For millions of Dodger households that day, the last out of the Dodger half of the fifth inning of the seventh game in 1955 did not simply mean that the game—barely an hour old—was half over. It also meant that Mel Allen’s southern accent and booming baritone was about to be replaced by the flatter, already beloved, Bronx accent of Vin Scully. My parents detested Mel Allen—less because he was a notorious “homer” in his adulatory descriptions of Yankee games than because he was corny. I was used to his relentless hype and more amused than turned off by his folksy demeanor; most of my friends could recite his tobacco and beer spiels for White Owl cigars and Ballantine beer and ale (“Make the three-ring sign and ask the man for Ballantine”).
Allen had two trademark expressions when he did games. By accident early in his career (he had started doing Yankee and Giant home games in 1939), he had described a long fly ball he wasn’t sure was going to be caught or, as it happened, end up a home run: “Going, going … gone!” And after a particularly sterling play, usually by a Yankee, he always exclaimed, “How ’bout that!” He seemed pleasant enough.
But Vin Scully was way beyond pleasant. Astonishingly, on that historic day he was only twenty-seven years old, Junior Gilliam’s age, broadcasting his second World Series, having emerged almost immediately from the shadow of as hard an act to follow as a person could imagine—Red Barber.
Despite their different origins and accents, and very different ages, each was renowned for essentially the same reasons: economical use of language, absence of noisy hype, almost casual tone, and a continuous flow of detailed information communicated in clear English.
Barber had been hired by Larry MacPhail in Cincinnati and went with him to Brooklyn. He achieved iconic status in the 1940s, a trailblazer in the difficult arts of wise understatement and wry wit that more sophisticated listeners in postwar America appreciated. By contrast, Vin Scully had barely had time to learn from the master as the very junior member of his broadcasting team when circumstances thrust him into the national limelight with virtually no warning.
“It was 1953,” he told me when we talked in his booth at Wrigley Field in Chicago, where he had accompanied the Dodgers on a road trip fifty years later, still at the very top of his profession. “Gillette was offering him two hundred dollars a game for the Series, and Red wanted more, and Gillette made it clear that they were not offering a penny more. Red was just not going to do the broadcasts for that amount of money.”
In the Dodgers’ booth that year, the second man at the microphone was another broadcaster with a rich resume, Connie Desmond. If Barber was a father figure to the young Vin Scully, Desmond (out of Toledo, Ohio) was the big brother. However, he also drank heavily, there had been an episode or two on the air, and NBC did not have confidence in him before a national audience for the World Series.
Ever the diplomat as well as the professional, Scully called his colleagues before formally agreeing to join Mel Allen in the booth. He sought the blessing of each and made it clear he was not in such a career hurry that he wanted to proceed without that blessing. Barber and Desmond each graciously told him to do the games; Dodger owner Walter O’Malley took Mel Allen aside before the Series and urged him to “take care of my boy.” Scully went out and drew raves.
He was a recently married man, very close to his parents and sister, and living in New Jersey. On the morning of Game One in 1953, he had a big breakfast, drove to Yankee Stadium, promptly threw up his breakfast, and entered the booth.
Scully is from Yankee territory, the Bronx, but he grew up closer to the Polo Grounds and was a Giants fan. When he was a boy his mom wheeled him around the nearby campus of Fordham University, where it was always hoped he would go to college. As it turned out, he attended Fordham Prep as well.
A decent athlete in school, he developed his passion for broadcasting listening to games, especially college football games, on his family’s large radio that perched atop a four-legged console. Lying on the floor underneath it, he was mesmerized by the sound of the fans. He first used his narrative gifts shouting summaries of what was transpiring to neighborhood kids playing in the alley five floors below his family’s apartment.
The war interrupted his time at Fordham, but after navy service he returned, focused on being sports editor of the college paper and hanging out at a tiny FM radio station that had started up on campus.
In his senior year, he sent job application letters out by the dozen, but the only serious response came from the CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C., whose sports operation was presided over by one of the pioneers in the field, Arch McDonald, who did the Washington Senators’ play-by-play and a daily sports show as well. It was in the evenings when McDonald was stuck at a game in Griffith Stadium that Scully got his opportunities to be on the air. The summer job led to an offer of a real one, but because it was not to begin until the spring of 1950, he was back in New York hoping for temporary work.
