The Ebbets Field Knothole: BROOKLYN, NEW YORK , 1939-1961
By Donald J. Millus
Copyright, 1992, 1997 All Rights Reserved
Copies for individual use are not only authorized but welcome: Enjoy!
FOREWORD:
Between Two Wars, 1939-1961
If you lived in Brooklyn between The War and Vietnam, you can add your own memories to these. The summer I was born in Samaritan Hospital on Park Slope, Germany sent its troops into Poland for a quick victory; the summer I left, we sent more advisors to Southeast Asia for what we also hoped would be a quick victory. Between those two painful wars, Brooklyn was good to many of us. If you missed the experience, the odds are that a relative or friend can get started with what follows and tell you many more stories about a good place to be, for us...or for them...then.
INTRODUCTION: Ebbets Field Really Did Have a Knot Hole
My father had an accent, my mother didn't, at least not one that I would recognize until I moved away from Brooklyn. My oldest brother was fighting with the U.S. Army Infantry in Europe before I was in the first grade. The subway, Brighton Line, Cortelyou Road stop, local, was only a few blocks away. I could ride my bicycle to the Parade Grounds to play baseball, or walk home from Ebbets Field after a World Series game. We always had a car, just one, to go fishing at Canarsie Pier or swimming at Riis Park after Coney Island got too crowded. The first one I remembered was a 1930-something Packard that smelled of paints and turpentine my father carried to his contracting jobs.
The worst things the cops had to worry about was confiscating stickball bats. No A.C.L.U. to help us against unreasonable seizure in those days. If Junior DeMartino (all my spellings are from memory, as are all the names, and my research depends on the same source, memory, as that of the family members who might recall the twenties and thirties as they sat on the porch in the summer and drank a Trommer's beer or had a dish of Breyer's ice cream freshly dipped at Agovino's candy store) whose real name was Donald, American name like mine even if Junior was Italian on both sides--his older brother, Sonny, last I heard was a New York City Sanitation Department worker--even if Junior did hit me over the right eye with a broomstick stickball bat as he was trying to hit a "Spauldeen" two sewers, the equivalent of driving the ball on a par-4 to the 150-yard marker although no one we knew played golf and although somehow I got an old five wood and a golf ball and used the top of a pencil and its worn out eraser-holder as a tee and sliced my first golf ball at the Parade Grounds, my God, did it go far--too bad I could hardly hit a baseball out of the infield in C.Y.O. ball--and I didn't play a round of golf until a quarter of a century later, but even if Junior--did he end up as a high-ranking detective in the New York P.D.?--did accidentally smash me with that broomstick bat over my eye because I wasn't paying attention and he was taking a big swing, Doctor Fry could bandage it up, no ambulance, at his home office, no Blue Cross card or proof of coverage needed and I would be in that house 35 years later, the day of a grammar school reunion, with his daughter, now Sister Joan, the nun who taught music--but hesitated to ask to see her family's old house: "It's sad how the new owners have let it go"--no 911, no ambulance, no lawsuits, but Junior took off running when he saw my blood--I bet he never ran away as a N.Y. cop--and hid in the loft of what used to be a stable, but was then, in 1947 or so, a garage just behind the Chinese laundry that was behind Padnis's Pharmacy where I also had been bandaged up once, again no charge, for getting my fingers caught in the spring of a wind-up toy, again no lawsuit.
Why was it so good growing up in Brooklyn?
Was it the economy after World War II that allowed any hard working father, (just the father, mothers stayed home--maybe that was it?) whether he was painter, policeman, garbageman or insurance salesman, to support a family, rent or own a house, send the children to parochial school, no tuition but contribute to the Sunday and special collections, or to the public schools, and a free ride through City College or Brooklyn College if they could pass the entrance exam?
Was it that we were sheltered from the problems of the poor blacks and later the Puerto Ricans by white politicians who wanted peace in their time?
Was it that we were riding the euphoria of having won a real war against tough, industrialized people whose soldiers may have been just as committed as ours, not Arabs with lots of money but no winning tradition? Was it that the last hurrah of industrial-factory-wheat-and-corn-and-soy-bean-farming America was being played, plus Acts III-V of "America Loves Its Cars" and we born-at-the-end-of-the-thirties-or-early-forties were to be the beneficiaries? And Brooklyn was still a good place to be, although already we knew the suburbs were taking shape, but some of us had tree-lined streets and the kids in New Jersey could drive earlier, but we could still buy a beer at age eighteen, and, hell, if your dad owned a car and trusted you, you were lucky.
