The Boys of Summer (50 page)

We were working on a film, Pee Wee Reese, his son Mark and myself, during the middle 1990s, and we were trying to get one memorable story right. The film was a one-hour documentary on the captain and shortstop, which Mark had titled
The Quiet Ambassador.
The story we sought recounted a single brief moving deed. But it had been told and retold and mistold so many times, we had a hard time reconstructing the scene. Was it Boston, that old abolitionist center, where the Red Sox practiced apartheid baseball until 1959? Was it St. Louis, the old major league city that was closest to the heart of the Confederacy? In the end it turned out to be neither. The place was the river town, Cincinnati, Ohio, and that made the story all the stronger.

Whenever the Dodgers traveled to play the Reds, some of Reese’s old ball-playing friends made the easy drive up the Ohio River valley from Louisville to watch him work his trade at Crosley Field. The year 1947 was different from what had gone before. The Dodgers were starting a black man at first base, the first black to play in the major leagues since 1884. Now, after sixty years, the Cotton Curtain was coming down. That was not to
everyone’s satisfaction. Certainly not to some of Reese’s boyhood friends from the segregated sandlots of Kentucky.

As the Dodgers moved into infield practice, taunts began. Fans started calling Jackie Robinson names: “Snowflake,” “Jungle Bunny,” and worse. Very much worse. Some Cincinnati players picked that up and began shouting obscenities at Robinson from their dugout. There Jackie stood, one solitary black man, trying to warm up and catching hell. Reese raised a hand and stopped the practice. Then he walked from shortstop to first base and put an arm around the shoulders of Jackie Robinson. He stood there and looked into the dugout and into the stands, stared into the torrents of hate, a slim white southerner, who wore number 1 and just happened to have an arm draped in friendship around a black man, who wore number 42. Reese did not say a word. The deed was beyond words. “After Pee Wee came over like that,” Robinson said years afterward, “I never felt alone on a baseball field again.”

Reese detested bigotry, hatred against blacks or Jews or Latinos, whatever. I never knew anyone whose life was a more towering example of decency. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.…” The words are Lincoln’s. The character that comes to mind is Harold Henry Reese, who died in the summer of 1999 at the age of eighty-one.

Mark Reese, who was twelve when I visited Louisville in 1970, grew much taller than his father, played some college baseball and fell in love with modern poetry. He expanded the Pee Wee Reese documentary into an intriguing five-part television series on Brooklyn and the Dodgers, and, to my delight, the Reese family engaged me as narrator. That gave me a chance to spend a good deal of time with Pee Wee, almost fifty years after we had met. His wit and sense of merriment glowed undiminished. He was older, to be sure, but he was not aged. When Mark quoted
some of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry at me one day, Pee Wee shook his head, feigning despair, and said, “I don’t know where he’s getting this stuff from. He certainly doesn’t get it from me.” (He was, of course, delighted with his son’s range.)

On one birthday, he telephoned and said, “I cannot believe that Pee Wee Reese is seventy-eight years old.”

I said, “I cannot believe that Roger Kahn is sixty-eight years old.”

Without pause Pee Wee said, “We were talking about me.” He cut to the heart of things with high style.

We seemed always to enjoy sharing and renewing memories. He remembered that when he turned professional in 1938, at the age of eighteen, he had to quit his job as a telephone company line splicer. The foreman said sternly that the phone company would always be there and that by leaving it, Pee Wee was making a terrible mistake. “I’m young, sir,” Reese said. “I can afford to take a chance.” Recounting this, he gave me a gentle smile before he added, “Where that foreman might be today I do not know.”

He joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1940, when Larry MacPhail was restoring a ball club that had been more famous for gag lines than base hits. The Dodgers had not won a pennant since 1920, and John Lardner wrote of one star slugger, “Floyd Caves Herman, known as Babe, did not always catch fly balls on the top of his head, but he could do it in a pinch.” Reese was droll and often very funny, but after he moved in as Dodger shortstop in 1940, comedy came only after winning. The Dodgers beat a fine Cardinal team for the pennant in 1941 and, after World War II, Branch Rickey picked up from MacPhail and assembled
The Boys of Summer.
Reese was a very fine shortstop, a great base runner, and a superb clutch hitter. He played every inning of every game in seven Dodger World Series. He was a captain who led by civility, however difficult the circumstances.

