Easter 1947.
A FEW YEARS AGO, anxious to enrich his predominantly male cast with a passionate female fan, filmmaker Ken Burns interviewed me for his documentary on baseball. I talked about my childhood love for the Brooklyn Dodgers, my desolation when they moved to California, and my becoming a Red Sox fan—a rather ominous progression.
The reaction was startling. Almost everywhere, as I traveled the lecture circuit, I encountered people less anxious to hear my tales of Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, or the Roosevelts than they were to share memories of those wondrous days when baseball almost ruled the world. The enthusiastic intensity of their recollections revealed that they were remembering not simply the history of a team or a group of athletes but their own history, and especially their youthful days.
In response, I set out to write a story of my own coming of age as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, a story that would be peopled not by leaders of the nation, but by Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Sandy Amoros, and the infamous Bobby Thomson.
As I set to work, however, I saw that my early involvement with baseball was an indistinguishable part of my childhood in Rockville Centre, Long Island. Thinking about the Dodgers summoned recollections of my family, my neighborhood, my village, and the evolution of my own sensibilities. I could not talk about my experience as a fan without also telling the story of my life as a young girl reaching adolescence in that deceptively tranquil decade of the nineteen fifties.
From something as simple as the small red scorebook in which I inscribed the narrative of a ball game, I saw the inception of what has become my life’s work as a historian. My early friendships, the adventures which took place in my home and on my block, in the butcher shop and the soda fountain, in my church and my school, revealed a microcosm of a time and a way of life shared by many who knew nothing of the Dodgers or even of baseball. These recollections unveiled my own qualities as a young girl, the experiences, the habits of thought and fantasy, the feelings which defined me as a child and which were decisively to shape my life and work as an adult. Thus, my intention to write my baseball story was transformed into something different. I would write my own history of growing up in the fifties—when my neighbors formed an extended family, when television was young, when the street was our common playground, when our lives seemed free from worry, until one remembered the sweeping fears of polio, communist subversion, and the atomic bomb that hung over our childhood days like low-lying clouds.
I soon discovered, however, that my own memory was not equal to my expanding ambition. Some of my most vivid private recollections of people and events seemed ambiguous and fragmentary when subjected to the necessities of public narrative. If I were to be faithful to my tale, it would be necessary to summon to my own history the tools I had acquired in investigating the history of others. I would look for evidence, not simply to confirm my own memory, but to stimulate it and to provide a larger context for my childhood adventures. Thus I sought out the companions of my youth, finding almost everyone who lived on my block, people I hadn’t seen for three or four decades. I explored the streets and shops in which I had spent my days, searched the Rockville Centre archives, and read the local newspapers from the fifties. From all this—from my own memory and the extended memory of others, from old pamphlets, documents, yearbooks, and picture albums—I have tried to re-create the life of a young girl growing up in a very special time and circumstance, and set on a path which led inexorably to a place she could not even imagine.