I
Growing up in those tipsy streets of prohibition where a player like Meyer Lansky had the foresight to take flight thru our first floor bathroom window, the feds at the front door of the fourth floor walk up,....around the corner from Colonel Marcus’s playground at Avenue P and East 4th Street, the denizens worshiping the baseball and football pros at Bedford Avenue’s Ebbets Field...... Aside from Mrs Harder at P.S. 217, Mrs Kelly and the Midwood High “Argus” gang all denied us a byline for our interview with WOR’s Stan Lomas, our street wrought gig would earn a brownie in the Guinness School of Records......
II
However “Ole Reliable” Tommy Henrich, a Bronx Bomber, recorded those yesterdays while manicuring the pastures in right field, playing alongside the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio in center, long before he exchanged his vows with Marilyn Monroe..in Beverly Hills.
The Dodgers had taken his “Five o’clock lightning”, Ole Reliable passing at 97 several weeks ago, encompassing the baseball cosmos from ‘37 thru the present.
Their accomplishments are interwoven ...the glory years of Ruth Gehrig DiMaggio Mantle Roger Maris before Mark McGuire’s confession..... using muscle enhancing steroids..
“I’m good I’m good I’m good” said the Maris family, finding redemption for their father’s immortal character. Inheriting the “mantle” of the mighty Babe...sixty base clearing explosive four baggers..., surpassing it, paying a mighty psych and physical price in the tradeoff.......
III
Who could imagine the Babe in his camel haired coat walking the peccadillos of Westwood Boulevard on the Ucla campus in the late forties. A mirage appearing in that world of undergraduates, the aftermath of World War 2, GI housing put together to house them as they let their civies do the talking for them....lecture halls, the Powell library, the graduate research library before Bill Ackerman’s center, Ed Pauley’s pavilion, the tennis center, Ducky Drake’s track, Harry Trotter’s. Bill Spaulding Joe E. Brown fields, Jane Wither’s home above Sunset..
John Wooden’s workout center.,”his pyramid of success”.....the swimming pool. Jans Steps...... the Globe Theater in miniature “no seating for bimbos”, 20th Century variation.
IV
But not to belabor a hero we identified with.....the Iron Man , Lou Gehrig speaking into the mike at home plate.
“I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth”
A massive relief effort to “Haiti mon amour” from the West Coast Middle America, and the Big Apple “Donate now” ($5.00)....January 13, 2010 ...to be continued
