When Shea opened in April of 1964, it was considered a part of the World’s Fair. On programs and on posters you’d see it called “Shea Stadium at the New York World’s Fair.” I remember that there was an ad in one of the Mets’ programs or scorecards which said that the Fair was just a “dinosaur’s throw” from the stadium. The ad was for the Sinclair Oil Company, whose Fair exhibit featured models of dinosaurs. The stadium was right next to the Fair. You could walk or take a shuttle bus. Shea was a part of the Fair that would fulfill the promise that the future would be better than the past. The Fair would close after two years, but Shea would go into the future with us. Shea looked like the Fair. I know that this is hard for younger fans to believe because in the last years of its life the stadium had the architectural equivalent of 1980s hair. I mean, I loved it and all, but the exceptionally deep Mets blue and the elaborate stylishness of the neon sculptures of ballplayers, and the photo montages of the Championship years, and all the Pepsi and Budweiser stuff that had been stuck onto the scoreboard, made Shea look very different from the way it had looked in its youth. When it opened, Shea wasn’t blue. It was a kind of sand color, a pinkish tan. The first new stadium built in over thirty years, it didn’t look like the older stadiums. It didn’t have any wood or brick or columns. It didn’t look like the sort of place in which you might as well be watching a horse race. Shea looked monumental across a parking lot, yet it made no reference to the monumental architecture of the past. Immense and relentlessly modern and round, it looked like a flying saucer that had just landed. I suppose, in a way, it also looked as if it could take off at a moment’s notice. In 1964, there was this idea that it was a good thing to have nothing to do with the past, to look as if you were a visitor from outer space. The main decoration on the exterior of Shea were squiggly blue and orange aluminum panels suspended on thin, almost invisible cables. The panels had the same audacity of color you saw everywhere at the Fair. They looked like the cozy futuristic Howard Johnsons that were scattered all across the country at the time. The panels were part of something that was happening right at that moment in history, on television, in movies, and everywhere. Everything that had always been in black-and-white was suddenly in color. The blue and orange panels at Shea were like the brilliant animated opening credit sequences you saw at the beginning of movies in 1964 and 1965. They were asymmetrical and irregular. They looked as if they were about to change their shape, or change from one thing into another. Since you could hardly see the cables to which they were attached, they appeared to be floating, and perhaps rising. I always thought they looked like the bubbles I loved to watch as they rose inside a glass of Coca Cola. The panels made Shea look cool, hip, modern, and friendly. Contributing to the sense of Shea’s colorful hipness was the fact that the seats in the stadium were a different color in each level. The Field Boxes were a soft yellow, the Loge was bright orange, the Mezzanine was a pretty dark blue, and the Upper Deck was old-fashioned baseball park green. Stadium seats were normally only one color at that time. But Shea was like a rainbow with an arc of 300 degrees. The scoreboard too was striking. Seen from behind, it was sleek, sweeping, and white, like something on the Jetsons, or like the TWA terminal at Kennedy airport. It looked like a big white vampire with a big square head and an immense white cloak. From the front, it offered state of the art information with little electric lights on a dark display. It didn’t talk or make noise, but it gave you what you needed, scores and stats, welcomes to civic groups, birthday wishes, warnings not to throw objects on the field. It would also tell you proudly when you were listening to Jane Jarvis, Shea’s Queen of Melody, on the Thomas Organ. At the top of the scoreboard, on the right, was a big black clock with white hands. It was a real clock that said Longines on it. Time wasn’t digitized yet. There were ads on the scoreboard but they didn’t overwhelm it the way the Pepsi-Budweiser blotches did in the stadium’s final years. There was a Rheingold logo at the top and a Rheingold ad at the bottom. I loved Rheingold and I had already decided that it would be “my beer” when I was an adult. From the lovely waltz jingle of the commercials, I gathered that adults had specific beers. My parents didn’t drink much beer so I hadn’t known that. I liked the idea in the jingle and the ads that Rheingold was “extra dry.” I didn’t understand what this meant but I liked the way it sounded and I liked the name Rheingold a lot too. It made the beer sound as if it was a golden liquid that somehow came from a winding river with romantic castles along the side of it. At some point in the sixties, the Rheingold ad at the bottom of the scoreboard acquired a picture of a glass stein with an enormous head of foam. The Rheingold ads and commercials always had these glass steins with beads of moisture on the side of them and enormous white foamy heads. People who argue that ads for alcoholic beverages makes young people want to try them should understand that they do in fact have this effect. I imagined that it would be wonderful to drink such a beverage. I could imagine how wonderful the foam must taste. The ad on the scoreboard said “The Ten-Minute Head, Haven’t You Timed It Yet?” It was as if there was something wrong with you if you didn’t time your beer head to see how long it would take to flatten out. Did you have to wait for it to be gone before you drank your beer? I hoped not. It looked delicious. It looked like foamy melting ice cream that rose up out of something golden. I couldn’t wait to grow up and drink my beer, Rheingold, the dry beer, the beer of the New York Mets. The feeling of old Shea was not just created by architecture and ads. There was also this funky Mets thing that everyone was into. There was a universal sense that we were rooting for a last place team that had little hope of being anything but a last place team for quite a while yet. So to compensate for our team’s mediocrity, we had to be the most enthusiastic and colorful fans in baseball. The franchise had to have something that made it distinctive in a good way. As what Casey Stengel had called “the New Breed,” we Mets fans played the part for all it was worth. We channeled the legendary nuttiness of Dodger fans and the stubbornness of Giant fans. We screamed and cheered for players who did not deserve the extravagance of our affection. We hung our scruffy banners from the balconies of the immaculate new ballpark and on windy days they would look like laundry flapping on a clothesline. With the noisy crowd and the flapping sheets, you could almost imagine hearing the cries of vendors with their pushcarts. New York’s working class, abandoned by the Dodgers and the Giants, moved into the new palace of a