THE MAN THAT MADE ME A YANKEE FAN: PART 3

On September 16, 1951 my Grandfather married my Grandmother. After the wedding they headed into the City and spent the night at Hotel Sadler. It turns out they had forgot the suitcase with all their clothes in them at home. The next day they headed out to Times Square to buy new clothes and then decided to head up the Stadium for an afternoon game against the Indians. Turns out, this was my Grandmother’s first game. As usual they bought the cheap General Admission tickets and ended up sitting in the lower right field seats. The game was 1-1 in the Bottom of the 9^th, Joe DiMaggio leads off against Bob Lemon and singles to third, Gene Woodling singles to right, Bobby Brown is then intentionally walked to load the bases and Phil Rizzuto bunts DiMaggio in to win the game.

After the game they headed back to Times Square to see South Pacific on Broadway thus beginning 62 wonderful years married.

I’ve never known my Grandmother to be much of a sports fan and I guess a trip to the Polo Grounds sums up her fanaticism. My Grandfather said: “Parking at the Polo Grounds was awful. One night we took a bus trip down a Giants/Dodgers game. There were 55,000 people there and I look over and she is sleeping in the seat next to me. Late in the game one of the Giants players hits a home run, the whole place erupts and she’s still sleeping through the whole thing.”

“Another time in the mid 60’s I was working for Western Publishing and they were giving tickets away to a Giants game at Yankee Stadium. The seats were on the 50-yard line right in front of Richard Nixon. I spoke with him briefly and he signed my program. I go home and left it out on the table. The next day I came back to get it and your Grandmother had thrown it out.

At this point my grandmother yells in from the other room. My grandfather said he barked,  “I didn’t know what the scribbles were. I just thought it was garbage.”

Over the years, my grandfather has seen a lot of baseball, both good and bad. He says the best time was the late ‘40s all the way through the early ‘60s. “Guys would get hurt or retire and whoever they brought in to replace them wouldn’t miss. They kept right on going” I totally get what he’s saying. I was in my late teens, early 20’s during the most recent Yankee dynasty. It’s still very vivid in my memory. I’m sure for me that will be greatest moment in history as well.

Having said that and as noted before, I lived through the ‘80s which was a terrible time to be a Yankee fan. For my grandfather, it was easily the late ‘60s. “CBS owned the team then. They didn’t spend any money. For years, the Yankees had no pitching at all.”

As the old adage says, ‘those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it’. I hope you enjoyed my journey through history as much as I did. I encourage you all to go talk to older family members and ask them about the old days, you’ll be surprised what you might learn. And hey, if you have pictures or stories... tell us here at BYB.  We'd love to publish them!

If you missed the full series of THE MAN THAT MADE ME A YANKEE FAN, be sure to click and read PART 1 and PART 2.

Thanks for reading!

--Lem Allen, BYB Contributor

Email me at: bybcurmudgeon@gmail.com

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