His big breaks came from Red Barber, who did CBS work during the college football season. Scully got two assignments, the 1949 Maryland–Boston University and Harvard–Yale games, which in turn led to his really big break. The junior man on the Brooklyn Dodgers’ broadcasting crew was the legendary Ernie Harwell. He had not yet landed in the city that would make him famous, Detroit, but when he took a better offer from the New York Giants over that winter, the job opened up. Barber called Scully to arrange an interview with Branch Rickey, which produced the flimsiest of job offers—spring training with the Dodgers on a month-to-month deal, renewable at the Dodgers’ option. Scully was barely out of college, but he was blessed with a sharp mind and a rich voice and determined to apply the lessons he had first learned lying under the family radio.
“I loved to hear the roar of the crowd,” he told me, “and when I started broadcasting I loved to let the crowd roar without my interference.”
This virtual silence at climactic moments when no words were really necessary has long since become a Scully trademark; that afternoon his trademark reticence would produce a famous concise sentence at the end of the game.
His sparse language and wry wit were always adorned either by a telling or merely delightful nugget of information. In our talk, Scully remembered Game Five of the ’53 Series, a complete game 6–5 victory by the beloved Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine.
“It was Game Five, and the fifth anniversary for Carl and his wife, Betty,” Scully recalled. “The Yankees scored all five of their runs in the fifth inning, and I noticed that the game ended at five-oh-five in the afternoon of October 5. I was determined to get all of those fives into one sentence and somehow I did.”
For the record: “On Carl and Betty Erskine’s fifth wedding anniversary, the Dodgers made it a game of fives, winning Game Five of the World Series on October 5 by a score of 6–5 in a game where the Yankees scored their five runs in the fifth inning before yielding to Brooklyn at five-oh-five in the afternoon of the fifth.”
That, of course, was a head-scratching hint of still another Scully trademark. Whenever someone was at bat with two outs and the count on him ran to two balls and two strikes, the “deuces” were forever “wild.”
Scully also made marvelous use out of the encyclopedic compilations of numbers kept by a genius the Dodgers had also hired, in 1947, to be their “statistician”—the amazing and pioneering Alan Roth. Data is of course only numbers until it is reported and analyzed in understandable fashion. The combination of Roth’s information and Branch Rickey’s leadership produced some important player decisions as the Dodgers evolved into a powerhouse.
After Rickey departed for Pittsburgh, Roth brought his genius, as well as his trivia, to what would become a twenty-plus-year career in broadcasting. With Vin Scully, the combination of his data and the broadcaster’s style and interpretation gave Dodger fans an insight into the game not previously available, even in print.
Scully and Mel Allen could not have been more different in their style and content, but it turned out that they shared an important career connection—with Arch McDonald, whose folksy Arkansan approach to sports fit with the then-sleepy southern town of Washington. Allen had come north from Alabama as Melvin Israel after doing the university’s and Auburn’s football games on a lark after getting both his bachelors and a law degree. He literally walked into CBS in New York and got a job assisting the network’s stars, Robert Trout in news and Ted Husing in sports. Allen could have gone in either direction, but two flukes—nearly an hour ad-libbing through an auto race and then being junior man for the 1938 World Series—sealed his fate.
The following year Allen was teamed with Arch McDonald for baseball, the first step in a plan to anchor the better-known McDonald in New York and send Allen to do the Senators in Washington. The idea was blocked when owner Clark Griffith exercised his local owner’s prerogative to instead hire pitching immortal Walter Johnson for the job. That left McDonald in New York, which he hated and soon left to return to Washington, putting him in position to assist the young Vin Scully a decade later. Allen thus got the top job by this default; during the war years he was in turn assisted by none other than Connie Desmond.
I was of course not even remotely aware of any of this broadcasting history during the seventh game in 1955. In our apartment, Scully’s voice was already a familiar and welcome guest. As he began doing the game, he didn’t reduce the tension level one bit; it simply felt better to have a friendly voice guiding me through the excitement, just as it felt better to look across the room and see my father.
