Read Online Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin - Free Book Online

unpretentious clowns, whose fans were seen as scruffy bluecollar workers who spoke with bad diction. The Giants, owned since 1919 by the same family, the Stonehams, were the conservative team whose followers consisted of small businessmen who watched calmly from the stands dressed in shirts and ties, their identity somewhat blurred, caught, as they were, between the Yankee “haves” and the Dodger “have-nots.”

    Elaine Lubar and me posing after a pony ride.
Below
: For all of us, the love of baseball was personal and familiar. We spent hours arguing about, among other things, who was the better catcher: steady Dodger Roy Campanella (
right
) or short-armed swarthy Yankee Yogi Berra (
left
).

    To me, however, each team was signified by a member of my small community. The Giants
were
my parents’ friends the Goldschmidts, the Rickards down the street, and, most of all, Max Kropf and Joe Schmitt, the butchers around the corner at the Bryn Mawr Meat Market. Loading me down with huge shinbones for my small cocker spaniel, Frosty, they would mock my Dodgers. I would pretend to be angry, but the truth was I loved going into their shop, the feel of the sawdust under my feet as I moved from the muggy August heat into the cooling air of their enormous refrigerator with sides of beef hanging from the ceiling. Most of all, I loved the attention I received, especially when they called me “Ragmop” in honor of my unruly reddishblond hair. These Giant fans were not dressed in ties and jackets, but wore white aprons, smeared with blood and marrow. Although I tried not to stare, my eyes were often drawn to the rounded stubs of the two fingers Max had cut off while slicing meat. When he caught me looking, hewould hold up his hand as if the wound were a badge of honor. “See, Ragmop, this is what happens if you want to be a butcher.”
    The Yankees were represented by the Friedles, and especially Elaine, who was as devoted to her team as I was to the Dodgers. Since the two teams were in different leagues, our rivalry was muted during the summer months, only to peak again during those frequent Octobers when the Dodgers and the Yankees met in the World Series. She could not understand my idolatry of Jackie Robinson, while I, in turn, heaped scorn on her admiration for the shrill, wiry Billy Martin, the Yankee second baseman known for his quick fists and timely hitting. She would frequently take out her scrapbook of Billy Martin clippings to prove her point—how many hits, his latest batting average, his exploits in the field. How she could compare the tiny, pugnacious Martin to the noble Robinson defied my comprehension. Her enthusiasms and knowledge seemed all the more remarkable since her father, also a Yankee fan, did not encourage her love of baseball, taking her brother, Gary, to games and leaving her at home with the claim that she could never sit through an entire game. Finally, at the age of eight, she exploded in a tantrum of outraged anger, and he agreed to take her, choosing a doubleheader to prove his point. I can still see her look of delight and triumph when she returned to tell me she had loved every minute, and had demanded they stay until the last out of the extra-inning nightcap.
    The Yankees also had fervent followers in the Lubars and the Barthas, who lived across the street. Elaine (“Lainie”) Lubar’s birthday was the day after mine, and her mother would host a joint birthday party to spare my mother the clamorous assemblage of our friends. Only by dint of their cabana at Lido Beach, a symbol of affluenceon our block, did the Lubars fit the typical image of the Yankee fan. When Lainie and I went to the beach together, I would race from the car to their family cabana—little more than a concrete hut with striped awnings and deck chairs, but to me, an oasis—where soft drinks were stacked in the refrigerator, and we could sit together for lunch, take a shower after swimming, and put on dry clothes to avoid