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Chapter One
When I was six, my father gave me a bright red scorebook that opened my heart to the game
of baseball. After dinner on long summer nights, he would sit beside me in our small
enclosed porch to hear my account of that day's Brooklyn Dodger game. Night after night he
taught me the odd collection of symbols, numbers, and letters that enable a baseball lover
to record every action of the game. Our score sheets had blank boxes in which we could
draw our own slanted lines in the form of a diamond as we followed players around the
bases. Wherever the baserunner's progress stopped, the line stopped. He instructed me to
fill in the unused boxes at the end of each inning with an elaborate checkerboard design
which made it absolutely clear who had been the last to bat and who would lead off the
next inning. By the time I had mastered the art of scorekeeping, a lasting bond had been
forged among my father, baseball, and me.
All through the summer of 1949, my first summer as a fan, I spent my afternoons sitting
cross-legged before the squat Philco radio which stood as a permanent fixture on our porch
in Rockville Centre, on the South Shore of Long Island, New York. With my scorebook spread
before me, I attended Dodger games through the courtly voice of Dodger announcer Red
Barber. As he announced the lineup, I carefully printed each player's name in a column on
the left side of my sheet. Then, using the standard system my father had taught me, which
assigned a number to each position in the field, starting with a "1" for the
pitcher and ending with a "9" for the right fielder, I recorded every play. I
found it difficult at times to sit still. As the Dodgers came to bat, I would walk around
the room, talking to the players as if they were standing in front of me. At critical
junctures, I tried to make a bargain, whispering and cajoling while Pee Wee Reese or Duke
Snider stepped into the batter's box. "Please, please, get a hit. If you get a hit
now, I'll make my bed every day for a week." Sometimes, when the score was close and
the opposing team at bat with men on base, I was too agitated to listen. Asking my mother
to keep notes, I left the house for a walk around the block, hoping that when I returned
the enemy threat would be over, and once again we'd be up at bat. Mostly, however, I
stayed at my post, diligently recording each inning so that, when my father returned from
his job as bank examiner for the State of New York, I could re-create for him the game he
had missed.
When my father came home from the city, he would change from his three-piece suit into
long pants and a short-sleeved sport shirt, and come downstairs for the ritual Manhattan
cocktail with my mother. Then my parents would summon me for dinner from my play on the
street outside our house. All through dinner I had to restrain myself from telling him
about the day's game, waiting for the special time to come when we would sit together on
the couch, my scorebook on my lap.
"Well, did anything interesting happen today?" he would begin. And even before
the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play,
and almost every pitch, of that afternoon's contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder
if, at the close of a day's work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious.
For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I
commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an
early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of
storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as
my father did.
Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, my father, was a short man who appeared much larger on
account of his erect bearing, broad chest, and thick neck. He had a ruddy Irish
complexion, and his green eyes flashed with humor and vitality. When he smiled his entire
face was transformed, radiating enthusiasm and friendliness. He called me
"Bubbles," a pet name he had chosen, he told me, because I seemed to enjoy so
many things. Anxious to confirm his description, I refused to let my enthusiasm wane, even
when I grew tired or grumpy. Thus excitement about things became a habit, a part of my
personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the
enjoyment itself.
These nightly recountings of the Dodgers' progress provided my first lessons in the
narrative art. From the scorebook, with its tight squares of neatly arranged symbols, I
could unfold the tale of an entire game and tell a story that seemed to last almost as
long as the game itself. At first, I was unable to resist the temptation to skip ahead to
an important play in later innings. At times, I grew so excited about a Dodger victory
that I blurted out the final score before I had hardly begun. But as I became more
experienced in my storytelling, I learned to build a dramatic story with a beginning,
middle, and end. Slowly, I learned that if I could recount the game, one batter at a time,
inning by inning, without divulging the outcome, I could keep the suspense and my father's
interest alive until the very last pitch. Sometimes I pretended that I was the great Red
Barber himself, allowing my voice to swell when reporting a home run, quieting to a
whisper when the action grew tense, injecting tidbits about the players into my reports.
At critical moments, I would jump from the couch to illustrate a ball that turned foul at
the last moment or a dropped fly that was scored as an error.
"How many hits did Roy Campanella get?" my dad would ask. Tracing my finger
across the horizontal line that represented Campanella's at bats that day, I would count.
"One, two, three. Three hits, a single, a double, and another single." "How
many strikeouts for Don Newcombe?" It was easy. I would count the Ks. "One, two
. . . eight. He had eight strikeouts." Then he'd ask me more subtle questions about
different plays -- whether a strikeout was called or swinging, whether the double play was
around the horn, whether the single that won the game was hit to left or right. If I had
scored carefully, using the elaborate system he had taught me, I would know the answers.
My father pointed to the second inning, where Jackie Robinson had hit a single and then
stolen second. There was excitement in his voice. "See, it's all here. While Robinson
was dancing off second, he rattled the pitcher so badly that the next two guys walked to
load the bases. That's the impact Robinson makes, game after game. Isn't he
something?" His smile at such moments inspired me to take my responsibility
seriously.
Sometimes, a particular play would trigger in my father a memory of a similar situation in
a game when he was young, and he would tell me stories about the Dodgers when he was a boy
growing up in Brooklyn. His vivid tales featured strange heroes such as Casey Stengel,
Zack Wheat, and Jimmy Johnston. Though it was hard at first to imagine that the Casey
Stengel I knew, the manager of the Yankees, with his colorful language and hilarious
antics, was the same man as the Dodger outfielder who hit an inside-the-park home run at
the first game ever played at Ebbets Field, my father so skillfully stitched together the
past and the present that I felt as if I were living in different time zones. If I closed
my eyes, I imagined I was at Ebbets Field in the 1920s for that celebrated game when
Dodger right fielder Babe Herman hit a double with the bases loaded, and through a series
of mishaps on the base paths, three Dodgers ended up at third base at the same time. And I
was sitting by my father's side, five years before I was born, when the lights were turned
on for the first time at Ebbets Field, the crowd gasping and then cheering as the summer
night was transformed into startling day.
Excerpted from NO ORDINARY TIME © Copyright 2001 by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Reprinted with permission by Touchstone Books. All rights reserved.
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