Panama City, Panama, 1947. Rickey is about to promote Robinson from the Triple A Montreal Royals. Some veteran Dodgers—
Hugli Casey, Dixie Walker—prepare a position that says, in effect, “If you promote the black man, trade us. We won’t play.” Walker brought the document to Reese confident, southerner to southerner, that Pee Wee would sign. Reese refused. Five or six older players pressed him. Was he gonna let Rickey make him play with one of
them?
“I’m not signing,” Reese said. The petition died. I mention this again because during the 1990s, a few surviving old Dodgers have insisted there had never been any such petition. “I saw it,” Reese said. “It was presented to me. I wouldn’t sign.”

As earlier pages indicate, I rooted for the Dodgers and Pee Wee Reese when I attended a Brooklyn prep school, and kept rooting from secondary school and college, and even when the New York
Herald Tribune
hired me to write sports, which meant that I was professionally neutral. I was neutral all right. Neutral for Brooklyn. When I was twenty-four and the
Tribune
assigned me to cover the Dodgers, Reese made his remark, since widely quoted, that I didn’t want to hang around with him because he wasn’t good copy. This was not stated for effect. T. S. Eliot wrote that “humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve.” Reese’s humility was glorious and genuine, like his whistling throws from shortstop to first base. That is not to say that he lacked sophistication. Sometimes at a party he moved to a piano and effortlessly and quite beautifully played the haunting opening bars of Debussy’s
Clair de lune.
He then stopped, saying he didn’t want to interrupt the evening. Some marveled at a major league shortstop who was also a classical musician. Pee Wee smiled modestly and in this one instance the humility was pure, sparkling, twenty-four-karat fake. The eight bars of Debussy were all the classical music he knew how to play.

We became closer than the journalism textbooks say is right. One night in Brooklyn the late Joan Kahn, my first wife, was sitting in a photographer’s booth when a foul bounced out of the upper deck into a metal support that held up the big lenses on the old-fashioned cameras and the ball spun backward into her,
breaking her nose. She was uncomfortable in the first-aid room but being cared for. Walter O’Malley sent me a message in the press box. “Don’t bother to sue. Courts have held we don’t have to protect that location. If you sue me, you will lose.”

Pee Wee’s message in the clubhouse was different. “How’s your wife getting home?”

“I’ll drive her, but I have to write my story first.”

“Take your time with the story,” Reese said. “I’ll drive Joan home.” When I finally arrived, he was applying soothing talk and an ice pack to a patient who was in pain but delighted by the company.

The next spring at Vero Beach Reese said, “You’ve played a little ball. Why don’t you go out to left and shag a few?” When I reached the outfield, Gil Hodges stood in the cage. He slashed a nasty line drive over Reese’s head and the baseball came bouncing toward me, looking curiously like a hand grenade. Who else was on the field? Reese, of course, Robinson, Snider, Furillo. If there is a God, I thought, please don’t let this one go through the wickets. I moved up slowly, dropped down to one knee. The ball plunked into my glove. Whew. Then the shortstop called my name.

“Yes, captain?”

“You’re supposed to pick up the ball before it stops.”

Reese could say things few others dared. Once Robinson was raging against the steady run of knockdown pitches he had to face. Jack was, as we have seen, a fierce competitor and a withering, sometimes unpleasant needier, hardly the bland saint that organized baseball has recently been celebrating. “Jack,” Pee Wee said, “some guys are throwing at you because you’re black and that’s a terrible thing. But there are other guys, Jack, throwing at you because they plain don’t like you.” Robinson blinked. No one but Reese talked to him that way. Then Robinson nodded and said, “You’ve got a point.”

Reese had some rules. After he caught a pop fly, he never held
up, say, two fingers signaling two outs. “This is the major leagues. You’re supposed to be able to keep track of the outs by yourself. Besides, they’re on the scoreboard.” Once the Dodgers’ backup catcher, Rube Walker, won a game at Ebbets Field with a home run and in the clubhouse a photographer took one picture after another. Finally Walker snapped, “That’s it. I got a bridge date with my wife.”

Reese bounded up from the captain’s chair beside his locker. “Rube, you had a job to do on the field and you did it. This man has a job to do here. You’ll stay in the clubhouse until he has all the pictures he needs.” He insisted that the Dodgers treat everyone pleasantly, waiters, bellhops, room clerks, even journalists.

