits, and Furillo faded. Episodic publicity greeted his reappearance as part owner of a delicatessen in Queens, but then he sold his interest and no one seemed to know where he had moved. Several ball clubs offered me addresses, but Furillo no longer lived at any. The telephone company had no record of him in New York City. Someone said he had gone south. Someone said he was living out west. Someone else was certain he had remained in Queens, under another name. I looked for months and mailed half a dozen letters, but I had all but given up when the telephone rang at 9:30 of a Friday morning and a large voice boomed my name.
“Who’s this?”
“Carl Furillo.”
“Where in the world are you?”
“Downtown. The family’s back where I come from, but I’m working in the city during the week.”
“Nobody knows that.”
“You want to be bothered a hundred times a week? But I got your letters and I been thinking and it’s okay. But look, when you come down, do me one favor. Put it down right. I ain’t greedy. I ain’t nuts. I only wanted what I had coming. I read my fucking contract so many times I got that part memorized by heart.” Then he recited the lines that precede this chapter.
By the time Furillo called, winter had come. One tower of the World Trade Center had been topped and sheathed. It stood 1,350 feet, the tallest building on earth, an aluminum hulk against the sky. The other tower still showed girders. Wind was slamming across the Hudson, blowing bits of debris from unfinished floors. Four thousand men had been working for two years, and the sprawling site had acquired the scarred desolation that comes with construction or with aerial bombardment. The sun gleamed chilly silver. It was 11 degrees and getting colder.
A broad stairway led below grade to a cement floor that was wet and patched with ice. Enough daylight entered the vast basement so that wall signs were clear. “TO HELL WITH GOODELL.” “VOTE BUCKLEY.” “VOTE CONSERVATIVE.” This was hard-hat country.
“Otis is over there,” someone said, pointing toward a clutch of unpainted wood cabins. “Furillo? The ball player? He dresses in that one.”
Inside, a workman standing under a bare bulb said Furillo would be down in a minute. “See that paper bag on that bench? You know he’s gonna be here. That’s his lunch.”
The workman’s name was Chester; Chester Yanoodi. “Carl stays with me out on the island,” Chester said. “He’s moved his family back to Pennsylvania. He’s in good shape. Real good.” Chester was a compact man, with leathery skin and eyeglasses. “I’ve played some ball myself. On the Grumman Aircraft softball team. I could hit a few.”
Furillo entered. “Ho,” he called for “hello.” Then, “Cold mother out there, huh?” He wore baggy brown pants and layers of clothing. His hair was still black, but he looked heavier. He peeled off a windbreaker and walked in front of an electric heater, beating his arms and blowing on his hands. “Ho,” he said again. Then, “Hey, what do you think of the building? It’s something, huh? I’m still learning about elevator doors, but I’m not bad. Do I look fatter? I go around 220. Preacher called me one time, and when I told him, he said he was ready to wrestle. Him, that skinny guy, Preacher weighs 223. How do you like that?”
According to a spokesman for the Port of New York Authority, each tower of the World Trade Center requires a thousand elevator doors. “What do you do, Carl,” I said, “when all the doors are in and the job is through?”
“Then I’m through.”
“Meaning?”
“Back to Pennsylvania. Hunt. Fish. You remember my boy, Butch? He’s gonna be a trooper. We’ll be all right where we came from. I like to hunt and fish.”
“And clam,” Chester Yanoodi said. “He’s a helluva clam-digger.”
“I’m bitter about baseball,” Furillo said.
“He could break some necks,” Yanoodi said.
“Lousy bastards,” Furillo said.
He sat on a bench and opened a sandwich and offered me half. Chester handed me a Thermos cup full of coffee. Three other workmen ate silently along the opposite wall, under another naked bulb. Furillo was one of them in the work clothes, but an interview reminded them that he was set apart, too. They knew it. They sat respectful. Furillo began to tell what had happened.
He never won the batting championship again after 1953, but he had six more good years. In 1955 he hit 26 homers and batted .314. In 1958, when the Dodgers sank to seventh at Los Angeles, he was still the solid man, with a .290 average and 18 homers. By then he was fighting pain. Under the beating of fifteen thousand innings and five thousand sprints to first base, his legs began to cramp. He had to miss days and later weeks. Professionalism and toughness drove him, but in 1959, the year of the World Series ground single, he played in the outfield only twenty-five times.
During the first week of the following season, Furillo was running out a ground ball, hurrying across first base, when his left foot found a soft spot on the floor of the Los Angeles Coliseum. Something tore in the calf. Pain crippled him.
Buzzy Bavasi wanted change. The Dodgers of 1959 were ribbed by Brooklyn veterans. Nineteen-sixty was a time to turn over personnel. A team must change constantly if it is to win. The calf injury convinced Bavasi that Furillo’s glories were history. He summoned Furillo to his office at the Statler Hilton Hotel and asked, “What do you think of Frank Howard, Carl?”
“I don’t think he hits the curve good.”
