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Buy the Book
When Baseball Was Number One
And Ike was President and girls were still over the horizon.
Baseball and Memory: Winning, Losing, and the Remembrance of
Things Past
By Lee
Congdon
(St. Augustine’s Press, 140
pages, $25)
Baseball, the fifties, and young American boys (not to mention millions of American men and more than few women) were made for each other.
For me the dreamy and much-maligned fifties began and were more than half done before girls, college, adults dreams (this was before the sixties when so many young people decided they didn’t want to become adults), and even the local draft board began to complicate my life beyond the power of Willie Mays and Stan Musial to smooth things out. At this simple point in my life, and that of my pals of the time, acquiring a complete set of Topps baseball cards, purchased with lawn-mowing and paper-route money, would excite us almost to the degree a loosened bra-strap would a little later on.
The NFL was in its 34th season in 1953, but hardly anyone during the Eisenhower years was paying much attention. Pro football’s popularity would only take off in the sixties, when it began to seriously challenge baseball for the title of “national pastime.”
College football had its fans in the fifties, but mostly among folks who had gone to college, which certainly didn’t describe the moms and dads in my blue-collar neighborhood in Tampa. I made it to senior high school without knowing how football was played. If any of my pals even had a football, I don’t remember it. I had seen footballs, of course, but had little truck with them. They bounced funny.
The first season of the NBA was 1950, and before the decade was over Red Auerbach and his Boston Celtics were winning championships and inventing interesting things like the fast break with some exceptional athletes with names like Cousy, Sharman, and Russell. But for every American who could pick Bob Cousy out of a lineup, a hundred knew who Ted Williams was and, love him or hate him, followed his on-field exploits.
The only sport other than baseball that claimed a large audience in post-war but pre-hippy America was boxing. First on radio and then on television, Friday night fights on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp) was a popular weekly event.
In those pre-Camelot days baseball was number one on all scorecards. I’m referring, of course, to the less attractive Camelot with all the Harvard grads. (Lancelot may not have existed, but he was still a lot more appealing than the real McGeorge Bundy, and don’t even get me started on Bob McNamara.) If any boy at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Tampa, where I attended 1954-57, had any ambition other than to be a major league baseball player, he kept it to himself.
Retired history professor Lee Congdon takes a break from scholarly books on heavy subjects such as philosophy, east European politics, and on figures like George Kennan and Georg Lukács (neither of whom could likely tell the difference between the hit and run and the straight steal) to produce a short but delightful memoir and historical reflection on baseball and its importance to American history and memory. Readers, especially those who love the Grand Old Game, can be glad. Professor Congdon is one of those rare dons who can write with clarity, grace, and humor. He can even deliver an opinion without packing it around with half a page of caveats and qualifications.
As is the way with professors, Congdon flogs a hypothesis in this book. One about memory, how it’s important to community and our sense of ourselves, and how baseball helps to promote it. I’m not sure Congdon makes his intellectual case, or even states it clearly in this book. But his nostalgic overview of the game, its high and low moments, its cultural importance to his generation, is so charming that readers will forgive him.
Unlike most scholarly works, Congdon doesn’t hesitate to state his baseball and historical crochets. Informed, conservative crochets, which deserve attention, not entirely because they are so consistent with my own.
Congdon takes readers through the game’s many magic moments, from Shoeless Joe Jackson through Reggie Jackson and beyond — Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world,” the autumn day a mediocre pitcher named Larsen was perfect, “The Catch” by Willie Mays, Bill Mazeroski putting an end to the mighty Yankee’s hopes and Casey Stengel’s tenure with the pinstripes in 1960….
Congdon also traces later melancholy times when the First Church of Baseball has been defiled by drugs, outlandish salaries and attendant ticket and concession prices, steroids, the designated hitter, noisy ball yards where fans must endure obnoxious “music” and constant commercial pitches at volume levels OSHA would never allow in industrial spaces. Congdon and I both have a message for the nice lady who used to play the organ between innings: “Come back, Dear. All is forgiven.”
For all these things, baseball on the field remains much the same. The game retains the power to move those of us with the necessary attention span and the ability to attend details it requires to unlock baseball’s considerable subtleties, grace, and manifold pleasures. But attention span is something our quick-cut, techno-world has leeched out of many of us. More and more American youngsters now, who have any time left over from computer games for competitive sports at all, prefer the greater flash and dash of basketball and football.
