Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Baseball memories: They started at 4
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Story by Lowell BlankfortBorn and raised in New York City, Post columnist and former co-owner Lowell Blankfort returned recently to the city of his youth with his wife, April, on a month-long reporting trip. This is the second in a series of articles.***April and I made baseball history at the New York Yankees' final home game of this season at the end of September.We were in the crowd that gave the Yankees an all-time American League season attendance record of 4,090,696.Had we not been present, the record would have been only 4,090,694.Thus we knew our lives had not been meaningless - we had made a difference.It was the first time we'd been to Yankee Stadium since 1991, although we'd visited New York several times since then during baseball seasons.April had ordered a family boycott of the Yankees after our last experience - a barrage of filthy talk pelting our ears from a quartet of expensively dressed corporate types sitting in box seats behind us.Their expletives, delivered at both the Yankees and the visiting team, would have put Howard Stern to shame.This year April relented, and the better seats having been sold out, we ended up in the upper tier high up in left field among the hoi polloi, the family crowd.We heard nary a nasty word.***My acquaintance with Yankee Stadium goes back to when I was 4 years old and my father took me to my first game there.It was during the Depression - a period, I was later to learn, when baseball drew big crowds because tickets were as cheap as 50 cents and the millions of unemployed had little else to do with their days.(There were no night games.)All I remember about my first game is that the Yankees played the St. Louis Browns and my father kept shouting at me, "There's Babe Ruth! There's Babe Ruth!" while pointing to all those funny-looking men running around in knickers. I never could figure out what they were running for, or which one or what a Babe Ruth was.Four years later, I was to find out. My parents divorced, and my mother and grandparents moved with me into a 14th-floor riverside apartment.The other apartment on the floor belonged to Babe Ruth, by now retired.The Babe and I became elevator friends.He was so huge he consumed two-thirds of the space, while I squeezed into a corner. Every day I walked his adopted daughter, 3 years older, partway to school; after three blocks, she turned left to her Catholic school and I continued straight on to the pubic school.And when a fellow student and I started up a mimeographed school newspaper in the fifth grade, the Babe twice invited me into his study to provide me with interviews. All four walls of the study were lined, floor to ceiling, with the originals of cartoons about him that had appeared in newspapers all over America. Four years later (by which time we'd moved to another apartment house), Ruth was dead. America wept.And so did I.***Baseball and the theater were my passion during those growing-up years. But they presented problems - particularly economic ones. My allowance was 75 cents a week, and to teach me thrift, my family was very stubborn about supplementing it. And even though sports and theater were cheap compared to today, they were beyond my budget. My dad could help partially satisfy my passion for sports.He had been a well-known high school athlete, and every weekend he would take me to a baseball game (or, in other seasons, to see football, basketball or ice hockey).Indeed, I think my current fondness for sports, as well as that of many adults, reflects a child's subconscious desire to retain an emotional link with his father.However, long summer school vacations offered a void. But to the rescue came the New York Giants, my favorite baseball team among those then in New York.(The Yankees were so good, and the Dodgers so lousy, that rooting for neither of those teams was fun). For midweek games, they would admit free youth groups such as the Boy Scouts. They totaled several hundred at every game.I looked them over as they gathered outside the stadium and noted the stature of many was not unlike my own. And that nobody was asking for identification. So, every afternoon, I gave myself a temporary membership in the requisite group and slipped into the stadium. And with only one usher charged with confining hundreds of kids to faraway seating, it was not hard to get by him and make my way to excellent seats. Completely free.In three teenage years, I probably tried this 20 or 25 times. And never failed.***The theater presented other problems. We (two particularly play-loving friends and I) were too young to go at nights and too poor to afford the tickets, the cheapest of which was a prohibitive $1.65. Before the play, ushers meticulously checked twice every ticket - once to be admitted to the theater, the second time to make sure you are in the right seat.But, we noticed, they did not do any of this at intermissions. So gate-crashers could simply mingle in the lobby or outside with the intermission crowd, and follow it in. We became gate-crashers. And this also never failed to work.In the end, we perfected our technique. We limited our visitations to three-act plays, the better to get more for our non-money.
