Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

A couple of weeks after my first birthday, my parents’ baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, did something they would only do once.  They beat the Yankees to win the World Series.  My father, an intern, was at work.  My mother was alone with me in an apartment at 163^rd street and Riverside Drive.  When the game ended, she couldn’t stand the silence, there in the middle of Giants and Yankee country.  She called her brother in Flatbush and asked him to hold the telephone receiver out the window so that she could listen to Brooklyn. 

Obviously I don’t remember this, but I sure wish I did.  And I wish that I had been in a position to help my mother celebrate what was a once in a lifetime event.  My mother turns 80 next week.  I would really be grateful if she could see her team beat the Yankees in the Series one more time.

My mother is the most dedicated baseball fan I know.  She remembers going to her first baseball game over 70 years ago, with her older cousin Naty.  Ebbets Field, she remembers, “was just a place in our neighborhood.”  My mother grew up at 823 President Street, at the corner of Seventh Avenue.  In what is now, I think, an optometrist’s shop, my grandparents had a “candy store,” called Thomashow Brothers from 1913 to 1960.  You could get a soda in the shop, or ice cream, your newspaper, a comic, a pack of cigarettes, a roll of lifesavers, etc. and you could, during the summer, always hear the Dodgers game on a radio.  In the late fifties, I used to sit in the phone booth to the right as you came into the store and I’d watch all the people.  My most vivid memory is of the time when the phone rang and I had to jump out of the booth in terror.  I can still bring up images of what I watched from that phone booth.  I remember men in hats and women with bright red lips.  I remember my grandmother in a grey jacket, solemnly making ice cream sodas for pimply teenagers with too much Brylcream in their hair.  I’m glad I have these memories.  It makes me feel a part of old-time Brooklyn, which I always think of as the soil from which the New York Mets have sprung.

You could take the trolley from Grand Army Plaza to Ebbets Field.  Brooklyn used to have trolleys.  In fact, that’s how the Dodgers got their name.  “Trolley-dodgers” were what they called Brooklyn street-urchins around 1900.  But since you had to walk a few blocks to get to Grand Army Plaza from Seventh Avenue, and Ebbets Field was not that much further, it was not considered to be worth the nickel it cost to take the trolley to the stadium.  So my mother used to walk to see a baseball game.  She remembers how cozy, she says, the stadium felt.  She says that Ebbets field was like a circus.  She loved the band that walked around the stands playing commentary (like “Three Blind Mice” when the umpires made a bad call).  Her favorite player as a kid was Cookie Lavagetto and she remembers the lady who sat in the stands and screamed and held up signs about being crazily in love with him.  Later her favorite player was Dixie Walker, “the People’s Cherce,” as he was called in the papers, though she was saddened when he was one of those who wrote the letter asking Branch Rickey not to let Jackie Robinson play.  Before Robinson came in the late ‘40s, the Dodgers were generally a pretty dismal team.  I asked my mother if she minded this and she said “Of course not.  We didn’t care if they were good.  They were the Dodgers.”  I asked her what it felt like when the Dodgers went from very bad to very good.  She said, “You know what it was like.  It was just like the Mets.”  During the great years, her favorite player was Roy Campanella, and she remembers how devastated she was when he was in the accident that crippled him.  She also remembers how devastated she was when the team left her to move to Los Angeles.  She said that only the coming of the Mets made it possible for her to get over it. 

She loves the Mets.  She watches every game.  Talk to any old Dodger fan.  It’s one team in their mind.  One team that represents the scrappiness of old New York life, one team that represents the highs and lows of life as it is actually lived.  She asks me who my favorite Mets have been and I tell her Seaver, Koosman, Hernandez, Strawberry, and Piazza.  She says, you see, “those are the good ones.  I like the good ones too, but I also like the other ones.”  I say I like the other ones too and I ask her who her favorite Mets are.  She tells me Mookie and Hubie.  To her, I guess, these are the heirs to Cookie and Dixie.  I don’t think it’s just the funny nicknames.  I think what she likes is the guys who are “The People’s Cherce,”  guys who come through in really special moments and who are not necessarily great or even good all the time.  I’m not exactly sure why she feels this way, but she does. 

I’ve been to a lot of ballgames with my mother.  She gets very emotional at them.  We used to go to Shea as a family on Mother’s Day when my mother and sisters would get these little make-up kits from Maybelline.  My mother never went to any games with her parents.  They were immigrants who could not understand why everyone in my mothers’ generation were so entranced by this American game that was so obviously a waste of precious time.  They thought that watching baseball was like playing cards.  But they were missing the point.  All of my relatives in my mothers’ generation became die-hard baseball fans.  The ones who lived in the Bronx even became die-hard Yankee fans.   I realize that baseball must have been one of the first things that let us in.  Here was this American thing that everybody could love without qualification, that everybody could love alongside everyone else.  Sure lots of different people could live side by side in New York, eating their own foods in their own houses, going to their own different churches and synagogues and mosques, living their own different senses of the world.  But baseball gave us a sense of what it was like for all of us to feel exactly the same about something.  No matter where you came from, you felt the same thing as everybody else when Carl Furillo did something, or Gil Hodges, or Jackie Robinson.  The importance baseball had in making Americans all feel like Americans probably can’t be overstated.  When my mother asked her brother to hold the phone out the window in 1955, what she wanted to hear was the voice of all of Brooklyn. 

My mom doesn’t walk very well.  But I really want to convince her to go to one last game at Shea.  And I’d really like to go to a game with her at Citifield because I want to get her impression of how it is like and unlike Ebbets Field.  The Dodgers and the Mets have been an important part of her life and I guess one good thing I’ll say about Citifield (which I still think should have 8000 more seats) is that for me, it brings my mother’s baseball life around in a kind of circle.  I imagine this little girl walking down that big broad avenue between Prospect Park and the Botanic Gardens in the 1930s.  I remember my family seeing the big new stadium right by the cool World’s Fair  in 1964.  Baseball gives us a certain relation to time, and to place.  We’re all Americans now in my family.  We’re here in this one place.  And we’re still moving through time, watching and caring about the Mets. 

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.