Baseball lifers like me who are looking down the barrel of our Biblical three score years and ten, or can still see 70 in the rear view mirror (an awkward age), can particularly enjoy Congdon’s treatment of the fifties, baseball’s golden age, and pretty golden in other ways as well.
About the Author
Larry Thornberry is a writer in Tampa.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (30) | Leave a comment
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cuban pete| 8.17.11 @ 9:50AM
During the Fifties, if you lived in Chicago and were Catholic, Notre Dame football was almost as important as baseball.
Alan Brooks| 8.17.11 @ 3:43PM
The '50s was a great decade-- we were not in debt for who knows how many trillions. Mark Steyn says 130 trillion.
Alan Brooks| 8.17.11 @ 3:46PM
...so of course baseball was more important, we didn't have quite as much to worry about 50- 60 years ago.
Occam's Tool| 8.17.11 @ 4:11PM
60 years ago was the 1950s. McCarthyism and The Bomb. I think there was plenty to worry about.
Pecos Pete| 8.17.11 @ 10:52AM
I know you can't mention all of the dudes, but Dizzy Dean on the mound and in the announcers chair was always a delight.
Occam's Tool| 8.17.11 @ 4:10PM
"Those who ain't sayin' ain't ain't eatin'." Dizzy Dean.
Wayne | 8.17.11 @ 11:38AM
Remember when teams had identity. I can name the players on the Giants in the 1960's or the Cubs, and I was an American league fan (White Sox). Minoso was hero, and I loved Banks (lets play two).
But, before we get carried away I also remember the Cubs playing before less that 1000 fans. Games were rarely sell-outs, despite being cheap (75 cents in the bleachers).
Well cuban pete. I remember in the early 60's going to a high school football game (St. Rita vs Lane Tech) that had more than 100,000 fans.
cuban pete| 8.17.11 @ 2:48PM
In 1963 Rita beat Chicago Vocational 42-7 for the city championship at Soldier Field. At that time the Prep Bowl was the big game in Illinois.
While large I don't believe the crowd reached 100,000.
The largest crowd(estimated) ever to see a football game at any level was the 1938 Prep Bowl at Soldier Field when Austin(Public League) beat Leo( Chicago Catholic). The crowd was estimated at 124,000.
My dad was there.
Although a Sox fan, the great thing about the Cubs in the 50's was by early August they were out of it. As a result you could buy a bleacher seat and by the third inning sneak down to the first base box seats and get a close up view of Stan, Gil or Willie.
Those were the days.
Wayne | 8.17.11 @ 3:20PM
Well I was at the game. I remember it taking me over an hour to get to my seat. Since Soldier Field is a giant horseshoe, I had a see about 100 yards past the end zone. Catholic Schools were dominant. I remember the paper reporting that their was over 110,000 people at the game.
cuban pete| 8.17.11 @ 3:41PM
Rita beat Lane Tech 12-8 in 1970 but not in the 60's. I haven't been able to find the attendance for that game but I'll check with my old Catholic league sources. You are correct the Catholic League began to dominate in 1961.
Wayne | 8.17.11 @ 6:16PM
It could have been CVS, but I don't remember Dick Butkus playing. I guess it was a long time ago. We played CVS every year.
cuban pete| 8.17.11 @ 7:34PM
If you played CVS every year, you went to a school in the Red Division-South. Lindbloom, Tilden, Dunbar, some years Calumet or Fenger.
I don't believe Butkus ever made it to a City Championship game. He was a man among boys.
As a member of the local Babe Ruth league All-Star team hit a home run in Comiskey Park.
Occam's Tool| 8.18.11 @ 1:46AM
My dad was a Senior when Butkus was a Freshman. My Dad was a running back for a Chicago H.S., I forget which one. He said Butkus was amazing. Oh, my.
Occam's Tool| 8.17.11 @ 11:46AM
When I was a scrawny 7 year old, Ernie Banks shook my hand at Morrie Mages' sports, and commented to my dad that I had big wrists. If you know that Ernie hit his home runs through his incredible wrist power, you would know what that would man to a 7 year old kid. I have a signed bat by Mr. Cub in a treasured place in my house.
No, they're not the same.