“But he has promise.”
“You don’t hit the curve, you don’t belong here.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Coming along, but slow.”
“That Howard’s gonna be something,” Bavasi said.
Bavasi was bearing a message down Byzantine ways. He was suggesting that Frank Howard had arrived, and that Furillo, like Carl Erskine, should make way gracefully to the j
udgment of years. Retire. Then, perhaps, the Dodgers would find him a job.
Fighting for his career and the last days of his youth, Furillo beat off that conclusion. Three days later, as the Dodgers prepared to fly to San Francisco, an official telephoned and said, “Carl, don’t bother to pack.” Furillo decided that Bavasi was giving him more time to rest his leg. But after the series Bavasi himself called and said, “I’m sorry to have to inform you that you’ve been given an unconditional release.”
Furillo cursed and hung up. Then he studied his contract. He drove through thirty-two arid paragraphs until he found the clause he wanted. He was hurt, unable to play, and the Dodgers had released him. It didn’t matter how slick Bavasi was or how much money O’Malley had. They couldn’t release him when he was hurt. He took out a pencil and began to calculate.
His salary for 1960 was to be $33,000. He had drawn $12,000. That meant the Dodgers were welshing on $21,000. “You know, Fern,” he said, “I think I’m gonna do something. I got an idea.”
Within an hour reporters came unannounced to the house he rented in Long Beach. A Dodger official had tipped them to the story. “What do you think about being released?” one sportswriter said.
“I don’t like it.”
“Are you hurt bad?”
“I can’t play, and that means they can’t release me.” Furillo explained the official contract succinctly.
“What are you going to do?”
“You asked me so I got to tell you. I’m gonna talk to two guys I know.”
“What two guys?”
“You asked me so I got to tell you. Two guys who’re lawyers.”
Furillo had not intended to reveal his scheme, but he felt that principle forced him to speak. When a man is released, he has to face reporters, and when he faces reporters, he has to answer what he is asked. He was surprised the next day to see his name and projected lawsuit in headlines.
Bavasi’s secretary called and asked him to stop in again. “Soon as I take care of something,” Furillo said.
He found Bavasi enraged. “Of all the dumb dago things to do. I was going to find a spot for you. Now I can’t. You’ve made trouble for you and me and everybody. What a rock.”
“Hey, Buzz,” Furillo said. “I got a message for you. It’s from the clubhouse man.”
“What’s that?”
“In my pocket here.” Furillo reached into his jacket and withdrew a subpoena.
Bavasi maintains that he “would really have looked after the guy, but not at $33,000.” He speaks of sending Furillo to Spokane and developing him into a coach. O’Malley shakes his head and says a man has to learn to accept things as they are. Both feel Furillo broke a code. In the extralegal world of baseball, a dissatisfied player may protest to the Commissioner, who is supposed to look upon club owners and their chattels without partiality, but is hired and fired by the owners. Turning to the courts is considered nihilistic. No one in baseball, or in the law, knows just when a judge will decide that the official player’s contract is itself invalid. The people who run baseball regard anyone exposing them to such risk as indecent. “I’m not sure what would have happened with Furillo,” Bavasi said, “but there were options.” Hiring lawyers foreclosed every option but one. There would be battle.
While the legal proceeding dragged, one of Walter O’Malley’s representatives asked if Carl would settle for a job as counselor in the Dodgertown Camp for Boys at Vero Beach. Furillo moved toward court and the following spring wrote letters to eighteen major league teams. He would pinch-hit or play; he had plenty left. Nobody hired him. “It’s gotta be because I’m hurt,” he said. “That damn injury is still messing me up.” He wanted to sue for two years, instead of one.
In May of 1961, a year after the injury, Furillo met with Ford Frick, the Commissioner, and Paul Porter, Frick’s attorney. According to Furillo, he collected the $21,000 due for 1960, and collected nothing for 1961.
If one thinks of blacklist in terms of the old McCarthyism when the three television networks in concert refused to employ writers or actors with a so-called radical past, then Carl Furillo was not blacklisted. As far as anyone can learn, the owners of the eighteen major league clubs operating in 1961 did not collectively refuse to hire him. What they did was react in a patterned way. Here was one more old star who wanted to pinch-hit and coach. He could have qualified marginally, but once he sued, people in baseball’s conformist ambiance decided he was a “Bolshevik.” Hiring him at thirty-nine was not worth the potential trouble. Walter O’Malley was no Borgia, plotting to bar Furillo from the game. Only Furillo’s decision to hire lawyers was at play. The existential result was identical.
Furillo returned to Reading, investigated several businesses and liked none. In 1963 he resettled in Queens. Then he bought a half interest in a small delicatessen and restaurant on Thirty-second Avenue under the shadow of a Consolidated Edison gas tank. At Furillo and Totto’s cheeses hung from the ceiling. Neighborhood people bought prosciutto and Italian sausage. Children loitered and in the afternoon you could hear Furillo’s voice booming. “Hey, kid. The candy’s for buying not for touching.” Late at night, in the restaurant, you could order hero sandwiches prepared by Furillo himself.
