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

the site in 1912, when Dodger owner Charles Ebbets pushed a shovel into the ground to begin the excavation. And when the park opened a year later, he was in the bleachers watching the first official game, against the Philadelphia Phillies. He had seen the Dodgers win their first two pennants in1916 and 1920, only to lose to the Red Sox and the Indians. He had sustained his love affair with “dem Bums” through the frustrating period of the thirties, when the Dodgers were stuck at the bottom of their division, into the happier era of the forties, when under General Manager Branch Rickey they began to look like a championship team. And now my own pilgrimage was about to begin.
    The marble rotunda at the entrance to the shrine looked like a train station in a dream, with dozens of gilded ticket windows scattered around the floor. The floor tiles were embellished with baseball stitches, and in the center of the domed ceiling hung an elaborate chandelier composed of a dozen baseball bats. As we started through a tunneled ramp into the stadium, my father told me that I was about to see the most beautiful sight in the world. Just as he finished speaking, there it was: the reddish-brown diamond, the impossibly green grass, the stands so tightly packed with people that not a single empty seat could be seen. I reached over instinctively to hold my father’s hand as we wended our way to seats between home plate and first base, which, like the thousands of seats in this tiny, comfortable park, were so close to the playing field that we could hear what the ballplayers said to one another as they ran onto the field and could watch their individual gestures and mannerisms as they loosened up in the on-deck circle. There, come to earth, were the heroes of my imagination, Snider and Robinson and the powerful-looking Don Newcombe; and there were the villains—the “hated New York Giants,” an epithet that was to us a single word—Monte Irvin, Sheldon Jones, and the turncoat Leo Durocher.

    Below:
The 1949 Dodgers. What a storied lineup the Dodgers had in the postwar seasons: Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, and Carl Erskine.
Top right:
Some of the distinguishing characteristics of Ebbets Field included the Schaefer beer sign and Abe Stark’s curious advertisement (top right of the photograph).
Bottom right:
Catcher Roy Campanella was the second African American to join the Dodgers after Jackie Robinson and 1949 rookie of the year pitcher Don Newcombe was the third.

    As the game got under way, my father proceeded to point out to me all the distinguishing features of the park: the uneven right-field wall with the scoreboard in the middle and the Schaefer beer sign on the top, where the “h” would light up for a hit and the “e” for an error; the curious advertisement for Abe Stark’s clothing store, “Hit sign, Win suit,” which earned Stark such visibility that he was later elected borough president of Brooklyn; the presence of Hilda Chester, a large woman in a print dress repeatedly clanging two cowbells to support the Dodgers and to irritate the opposition; and the arrival of the SymPhony, a ragtag band formed by a group of rabid fans whose comic accompaniment had become an institution atDodger games. When they disagreed with an umpire’s call, the little band played “Three Blind Mice.” When a strikeout victim from the opposition headed back to the dugout, they played “The Worms Crawl In, the Worms Crawl Out,” punctuated by a loud thump on the bass drum as the player sat down on the bench. And when an enemy pitcher was taken out of the game for a reliever, the band serenaded his walk from the mound with “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.” As opposing teams grew increasingly irate at these antics, a sense of camaraderie grew among Dodger fans that made the experience of going to Ebbets Field unforgettable.
    I was witness to a