Major League Baseball 2

My closest friends were Jackie and Allen, brothers who lived around the corner on 16th Avenue. Though they were Jewish too, they were German Jews, therefore somewhat suspect to many of the mainly Eastern European Jews of New York. Anne and Alfred came to the United States before World War II. They originated in north Germany, Hamburg, I think.

Jackie was three years older than I was, about my sister’s age, and Allen was a few months younger. There was a competitive element in our relationships. Sometimes I was closer to Allen, sometimes I was closer to Jackie. Who was competing for whose favor? Maybe it’s something automatic about relationships.

I was at their house a lot. It was like ours, but different in certain ways. They had a finished basement too, but where, in the rear, we had a laundry room, they had a kitchen, where they ate most of their meals. I ate mayonnaise there for the first time in my life.

Outdoors we played box baseball, stoop ball, and stick ball. We also went bowling now and then. In the summer I took a couple of buses with them to the large municipal pool in Sunset Park, where I learned how to swim. But Jackie and Allen preferred more cerebral games, like chess and bridge, which I tried to learn, but had little enthusiasm for.

Their major continuing project was the creation of a model train system in the large front room of their basement. It was extraordinarily elaborate, with looping tracks and miniature buildings and people, arranged on a plywood board that filled a large part of the room. It was on hinges, so it could fold up out of the way against the wall. They had figured out transformers, wiring, and so on.

Though we played some card games, like gin rummy, and some board games, our major obsession, at least during the summer, was All-Star Baseball. The game was based on the actual records of real players. For each player there was a round card, its rim divided into unequal slices—each with a number in it—and a four-sided hole in the middle that fit over a thick cardboard cut-out mounted with a spinning metal arrow. You spun the arrow and the number it pointed to determined the play. One meant a single, two a double, and so on. Other numbers meant walks, ground outs, strikeouts, and other kinds of plays. I remember that Pete Runnels’ number one slice was greedily wide. We kept statistics for each player and played whole seasons, one at bat at a time.

Anne, Alfred, and their sons moved to Brooklyn from the Bronx, from which it can be inferred that the boys were Yankee fans. Having always lived in Brooklyn, I didn’t question Dodger supremacy. My new friends, however—especially Jackie—had an air of authority. They were the kind of kids who liked to know what thing was the best in its category or what the right way was to do certain things. And they were proud of knowing what they knew and felt superior when they could tell someone something he or she didn’t know or didn’t know with equal certainty.

I didn’t know anything with certainty. For instance, I didn’t know if Truman would be a better president than Eisenhower, even though he had already been president for most of my life. Jackie and Allen, probably mimicking Alfred’s opinions, were certain that Eisenhower would go to Korea and end the war and would therefore be a better president than Truman. I was convinced. Similarly, I was persuaded that the Yankees were better than the Dodgers. In 1952, I suppose the Yankees were better than the Dodgers, but I didn’t understand then that that was not a sufficient reason to root for them.

Why did these fervently rationalistic Yankee fans move to Brooklyn? I believe the reason was that in Brooklyn Alfred would be nearer to where he worked. The company he worked for was located in one of the Bush Terminal buildings along Brooklyn’s waterfront south of Red Hook. He was the chief engineer of the Topps Chewing Gum Company.

(I wrote the above from memory and got some facts wrong, in particular, about the All Star Baseball board game. For instance, the number 1 on a player card meant “home run,” not “single,” which was number 7. I’ll leave the text as is as a reminder that other errors of memory are likely to exist, perhaps more substantial ones.)