The trouble, said Fern, was the hours. Carl had to get up early and he had to work late. “You hardly see the family any more,” Fern said.
“I got to make a living.”
After seven years, Furillo sold his share in the store and moved his family back to Stony Creek Mills, on the north side of Reading, where he was born. Then he took his job with Otis. He wanted to think several years ahead. He would work hard until he was fifty, spending only weekends with the family. But then, with the money he made in construction and with his pension, he would be set. There would be nothing but time for hunting and fishing, for Fern and the boys. That was how, he explained, he had come to be wearing a yellow hard hat and these rough clothes in this barren workingman’s shack.
“You’ve missed some damn nice years,” I said.
“They really screwed him,” pronounced Chester Yanoodi.
“Aah,” Furillo said. “It ain’t been bad.”
He reached back in memory beyond the bitter time. He could always play ball, he said. He could throw, and his brother Nick encouraged him to play and, hell, he said, when he got through with grade school what were the jobs? Picking in an apple orchard for $5 a week. Helping in a woolen mill for $15. But the family kept him close, and it wasn’t till he was eighteen and his mother died that he could go off to be a professional. He spent a year at Pocomoke City on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and hit .319. A season after, he played at Reading under Fresco Thompson, who watched him throw, gasped and encouraged him to pitch. “The experiment,” Fresco said, “ended within three games. He could certainly throw, but who knew where? He broke four ribs and two wrists before we decided as an act of public safety to make him spend all his time in the outfield.”
He came to Brooklyn in 1946, the vanguard of Branch Rickey’s youth movement, and moved into center field between Dixie Walker and Pete Reiser. Once he spoke to Reiser about a radio program he enjoyed. “Hey,” Reiser shouted. “This guy thinks ‘The Dorothy and Dick Show’ is ‘The Dorothy Dix Show.’ What a rock. Hiya, Rock.” With Furillo’s hard body and deliberate ways, ball players thought the cruel nickname fit. Furillo felt like an outsider because in many ways he was made to feel that way.
“I started having trouble with Durocher the year after that,” he said in the Otis shack. “A guy’s no good, he’s no good. He didn’t want to play me against righthanders, and Mike Gaven asked how I liked being platooned. He asked. I had to tell. I didn’t like it. He wrote the story. Durocher said, ‘Hey, kid. You trying to run my team?’ Why didn’t he get on Gaven?”
“It’s a good thing for Durocher Carl can’t get his hands on him today,” Chester said.
“Forget it,” Furillo said.
In 1949 Durocher was managing the Giants, but before on
e game in Brooklyn he poked his head into the Dodger clubhouse. Furillo was sitting on a black equipment trunk. “Hey,” Durocher shouted. “We had you skipping rope with the lefthander last night. Tonight we got the righthander. You’ll be ducking.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Furillo said.
A minute later Herman Franks looked in. “In your ear,” he cried. “Tonight we get you, dago.”
Chester broke into the story. “Dago? They called you ‘dago’ to your face?”
“All the time,” Furillo said. Then, kindly to the old Grumman softball player, “Things are different in the big leagues.”
That night the righthander, Sheldon Jones, hit Furillo with a pitch. The next afternoon, Jones visited the hospital where Furillo was recovering from a concussion. “I’m sorry, Carl,” Jones said. “It was a curve.”
“First fucking curve that never bent,” Furillo said.
“I just threw what Durocher told me to,” Jones said.
“I know,” Furillo said. “I ain’t blaming you.” He promised himself to get even. It was that 1949 promise that flared at the Polo Grounds when Furillo charged to tackle Durocher and the entire Giant ball club in 1953.
“Six times I got hit in the head,” Furillo said. “Maybe I ducked slow, but they was always gunning for me. So I had a right to gun for the guy that started it. Right?”
“You gunned em yourself,” I said. “How many did you throw out from right field?”
“They all the time write eight. They count seven I caught rounding the bag. I threw behind them. There’s only one guy I really threw out. A pitcher. Mel Queen. He hit a liner at me. I grabbed it on a hop and my throw beat him. Write the truth. I threw out one guy.”
“About the right-field wall,” I said.
“I knew you’d ask that.” His dark face lit.
“Well, how did you get to play it like that?”
“I worked, that’s fucking how. I’d be out early and study it. Preacher and Billy Cox hit fungoes for me. Now as the ball goes out you sight it, like you were sighting down a gun barrel. Except you got to imagine where it’s going. Is it gonna hit above the cement? Then you run like hell toward the wall, because it’s gonna drop dead. Is it gonna hit the cement? Then run like hell to the infield. It’s gonna come shooting out. Now you’re gonna ask me about where the scoreboard came out and the angles were crazy. I worked. I worked every angle in the fucking wall. I’d take that sight line and know just where it would go. I wasn’t afraid to work,”