Source: http://www.paradisepost.com/
Story by Lowell BlankfortBorn and raised in New York City, Post columnist and former co-owner Lowell Blankfort returned recently to the city of his youth with his wife, April, on a month-long reporting trip. This is the second in a series of articles.***April and I made baseball history at the New York Yankees' final home game of this season at the end of September.We were in the crowd that gave the Yankees an all-time American League season attendance record of 4,090,696.Had we not been present, the record would have been only 4,090,694.Thus we knew our lives had not been meaningless - we had made a difference.It was the first time we'd been to Yankee Stadium since 1991, although we'd visited New York several times since then during baseball seasons.April had ordered a family boycott of the Yankees after our last experience - a barrage of filthy talk pelting our ears from a quartet of expensively dressed corporate types sitting in box seats behind us.Their expletives, delivered at both the Yankees and the visiting team, would have put Howard Stern to shame.This year April relented, and the better seats having been sold out, we ended up in the upper tier high up in left field among the hoi polloi, the family crowd.We heard nary a nasty word.***My acquaintance with Yankee Stadium goes back to when I was 4 years old and my father took me to my first game there.It was during the Depression - a period, I was later to learn, when baseball drew big crowds because tickets were as cheap as 50 cents and the millions of unemployed had little else to do with their days.(There were no night games.)All I remember about my first game is that the Yankees played the St. Louis Browns and my father kept shouting at me, "There's Babe Ruth! There's Babe Ruth!" while pointing to all those funny-looking men running around in knickers. I never could figure out what they were running for, or which one or what a Babe Ruth was.Four years later, I was to find out. My parents divorced, and my mother and grandparents moved with me into a 14th-floor riverside apartment.The other apartment on the floor belonged to Babe Ruth, by now retired.The Babe and I became elevator friends.He was so huge he consumed two-thirds of the space, while I squeezed into a corner. Every day I walked his adopted daughter, 3 years older, partway to school; after three blocks, she turned left to her Catholic school and I continued straight on to the pubic school.And when a fellow student and I started up a mimeographed school newspaper in the fifth grade, the Babe twice invited me into his study to provide me with interviews. All four walls of the study were lined, floor to ceiling, with the originals of cartoons about him that had appeared in newspapers all over America. Four years later (by which time we'd moved to another apartment house), Ruth was dead. America wept.And so did I.***Baseball and the theater were my passion during those growing-up years. But they presented problems - particularly economic ones. My allowance was 75 cents a week, and to teach me thrift, my family was very stubborn about supplementing it. And even though sports and theater were cheap compared to today, they were beyond my budget. My dad could help partially satisfy my passion for sports.He had been a well-known high school athlete, and every weekend he would take me to a baseball game (or, in other seasons, to see football, basketball or ice hockey).Indeed, I think my current fondness for sports, as well as that of many adults, reflects a child's subconscious desire to retain an emotional link with his father.However, long summer school vacations offered a void. But to the rescue came the New York Giants, my favorite baseball team among those then in New York.(The Yankees were so good, and the Dodgers so lousy, that rooting for neither of those teams was fun). For midweek games, they would admit free youth groups such as the Boy Scouts. They totaled several hundred at every game.I looked them over as they gathered outside the stadium and noted the stature of many was not unlike my own. And that nobody was asking for identification. So, every afternoon, I gave myself a temporary membership in the requisite group and slipped into the stadium. And with only one usher charged with confining hundreds of kids to faraway seating, it was not hard to get by him and make my way to excellent seats. Completely free.In three teenage years, I probably tried this 20 or 25 times. And never failed.***The theater presented other problems. We (two particularly play-loving friends and I) were too young to go at nights and too poor to afford the tickets, the cheapest of which was a prohibitive $1.65. Before the play, ushers meticulously checked twice every ticket - once to be admitted to the theater, the second time to make sure you are in the right seat.But, we noticed, they did not do any of this at intermissions. So gate-crashers could simply mingle in the lobby or outside with the intermission crowd, and follow it in. We became gate-crashers. And this also never failed to work.In the end, we perfected our technique. We limited our visitations to three-act plays, the better to get more for our non-money.
Source: http://www.paradisepost.com/
