Fenway Flashback
By Harvey Frommer
The
glory days are back at the Fens as the 2018 season heads down the home stretch.
There is a lot of excitement about the real possibility of another world
championship for the Sox. Royal and loyal rooters, though, still have in their
memory bank images of a sad long ago time when life at Fenway Park was very
different from what it is today.
This
was the opening day lineup on April 19th as the new decade of the
sixties began at Fenway Park.
Don
Buddin ss
Pete
Runnels 2b
Frank
Malzone 3b
Gene
Stephens rf
Ted
Williams lf
Bobby
Thomson cf
Ron
Jackson 1b
Haywood
Sullivan c
Tom
Brewer p
It
was 58 degrees at game time. Playing before the Yankees of Roger Maris, Mickey
Mantle, Bobby Richardson, Elston Howard, Bill Skowron, Tony Kubek and company,
the Red Sox disappointed the Fenway faithful, losing 8-4. Roger Maris slugged
two homers for the New Yorkers.
BOB SULLIVAN: I grew up in Chelmsford,
Massachusetts in the 50s and early 60s. My early games on TV from Fenway had
everything to do with Curt Gowdy. I can
to this day regale one with the Narragansett Jingle. Games on the radio from
Fenway were as resonant to me as going to the ballpark. My grandfather used to
sit on the back porch in Lowell, Mass in his Mount Vernon Street home. I
remember his cigar smoke and sitting on his lap and listening to the Red
Sox.
I
remember coming home one night with my brother from catching crappies, coming
into the house, Dad sitting on the couch.
“Hey, come here and listen to this.”
Home run call:
CARL LOVEJOY: We’d park in the same area where
Boston University fraternities are now.
We would walk past the wooden cart with the old wagon wheel and a guy who was
the salesman with an apron and a hat, sort of a bender’s hat, the change maker
on his belt.
You’d
hear the crack of the bat as you were buying peanuts and wanting to get
inside to see batting practice, hoping to catch that foul ball.
I loved it when the foul ball would come
down the screen and everybody would, “whoooop!”
and the bat boy would catch it.
Going into a public men’s room for the
first time was to be intimidated. The urinals were troughs. And there were all
these men and boys lined up.
HARRY BAULD: Fenway was a place that you could go to the
same way you went to the movies. I paid
50 cents to sit in right field. The ushers were all those incredibly
florid-faced old guys. They’d dust the seat for you. I never did give them a tip. We were working
class kids. It was hard enough for us to scrape up the 50 cents
admission.
On July 22nd,
1960 Ted Williams
homered in a 6-4 Sox win over Cleveland. In the seventh inning he stole second
base to become the first Major Leaguer
to steal bases in four straight decades.
BOB SULLIVAN: Dad wanted my brother Kevin
and me to see Williams play before he retired, so he planned a big day. We were
going to go in early and we were going to come back relatively late.
We
drove down in the Oldsmobile with my brother and I on the back couch in
the days before seat belts and my mom sitting up front. I’m sure it took an
hour and a quarter. We parked under the Common. We took a taxi up, the first taxi we had
ever taken in our lives.
Fenway was such a dungeon down underneath that
you came out of the darkness and into the light. This was like, oh my goodness, it was like
sending you to heaven. It was like a
religion. Ted Williams. Fenway Park. I,
of course, was a young Williams fan. And
Dad was a World War II veteran, a Master Sergeant, and he was a Williams
devotee. There’s a myth now that all of
the Boston fanship booed Williams. He was a prickly character. But it was the sportswriters who had problems
with him, personal problems, that they took out on him in the pages of the
newspapers.
He
played hard. The fans in left-field would heckle him and he’d spit and all the
rest of it, but mostly the fans loved the guy.
And Dad, as a veteran was eternally devoted to this guy. His military
background, his patriotism, his heroism.
We sat behind first base. It was just some game in August. There was no one in the park; they had given
up on the team for every good reason.
Afterwards, we got a taxi and Dad took us
to Bailey’s for enormous ice cream sundaes, served in silver cups with gooey,
dripping marshmallow.
Falling asleep on the back couch of the
Oldsmobile, curled up back there with my brother, it was just great.
On
the 25th of September Casey Stengel clinched his 10th pennant in a
dozen seasons as manager of the New York Yankees as Ralph Terry edged Boston
4-3.
“I drove into the
ballpark,” Curt Gowdy recalled,” parked the car, went into the clubhouse, and
Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse guy, said, 'Gowdy, Gowdy come here, this is the
Kid's last game ever.'
'What do you mean? We
have a series in New York this weekend.'
'Mr. Yawkey told him
to take the last two games off and go fishing. This is his last game. You have
to promise me you won't mention it to anyone.'
"I said, 'I
promise I won't.'"
BOB KEANEY: I was a Lynn, Mass kid who loved Ted. I sat with my friend Bruce
Jackson on the third base side, where John Updike sat collecting notes for his
prize-winning essay on Ted's farewell game.
Ted warmed up with a pre-game catch near
the dugout with Willie Tasby and I loved that because Tasby lived in Lynn, too,
ironically, Williams Avenue.
FRANK MALZONE: It was a cold day, the
wind was blowing northeast in from right field, the kind of day you say nobody
is going to hit one out.
September 28th, 1960, Red Sox vs. Orioles. Overcast, dank, chilly the final day of the
final home stand of the 1960 season.
BOX
LINEUP
Pumpsie
Green SS
Willie
Tasby CF
Ted
Williams LF
Jim Pagliaroni C
Frank Malzone 3B
Lou Clinton RF
Don Gile 1B
Marlan Coughtry 2B
Only 10,454 showed up. The game was not
televised locally or nationally. “You Made Me Love You,” playing over the
loudspeaker, created a melancholy mood.
==============================================
One of the most prolific and respected sports journalists and oral historians in the United States, author of the autobiographies of legends Nolan Ryan,Tony Dorsett, and Red Holzman, Dr. Harvey Frommer, a professor for more than two decades in the MALS program at Dartmouth College, was dubbed “Dartmouth’s Mr. Baseball” by their alumni magazine. He’s also the founder of www.HarveyFrommerSports.com.
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