stadium as if it was meant for them. It was. We were New York too. Our team didn’t win as much as the Yankees. But the Mets had better, more passionate fans. We liked how we were supposed to be so over the top. We liked being nutty, but warm and generous. We liked rooting for something that people in other places couldn’t see the point of. We liked being New Yorkers. The way memory actually works, I can’t tell you for sure when I first went to a game at Shea. I know that I celebrated my tenth birthday with my family at the Fan Appreciation Day Doubleheader that was played against Cincinnati on Sunday, September 27, 1964. I remember Charlie Smith getting three hits and Tracy Stallard losing his twentieth game of the season. It was at that part of the old Mets’ seasons when the statistics would start getting really ugly, when we would pass 100 losses and some of the pitchers would get their twentieth losses. I have a sense that we went to a game earlier than that but I can’t remember which one it was and neither can my mother who is the only person I can ask. I remember that on the first game I went to at Shea, I looked through the binoculars my father bought in Tokyo when he was fighting in Korea and saw Casey Stengel on the dugout bench, his head in his hand, asleep. I thought I remembered Sandy Koufax on the mound at that game. I do remember Sandy Koufax on the mound. I remember him very vividly. But the only appearance Koufax would have made at Shea in 1964 was a Thursday night game and we wouldn’t have gone to a Thursday night game. I see Koufax in the daylight. I see his intensity and his lean face and black stubble through the binoculars. But the game I am remembering has to have been his Saturday afternoon appearance on June 12, 1965. My memories of Shea, in the early years, like your memories too, I would guess, are not neatly ordered in a list of box scores. They are a soup. Things come floating by. They sink down, they surface. More is there than you see at first, but things aren’t connected. I remember what I felt, I remember impressions, but I don’t remember who fouled out to end the ballgame. We always brought food to the game and we never parked in the parking lot. My parents could have afforded to buy food at the stadium and they could have afforded to park their car in the parking lot, but as a matter of economic principle, they never did. They had grown up poor in Brooklyn in the Thirties and had gone to Ebbetts Field plenty of times and this was the way they liked their baseball. You could spend money on other things, but with baseball, the idea was just to be there with everybody else. If it mattered so much to you to see the players close up, you could stay home and watch the game on TV. We always parked our car for free under the Whitestone Expressway, carrying the hamper with food that they wouldn’t let you take in now. We never bought anything from the vendors but I remember how excited I always was to see them, shouting with their boxes. I wanted to be a vendor someday. I also would have loved to have had a hot dog from a vendor, but I never asked for one, and I never believed my mother who told me that they weren’t as good as the hot dogs we were used to from places like Katz’s and Nathan’s at Coney Island. They looked so good. Sure they were expensive. Maybe they weren’t as good as Katz’s as Nathan’s, but I bet they tasted as good. I bet there was nothing that tasted as good as a hot dog you ate in the stands at a ballgame. We always sat in the Upper Deck. Those were good enough seats and we were a family of five. The players were far away, but you could still see what they were doing. You couldn’t see their faces, but you could kind of make out that the players were the people that the numbers on their backs indicated. Ballplayers still wore those old fashioned uniforms with the knickers-type pants and the socks that were stirrups. They were just like my little league uniforms. And so when you saw them playing on the green grass and on the smooth infield, they looked like the very idea of baseball players. That silhouette, that form, could belong to nothing but a ballplayer playing their game far away. And it could be 1920 or it could be 1935 or it could be 1964. You were watching baseball. Going to a Mets game was pleasure from the moment we drove out of our driveway to the moment we drove back into it. Even a boring game was wonderful. It was hard to explain why going to the stadium was so much more fun than listening to the game on the radio or watching it on TV, because at the ballpark, you often didn’t have a clear understanding of what was going on. Why was that an error? What are they taking so much time to talk about on the field? What did this guy do the last time he came up? But when you were at the game, you were in the place where it was happening. You saw that it was real, that it was not rehearsed or scripted. It was a joy and a festival and it didn’t need any special hype to make you feel that way. The scoreboard was enough, the organ was enough, the giant crowd in the enormous bowl was enough. It was enough to be in the open air, in the famous place, with all these people you would probably never see again but with whom you had an intense and eternal bond. It is still like this for me. It is still the same. I don’t know what it must be like to be the fan of a team that sells out all of its seats for every game. They didn’t have teams like that in the Sixties. The stadiums were always big enough for everybody. Anybody could go to a major league baseball game whenever they wanted to for not all that much money. How can this be preserved in the future? This can’t be lost. This shouldn’t be lost. For all of its costs and all of its inconveniences, there is nothing like being at a ballgame. It offers a high that it is impossible to get from any other source. We spend enough time in our living rooms. We spend enough time in our cars. We spend enough time at our computers. We need to go places. We need to be open to the sky and to be lifted up on the sound of so many other voices. We need to know what it feels like to be there, to be in the place where it is, where our senses can be filled and even flooded by the things that we love that are happening. Shea will always be the 1960s to me, the decade in which my spirit took shape. It was part of my original conception of the world, my original idea of perfect fun. And since I no longer think that the great big beautiful tomorrow is shining at the end of every day, and since I have a somewhat more complicated understanding of what life and love entail, when Shea is gone all I will have left of my original conception of the world is my love of the Mets. There will be nothing big and physical. There will only be this living fossil inside my soul. I will miss Shea so much. Shea was cool. Shea was kind of old and rickety in the end. But in the beginning it was a glamorous present that promised a spectacular future. It was the Gateway to the World of Tomorrow. It was in Technicolor and in Cinerama. ©Dana Brand 2009 |