Scully was hardly tested by the Yankee half of the fifth inning. Elston Howard’s fly ball to Junior Gilliam in left field was routine. Despite his well-earned reputation as a dangerous-hitting pitcher, Tommy Byrne struck out for the second time that day. Phil Rizzuto’s ground ball to third was a bit more than routine; it was hit sharply, backing Don Hoak up, but he fielded the ball cleanly and his long throw to Gil Hodges was perfect. Through five innings, the Dodgers had a 1–0 lead, as tentative and tenuous a lead as there is. The feel of the game, as well as its details, more than justified the observation of The New York Times’ Arthur Daley that “the Brooks never had a firm hold on it.”
At that point, they had but two hits, both solid, off Byrne, who had walked two and struck out two. Podres had walked just one Yankee, while striking out three. The four Yankee hits included the bouncer by McDougald that Rizzuto slid into and the bloop by Berra that had dropped in the Gilliam-Snider confusion. Neither team had a clear advantage.
It was also of absolutely no consequence to me that the Dodgers at the end of the fifth inning were flirting with something achieved only once before in the seventy-plus years of their franchise’s tough history—a lead in the deciding game of a World Series. In Game Seven in 1947, they had scored first at Yankee Stadium but had blown their lead in the third inning and fallen behind in the fourth. In their other seventh game, in 1952, they had tied the contest after five innings but fell behind in the sixth.
The true analogy at that point, unfortunately, was with Game Six in 1952, when the Dodgers could have won the Series in Brooklyn. The team took a one-run lead into the seventh inning only to lose it and the game under bizarre (even for the Dodgers) circumstances.
Vin Scully told me that the older players were acutely conscious of recent hideous, tragic Dodger history; it motivated them, but it also preyed on their minds. It did so for good reason; there had never been any recent history like it in sports. In the nine seasons after World War II ended, the Dodgers had lost the chance to win the National League pennant on the final day of the season three times and had come back from the World Series empty-handed four times. The other two years—the Boston Braves’ pennant-winning season in 1948 (the Dodgers finished third behind St. Louis, eight games back) and the Giants’ World Championship season in 1954 (the Dodgers finished five games back in second) seemed as much emotional respites as off-years.
I was steeped in this lore. My father had been as patient but persistent in my baseball education as he was with school and music. One thing—playing catch, learning to swing a bat—led to others, above all talking and reading. My parents doted on me, but what I remember most vividly is talking with them, not being a little kid around them. I had a cowboy outfit, complete with a cap pistol, and I had a shovel and pail for the sandbox, but I only have memories of playing in the parks of Tudor City with other little boys, not being indulged by my parents in our apartment; the only games we ever owned were checkers and chess, plus a deck of cards for Hearts. I have no memories of baby talk, only conversations in which I felt more part of the household than its junior member. Perhaps the fact that the roles in our household were scrambled by contemporary standards was part of it, but I grew up in an atmosphere where discussion and argument took precedence over obedience; I was encouraged to have no compunction about talking back as long as I understood that I then had to stand my ground against two people who used persuasion far more than power.
By the time I had started school, our family had a weekend ritual, interrupted only after I had started singing professionally and there was a Saturday matinee at the opera. Sundays were reserved for the laundry; my mother washed it in our bathtub, while my father and I squeezed out the water and hung clothes on a line strung across our postage stamp-sized balcony—two people could barely stand on it. But Saturdays were special. While my mother grocery-shopped, my father and I took the crosstown bus on 42nd Street to the massive temple of my young life, the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue.
My reading had quickly become voracious. I would get a book to take home on my library card, and more often than not as a treat my father would lead me to the periodical rooms to read old baseball stories in the newspapers and magazines. He—and my mother, too—would embellish the stories with their memories, shared around the card table while we ate or on my cherished trips with them to Ebbets Field. Years later, my mother told me that we babbled among ourselves so incessantly that people sometimes looked at us funny in the stands, on the street, or in the subway. I never noticed; I was in heaven, because on those occasions we were sharing good times, the focus for a change wasn’t just on me, and they never treated me like a kid except when I did stupid things.
Even then, their disapproval was offbeat as well as corrective. For some reason, I recall developing the bad habit in a tiny living room of kicking off my slippers instead of taking them off in the morning. My father had gently reproached me for this without impact until one day I launched a slipper into a long, high arc; as if by black magic it descended right into the cup of Postum he was drinking. I have few memories of him yelling at me; this time, he looked at me with an exasperated disappointment that was ten times as reproving. Saying nothing, he produced his yellow pad, on which I was commanded to write a paragraph explaining why kicking off your slippers was wrong. I could not have been more than seven.
