September 30, 1955 fell on a Friday. Major league baseball then was a sixteen team affair, eight teams in each league and each team played 154 games. The season usually ended before September did and this year was no exception. This particular day marked the third contest in post-season play, known as The World Series. Derisive remarks directed my way by a man pontificating atop a wooden box in London's Hyde Park while I was vacationing there in the late '70s, was a reminder that most of the world was not impressed with our self-centered misnomer about the most important final games each year of our beloved National Pastime. Who really cared? We were and still are (wait, let me check my watch) the greatest country in the world and therefore, there was nothing to be ashamed about regarding what we treasured and would always lovingly call The World Series.
On this day the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees for the first time in the '55 Series after losing the first two games. Brooklyn in the modern era (starting in 1903) had never won a World Series: never, ever. This afternoon in Brooklyn in the friendly "bandbox" that was Ebbets Field and home to the Dodgers since 1913, Roy Campanella, the beloved mulatto and genial catcher for the "Brooks" led the way with a three run homer as the home team prevailed, 8-3. Every game of this series except one was won by the home team: Yankees winning the first two at the iconic Yankee Stadium, Brooklyn the next three at Ebbets in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and the Yanks triumphing in the sixth game in The Bronx. The seventh and final game saw the Dodgers in their road "grays" capture the elusive crown of Champions of The World with an unforgettable pitcher's duel that gladdened the previously heavy hearts of several generations of fans of the county of Kings. For sixty five years Brooklyn teams had struggled and striven mightily, winning eleven pennants since 1890 with nicknames (sometimes alternating through the years) such as the Atlantics, Grays, Superbas, Bridegrooms, Grooms, Robins and of course, Dodgers (named thusly for the first time in 1911 to affectionately honor the citizens of the borough who routinely dodged trolley cars while going about their daily business). Still, the final triumph over a team from the other league, of rough parity in excellence, had always been denied to Brooklyn. The crushing defeat dealt to them in 1951 by their hated crosstown rivals the New York Giants in the final playoff game (just prior to a World Series) in which "The Shot Heard 'Round The World" occurred (Bobby Thomson's game winning home run), was the culmination of 53 days of a miraculous chase by the Giants to catch the first place Dodgers. The boys from Brooklyn led the Manhattan team by 13 1/2 games on August 11th, but ended their season tied (hence, necessitating the best-of-three playoff games) because of the Giants' torrid pace of winning an amazing 37 of their last 44 games of the season. It was the psychic trauma of this pennant race's conclusion of four years earlier that made the cry "Wait 'til Next Year!" so paradisaically at last, an obsolete prayer. Dodger defeats in the '52 and '53 Series, both against the Yanks, made deliverance from such victory-starved suffering (nearly impossibly painful to endure) and the related, yet again dashed dreams exquisitely punishing in their denial. Now the long agony for Dodger fans was beginning its death throes on this Friday afternoon and a pregnant joy, or certainly a hungering hope that could envision glorious sustenance through a cozy winter, spring and summer of nourishing delights as "World Champions of Baseball", was in the heart of every fanatical partisan of Brooklyn when the game ended a little before 4 o'clock.
Five hours later on a dusty highway in the gloaming near Paso Robles, Calif., the newly minted Hollywood film star James Dean would die in the crash of his new Porsche Spyder, his persona's immortality assured in the minds of temporally attuned men and those dedicated to the "dream factory" that was (and is) America's movie industry. But his further contributions to art or to a personal future with a beloved, progeny and of course, a more substantial body of work (in his twenty four years, he starred in but three films, the last one released posthumously), were all never to be as was his impact as a truly iconic actor with stature and a legend based on a life fully lived. Instead, he remains frozen in time along with his boyish good looks, and having bequeathed us an endlessly lingering yearning for what was as well as for what might have been. The love affair in American society with ruination and waste ("The Great Gatsby", "An American Tragedy" and "From Here To Eternity" are some examples of this strain in our film and literature) caused many to rapaciously lap up Dean's story much like the mother of the Sicilian Robin Hood of mid-century, Salvatore Giuliano, lapped up the blood alongside his corpse following her son's betrayal and assassination.
For the Dodgers and their legion of fans smitten, nay, perhaps consumed by a love affair with their team, exceeding any of their personal ones or even of their God, the nirvana at the summit of the baseball world was in many ways indescribably heavenly unless one knew firsthand the gut feeling of tribalism's triumph over the strangers and tormentors of nearly all of one's remembered past and of the memories of one's forefathers as well. Strangely, this ardor was arguably proved unrequited when a mere two years later, the team announced its departure for Los Angeles, the nearest metropolis to, curiously, the scene of Mr. Dean's departure from this world and arrival at both the afore mentioned one of immortality and perhaps the eschatalogical one of our Christian traditions. And what of the imperishability of the Brooklyn Dodgers and their fans? Those of living memory must have reached the age of reason (of years not much more tender than those of a seven year old) in 1955 or earlier to have imbibed the love potion of Dodger baseball in Brooklyn. Thus, only those on the cusp of old age or of course, older, can recount tales of this joyous period without the assistance of history books or hand--me-down accounts. Preserved film and other broadcasting artifacts do help. And the timeless nature of the Dodgers' story, as well as Dean's, if told truthfully and lovingly, will help immeasurably to keep death and forgetfulness at bay. Jimmy Dean was us and we were him, experienced through his rebelliousness "without a cause" and his aching search for love and the American Dream. The perennial underdogs from Brooklyn were too, like a younger cousin, maybe at first annoying, but with an unquenchable spirit along with a limp or other malady he determinedly ignored or contrastingly, with a youthful exuberance and salubrious physicality unbridled by prudent judgment while crashing into outfield walls like the famed Pete Rieser of post-war Brooklyn teams. These characters had just that: character, and we fell in love. They, all the other Brooklyn Dodgers, their fans and James Dean: all showed us the fragility of life and the gloriousness of its ever so finite arc with their greatest triumphs being but a few heartbeats away from their sparks turning to glowing embers that our love and memory can blow upon to give wan but special light and hope to our descendant seekers of truth, beauty and the precious vivacity gifted to us all.
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