OK, I'm getting ahead of myself. The point of this memorial is that Brooklyn was the almost perfect place to grow up in for many of us and that there were neighborhoods that had already gone through the admixture that would later be the suburbs. You didn't have to be part of an ethnic ghetto to enjoy growing up in Brooklyn. It was mostly great, even though we did drop rocks on subway trains and see the guy, early twenties at most, from one of the single-family homes in the neighborhood go running up the street, a mile and a half breathless to the Leader movie theater on Coney Island Avenue to where his brother had just been shotgunned to death. Yes, there were no blacks in the neighborhood, no race problems that in later years might have appeared in spray paint on walls, no bi-racial committees, no Puerto Ricans, nor Asians, and only forty years later did I find out that there was a Lebanese family on the next block of Westminster Road, but folks really knew only the people in the next few houses, unless you were a kid and then we grouped by age even around the corner to Argyll Road and Dorchester and to the playground at P.S. 139 and to Holy Innocents Grammar School and the Parade Grounds and once we went off to high school the neighborhood wasn't really important except for the girls you dated.
And there really was a knothole at Ebbets Field.
We didn't all live in tenements and say "dese" and "dose" and "Dem" and "earl" for oil or "Oisken" for Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine. We weren't all Irish, Italian, or Jewish, and I was shocked even at age eleven, when one of the Italian kids said no Jews allowed in our club, no girls either. Hey, Mike Messer was a good punchball player and a decent guy and Freddie Lieberman could throw like a boy and, besides, she and I were the only Giant baseball fans on the block, football then being a newspaper big deal over the annual Army-Navy game. The no-Jews club failed, never getting beyond the talk stage.
We all moved away from Westminster Road and when I went back one weekend in the early 1990's for the 75th anniversary of the founding of Holy Innocents grammar school, an apartment house had replaced my old 3-story wood house, and it already looked old, run down, and dreary. The white fireman at the Cortelyou Road station warned me about the wallet sticking out of my jogging pants. (I told him it was just a notebook with two twenties in it so if I was mugged, the mugger wouldn't feel cheated.)
The street was quiet on that delicious October morning when I returned. A a few residents, mostly black and Hispanic, were going off to work. I don't recall lots of people working Saturdays in the late 40's and 50's, except that I had to scrub the bathroom floors before I was old enough to go collecting rents with my father, and there was still time to get to Ebbets Field and buy a $1.25 general admission ticket or just hang around, first for autographs, Don Newcombe and Willard Marshall, Dodger pitcher and Giant right fielder come to mind, or wait across Bedford Avenue for a batting practice homerun, one guy almost killing himself in front of a car as he tripped and fell flat straight going for a ball hit out over the high screen on top of the concrete wall.
But what about the knothole?
It wasn't really a knothole, despite fat, eye-glassed Happy Felton who arranged for groups--Cub Scouts, Altar Boys, Boys Clubs--to get in free on summer weekday afternoons, when the Dodgers never sold out, even with just a 32,000-seat stadium because they had to play teams like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati that were always losers despite Ralph Kiner and Ewell "The Whip" Blackwell.
I discovered the hole in the wall while hanging out during a game. There was a huge gate there, all metal or part concrete, I'm not sure which, but the reason I say concrete is that part of it near the lower hinge seemed chipped away. The only time I remember it being open was for Holy Name rallies when the men and boys of each Catholic Church paraded into Ebbets Field behind parish banners. They may have opened it for the Cleveland Browns' band when their team came to Brooklyn to crush the Dodgers in football. But, somehow, the gate had a hole near the hinge, and if a kid knelt down, only one at a time and in a very vulnerable position, although I didn't lock my Columbia balloon tire bicycle while I did it, but it was, even then, humbling to kneel and scrounge for a look from dead center field, past Snider; past second base with Pee Wee Reese at short and Jackie Robinson at second, and who on the mound, Newcombe or Roe? , and Roy Campanella, and the ump and Yankee in the batter's box if it was the World Series but you didn't know who was up, except the first time though the lineup when the batter was announced by Tex Rickard on the public address system.
Perhaps this book is like the view from center field: limited focus, easy to look at only for a short time, perhaps not costing me anything because I mostly want to talk about the best moments, for the only time I would look through that knothole was when I knew there was something to see, a game in progress, on a sunny day in summer or fall when I could ride my bicycle four or five miles to the ballpark, players in the field of vision, not all of whom I could identify---then or now.
What follows are my knothole memories of growing up in Brooklyn.