Sometimes the learning experience was in the opposite direction. One of my rare treats in those early years was a Sunday excursion to one of the grand ice-cream parlors of the day, Schrafft’s, which had an outlet near Grand Central Station. A vanilla ice-cream soda was my usual, while my father favored milk shakes, the plasma of ulcer patients. Among my bad habits was a tendency to lean over the soda, sipping through my straw without holding the tall glass. One day, my father had just finished a lengthy declamation on the dangers of tipping the tall glass over this way when his elbow knocked his own glass into his lap. The waitress and I laughed until we cried—with him.
My only resentment, nurtured in private, was that I detested being shown off in any way to my parents’ friends. I loved learning, but I hated performing because it made me feel more like a freak than a person. The one exception involved my father more than me. Whenever he was able to work and completed a freelance piece, he would take me with him to a bar on Third Avenue a couple of blocks away from our building to celebrate and, I suspect, to show off. It was one of the writers’ shrines of that era—Tim Costello’s. Tim and his brother, Joe, attracted newspapermen, authors, playwrights, poets. The walls were decorated with drawings by James Thurber. I don’t remember, but the family legend was that before I was five I had had whiskey spilled on me by Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan.
My mother and father had hung out there before the war, when he was just beginning to establish himself. He knew both Costellos well, and there was always a ginger ale for me with a cocktail cherry in it after one of them hoisted me up on the long bar, where there was often another kid or two as well. My mother feigned disapproval, but all my memories of her in that famous joint include smiles and laughter (pride, I suspect) as she nursed her one manhattan; after my father got sick, even a shot of whiskey caused him intense pain, so we tended to share ginger ales. The noise was continuous as the writers shouted to one another about their “stuff” and these strange people they called editors. I don’t recall any Yankee fans, but there was always plenty of Dodger talk, every word of which I soaked up like a sponge.
Through this somewhat unusual educational process, long before the 1955 season, I was an expert on everything from the evolution of the Dodgers from town teams after the Civil War, the maturation period under a onetime odd-jobs guy named Charles Ebbets and the construction of the cozy ballpark that bore his name, the disappointments of 1916 and 1920, the slow descent into the horrid but lovable Daffy Dodgers, and then the climb back to excellence followed by the amazing string of Almosts after the war.
This mixture of possibility, bad breaks, perseverance, disappointment, the nobility of effort, was hardly unique, but it certainly fit my family history. The Dodgers were made for us, as they were for so many millions of working families in those days.
After the fifth inning of the seventh game ended, I had no basis for believing what the scoreboard undeniably had recorded. Instead of the fact that the Dodgers were ahead 1–0 and Johnny Podres was pitching marvelously, the only thing that mattered to me was that the Yankees had come within an eyelash of scoring three of their first five times at bat. There was nothing beyond more of the same to look forward to—the atmosphere in my apartment was not rah-rah; it was quiet and intense, as established by my father’s example. What was unspoken between us was both the fear and the expectation of disaster.
It could not have been otherwise. It was not superstition or a vague sense of foreboding that produced our mood. It was historical fact or, more comprehensively, a string of historical facts. We sat in silence because based on everything we knew in excruciating detail about the Brooklyn Dodgers, the game on the television set was anomalous to that point; it made no sense at all. Each at-bat by each player was simply an opportunity for something to go horribly wrong—again.
It is useless to say simply that the Dodgers lost real chances to win championships many times just before and for ten years after the war. The point is that each of those tales from 1941 through 1954 added bricks to the foundation of the team’s unique lore and that the details of each (tragic, tragic-comic, maddening, infuriating, heartbreaking) are what gave the saga its meaning and its force. The Dodger fan’s cry after every one of these Almosts—Wait’ll Next Year—was not a cheery, uplifting chant; it was a fist waved with cockeyed optimism and defiance at adversity itself. The Dodgers themselves kept coming back; so did my parents and the millions of people who didn’t have to study metaphors to know in their bones what the team represented. Any one of the stories of their setbacks would be astonishing by itself; strung together over such a short period, the stories provide a sense of what it took to keep trying and excelling.
There were twenty years of experience with the Dodgers in that living room that afternoon in 1955; each of those years taught us that a 1–0 lead was not only inconsequential but also most likely a cruel hoax.