RECOLLECTIONS
Branch Rickey and I in Brooklyn

Branch Rickey

Baseball was a big deal for me for seven years, from ages 7 through 14. The reason for my avid interest in baseball was due to one person: my cousin Jack.

Jack was about four years older than I was and my idol. Good looking, very good at sports. Of course I looked up to him and, as you do with any idol, I imitated everything about him I could. Jack loved baseball, I loved baseball. Jack would sit in his room listening to the games on the radio and diagram on a special scoring sheet. Soon I learned that system, and I would sit and listen to the game, often in Jack's room, and keep score.

What changed all that was the Brooklyn Dodgers.

My connection to the Dodgers started with my dad, who one day told me he had some tickets to the Dodgers and would I like to go. Would I! That was a great day when I emerged from the black-and-white world of TV baseball, up through the ramp into the stadium itself — and saw GREEN! I got dad to buy me a Dodger hat, pennant and assorted other paraphernalia, and from that time on — until they moved to L.A. — they were my team.

My dad had gotten the tickets from a golfing friend, a New York Supreme Court judge who was on the Dodgers board of directors. When I was about 12, the judge would tell me stories of all the players he'd met and I thought that was extremely cool. He said, "Next time you come to a game, come visit me. I'm usually up in the press box."

Sure enough, the next time I was at Ebbets Field I left my seat and went up to the press box. There was the judge and another fellow named Branch Rickey, who was pretty famous in his own right, as I discovered later. The judge was impressed. Said he didn't know anyone with the smarts to ever find him in the press box. He offered me a seat and I spent the rest of the game with the judge and Branch Rickey, watching the game and listening to the announcers I usually listened to on the television, sitting right next to me talking up a storm and madly shuffling though papers of bios and statistics.

The judge presented me with a baseball signed by all the players. That was the team of Jackie Robinson, PeeWee Reese, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges and lots of other famous Dodgers.

When I was 14, the judge asked me whether I'd like to be the batboy for the Dodgers that coming summer. I thought about it. It was hot in Brooklyn in the summer and this sounded an awful lot like a "summer job," something I had avoided successfully for 14 years. I politely turned the judge down. I remembered that offer several years later and have been slapping myself ever since.

One last Dodgers story. In 1951 my dad took me to the all-time game. At the end of the season the Dodgers and Giants were tie for the National League championship, so they were playing to see who would go to the World Series. The game was all in the Dodgers' favor. As the ninth inning began, my dad wanted to leave and beat the traffic. The guy next to us was a Giants fan and said to stay, that anything could happen.

In the ninth inning, with two outs and two men on base, Bobby Thomson stepped up and hit "the shot heard round the world," winning the game and the pennant for the Giants.

At Ebbets Field the entrance to the player lockers was at the center field wall. The second that Thomson's homer flew into the stands, the players from both teams began to run across the field for the center field door. Cops were standing all around the stands guarding the field, to no avail. The players made it about to second base and were surrounded as the stands emptied of screaming Giant fans, who ran over the cops and onto the field.