At length the New York baseball writers voted Reese their “Good Guy” award. He told me on the phone from Louisville that he was nervous about making a speech at the Waldorf Astoria and maybe I could meet him there and look over and edit the text. “I’m getting some help here,” he said, “from a friend that knows the classics.” Here is the speech that Reese presented to me (and delivered to an audience of two thousand). I didn’t change a word.

“Gentlemen: If I possessed the oratorical fire of Demosthenes, or the linguistic elasticity of Branch Rickey, I would wow you with superlatives. But frankly, fellers, I ain’t got it. Thank you very much.”

He was playing shortstop at Yankee Stadium on October 4, 1955, when the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series. Fittingly, the final out was Elston Howard’s ground ball to short, and some said Reese choked and threw the baseball in the dirt and only Gil Hodges’ great pickup saved him and all of Brooklyn. Nonsense. The throw was shin high, an easy catch for a big league first baseman.

Somehow Reese and I ended up late that night toasting the universe on West 57th Street at a vanished bar called Whyte’s. Pee Wee’s face was shining, a child’s face on Christmas morning.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Two out in the ninth. You’ve played on five [up to then] losing Series teams. You’re one out from winning a Series. Howard’s up. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” said the bravest shortstop I’ve ever known, “I hope he doesn’t hit the ball to me.”

Reese probably didn’t want to manage the Dodgers. “Probably not and certainly when they made the offer the way they did.” He became a broadcast partner to Dizzy Dean and then an executive at Hillerich and Bradsby, the company that manufactures Louisville Sluggers, and gloves and hockey sticks. He invested sensibly. He never earned more than $35,000 playing shortstop, but he became comfortable.

We stayed close and on a terrible night in the summer of 1987, he rallied to my side. That July I lost a child to heroin. He was twenty-two. When I buried my boy and came home, I knew deep crevices of despair. Toward midnight the phone rang.

“Do you remember,” Pee Wee said, “that I was the captain of the team?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I just want to say for all the fellers, we are very, very sorry.”

Now, as Mark Reese was creating his documentary, he brought Reese, Bobby Thomson and myself together on Bedford Avenue, the street that runs behind the late but well-remembered right field wall at Ebbets Field. After some baseball chatter, Mark said, “I’d like you to talk about your late son and Pee Wee’s phone call.”

“I’d rather not. It’s very emotional. I don’t want to go misty in front of your camera.”

“You ought to get over that,” Mark said. “It’s not the way it used to be, the macho nonsense. Guys are allowed to cry.”

I looked at Pee Wee. The captain’s expressive face said—again, no words—it’s your call.

The camera rolled and I told the story and there was Pee Wee right in front of me and I said, “So, I will be very, very grateful to you for all the rest of my days.” I blinked away a little mist and kept control. But there on Bedford Avenue, Pee Wee Reese burst into tears.

They were tears for my dead son, Roger Laurence Kahn, and they were for my grief, but they were for more than that. They were for all the bereaved, the stricken, the bereft, all mankind. Now in a new century as I compose these lines, Pee Wee Reese, the immortal shortstop, has moved past tears.

Very near the end, his son sent me a letter of terrible beauty. “Dear Roger,” Mark began. “The prognosis is not good. The cancer has settled in the brain. Pee Wee is often delirious, sometimes delusional. The other day he stared at me with a blank look and said, All my life I’ve pondered sleep.’ This echoed in my mind throughout the day despite my father’s inability to explain his statement.

“That night I sat down to dinner with my father for what would more than likely be the last time. I thought of all the other times we had sat down to dinner, just another family sitting at the table to break bread and to share the events of the day. I thought of the dinner discussions, some good, some bad, some heated, some mundane. I thought of all the times he missed dinner because he was on the road, or the flight was late, or the game went into extra innings. Regardless of the state of things, I always knew my old man was there or at least coming home.

“But at this dinner, though he was there, I knew he never would return. From his wheelchair he seemed to study my every move, as if to ask, ‘Who is this stranger invading my home?’ I couldn’t get my breath. After excusing myself into the den, I felt as if the life were being drained from my body. As Turgenev said, ‘A boy doesn’t become a man until he loses his father.’ Maybe this is that process, a kneeing blow to the gut.