RCV| 8.17.11 @ 2:14PM
I'd love to see it. Ernie Banks was one of my childhood heroes, even though I was a rabid Brooklyn Dodger fan. (My mother turned down my request that my confirmation name be Carl, after Dodger rightfielder Carl Furillo, and I had to take my grandfather's awful moniker, Francis.)
Tiddly| 8.17.11 @ 8:20PM
When I was 9 I sent a letter to Ernie telling him that he was my favorite baseball player. I got a handwritten note from him in return thanking me for the compliment. How many players would do that now?
Occam's Tool| 8.18.11 @ 1:47AM
Like I said, I love that man, and pray for his good health. The nicest athlete I ever met, Mr. Cub. (Don Sutton is also a class act---I worked with his brother once upon a time.)
cuban pete| 8.17.11 @ 2:54PM
OT,
Remember Morrie Mages' Moment of Madness Sales?
Occam's Tool| 8.17.11 @ 4:03PM
Yup! I'm 49. I remember. RCV, if you come to Minneapolis to settle our bet after 2012, I'll be happy to bring the bat to the dinner.
Occam's Tool| 8.17.11 @ 11:47AM
Sorry, "what that would mean."
marcia| 8.17.11 @ 12:23PM
We were far away in a classroom in Pickstown, S.Dak. listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers and Johnny Podres beat the Yankees in the 1955 World Series. Schools actually broadcast the games on the intercom during classes. Learning was suspended for a few hours in October (when God ordained that the World Series should take place.) I can still recite the Dodger lineup, a real team.
Le Cracquere| 8.17.11 @ 12:27PM
As Mr. Thornberry points out, this major sports organization's southern and western limits were the Potomac and Mississippi, respectively. I can't emphasize this enough--that's a BUG, not a feature. It's a relic of an unlamented time when one parochial quadrant of the country was allowed to set the cultural (and political) terms for the nation.
And I'm not convinced it was easier to stock the old MLB with real talent than it is today. Both now and then, the stars were surrounded by journeymen and jobbers, and there's no reason to think the "roster lint" of DiMaggio's era was superior to their contemporary counterparts. What's more, expansion has nearly doubled the number of teams; but integration, population growth and Latin American/Asian expansion has increased the player pool far more than that.
The good news is, the current game has more than enough to populate the lobes of new generations of baseball fans. Let others follow March Madness and MNF--I tell you the truth, they have their reward.
Kilgore Trout| 8.17.11 @ 1:11PM
I grew up in NJ in the 50's (graduated in '58) about 10 miles east of Manhattan and loved the Dodjahs AND the Yanks (Mickey Manhole ruled).
I CANNOT even watch the players of today looking like BUMS with pants flappin around their ankles and crappy beards and drugs etc.
The game no longer exists for me and many others of similar view.
james wilson| 8.17.11 @ 1:35PM
The talent is better now, Ted Williams told us that, and the talent pool is international. Bigger, faster, stronger...often more careless.
It was the top game in town, but it also drew half the fans. Coming from Washington, I can attest to that. The advantage was you could go into the locker rooms, and my dad took me several times.
Al Adab| 8.17.11 @ 4:05PM
Thank you for reminding us that, amidst the political and national turmoil that surrounds us, we can still find enjoyment in the timeless game. Seasons come and go but the game goes on.
Occam's Tool| 8.17.11 @ 4:07PM
You know, the overall quality is probably higher, but I'm not sure about the stars---work ethic matters.
Last superstar in any sport who deserved his salary---truly economically deserved it---was Jordan.
Occam's Tool| 8.17.11 @ 4:09PM
I must say, I think Men at Work by George Will is a great book. My dad liked it, too. RCV, it would probably be the most enjoyable book by a Conservative you will ever read.
sara| 8.17.11 @ 11:27PM
I remember the paper reporting that their was over 110,000 people at the game.
http://www.summer-products.com
http://www.ainibag.com
Mike| 8.17.11 @ 11:28PM
We played CVS every year.
http://www.jerseys-hats-store.com
http://www.honey-gifts.com
Jordan| 8.19.11 @ 4:32AM
As a result you could buy a bleacher seat and by the third inning sneak down to the first base box seats and get a close up view of Stan, Gil or Willie.
http://www.summer-products.com