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In 1967, it didn't matter if you lived in Brooklyn or Skowhegan Maine. All of America was just a Mayberry North Carolina at heart. In those days, kids could walk across town and play a pick up ball game til dark and walk home knowing every adult, particularly moms, were looking out the window to ensure you got home safely.
In 1967, I was 10 years old, and baseball was all I thought about. There were 2 Memorial weekend rituals in my home. One was permanent and happened every year no matter what: I would blow out candles on a cake. The other one was left up to the lords of the realm of baseball. I have often wondered if the executives of baseball knew how I would wait for the season schedule to be announced and how many times they broke my heart by sending the Sox to Baltimore (or worse, New York) for Memorial weekend, or how many times I would giggle with joy to find them in Fenway for a series at home.
On Memorial weekend, if the Sox were home, my grandfather David would come pick us kids up in his 1957 Chevy Belair and drive us to Fenway (and I mean pick us up!) Any kid in the neighborhood who could fit and whose parents said ok was welcome. Sometimes, a sad-eyed boy would say "I can't go", after having begged his parents for what seemed like hours. My grandfather would walk over to that kid's house and within minutes the sad eyes were transformed to excited eyes. I learned years later, that many times that a friend would announce he couldn't go was because the family didn't have the money to send him. I know that some would say my grandfather, a Jewish businessman, was just trying to build goodwill amongst the neighbourhood by paying for a lot of tickets to the game on these weekends. I have never believed that. I knew the man, and he was just one of those types of men who would not stand by and watch a child be deserted by friends over such a thing as poverty while he had the money to carry the child to a memory of a pro ball game.
My grandfather was the original "big brother" not to us kids, but to our fathers. Many times I would see him slip a kid 5 bucks at the ball game (which was a fortune in those days) for the purchase of hot dogs and sodas, or a trinket from the souvenir shop. He would always tell the kid "Your dad gave me this for you. I didn't give it to you earlier because he didn't want you to spend it before we got here." He was a good liar.. and those lies were the kind that earned you a place in the kingdom of God.
I remember the 1967 Memorial weekend series vividly, perhaps for two reasons: it was the first time my brother Kenny did not come with us, and it was the first time that a boy named Rex did. Kenny had joined the Marines earlier in the year and was in boot camp at Paris Island. Rex was the poorest kid in the west end of Portland Maine. His father was a drunk and his mother always sported a bruise somewhere on her body. Rex was a hang-around, not really a bud to anyone and yet, always there it seemed.
One thing that is very important to stress is that when you went to a ball game with my grandfather you went early. My grand dad believed there were two types of baseball fans: those who went to the game, and those who went to batting practice and the game, and as far as he was concerned , the first type didn't amount to much.
We would arrive hours before the game and walk into an empty Fenway, and be awed by the splendor of it all. It doesn't matter if you are 10 or 100 years old, to stand in Fenway while it is empty and look out at the Green Monster, is to be awed, and forces you to see the world from the eyes of a child sure that no one can hit a ball over that wall... unless God says it is ok. Fenway, like Church, makes you believe in miracles.
In 1967, The Sox needed a miracle. They had finished the 1966 season in the cellar, and were (according to everyone) a 100 to 1 long shot to make it to the World Series. But there was hope... There was the kid in left field, the rookie with the funny name replacing the legend of Ted Williams. I never liked Ted Williams and to this day I believe he is the epitome of the worst of my father's generation. Sure he could hit, just ask his wife... but he was as unaproachable at the field as a dad after a 12-pack of beer on a Friday night. Ted was someone you watched but didn't want to talk to. To me, this new kid was better. Sure his name was funny, so funny we just called him "Yaz". He was nice and would talk to us and ask us where we were from, and he would sign anything for us and I do mean anything, from cards to sneakers.
Years later, I recall someone once said of Yaz that he was the greatest ball player ever, from the neck down that he was just a big old dumb kid. That may be true, but he was a hero of mine... and I cried like a baby as a full grown man when I watched him retire from the game. Why not? It mean't that both his and my childhood was truly over.
But in '67 he was a rookie, and he had the hopes and dreams of us all on his shoulders. That Memorial weekend, during batting practice, he put 3 over the monster, and we all watched in awe from the seats behind the Sox dugout. It was magic; it was the start of a belief that this year it would be different. He fouled one up right into the seats behind us and we all scrambled out and over the seats like commandos after the V X Nam guerillas that Walt Chronkite talked about every night on the news. We all wanted that ball... and when the race was done, that boy Rex had it. To add insult to injury, he got the damn thing signed by Yaz. Imagine, the poorest kid on the west side of Portland Maine now had the thing that made him the richest kid in Butler Elementary School. For weeks he would carry the ball and when he was willing to show us, we would look at it with lust in our eyes.
I resented for years the fact that Rex had been to that game and my brother Kenny had not. Kenny being the fastest sprinter I ever saw would have gotten that ball, and if he had he would have looked down at me and said "Here ya go". It was the kind of man Kenny was. When he got his first job in high school flipping burgers at McDonald's, on his pay day he would hand me a fist full of Tops and Bowman baseball cards, still in the wrappers saying "Here ya go"... and he would smile when I found Red Sox players. When the Jr. High boys bothered me and my friends walking home from Butler Elementary School, all I had to do was tell Kenny and somehow it would stop. He was a damn good older brother.
The Red Sox beat the Detroit Tigers that day. Yaz went on to become the last man to win baseball's triple crown that season. But their luck ran out against Bob Gibson and the Cardinals, who beat them in the World Series 4 games to 3. Yet it was still a season that if I live to be a hundred, I will never forget. It was a season of following the Sox and the 6 o'clock news with the Chronkite body counts. It was the first time in my life that I began to understand what it was like to worry for someone you love... it was when Kenny went to Vietnam.
The Sox did not take the series, Rex's dad went to the Maine State Prison in Thomaston for killing his wife (we never did learn what became of Rex), my grandfather died the next year in August, and my brother did not come home from Vietnam.
Today, all these years later, I am still a miserable Red Sox fan wanting only 4 things: for my grand dad to take me to an empty Fenway park, the Sox to take a World Series, to know what became of Rex and that ball from that season, and to be able to look up and just for a moment see my brother Kenny saying "Here ya go..."
-A.D. Fischer
October 1998
Hendersonville N.C.
Pondering the Greats...pg. 1
Pondering the Greats...pg. 2
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