Doris Kearns Goodwin – Monday 4 January 1943 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I had vaguely heard of Doris Kearns Goodwin in an academic context (she is an Historian). However, it was as an interviewee in Ken Burn’s excellent documentary film, Baseball (the sequel, The Tenth Inning is scheduled to air on PBS in the Fall of 2010), that Doris’s name has stuck with me. Doris is a baseball fan and in Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, she recounts her childhood love for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As a baseball fan myself, I enjoyed the story of how her love of baseball evolved. I have been a Boston Red Sox fan all my life (Red Sox Box) and Doris became a Red Sox fan in her adulthood.

Dedication in Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“In memory of my parents MICHAEL AND HELEN KEARNS and to my sisters, CHARLOTTE AND JEANNE”

Excerpt from CHAPTER ONE of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“ON A SULTRY FRIDAY evening that same summer, after months of listening to games on the radio, I saw my first game at Ebbets Field. As my father and I walked up the cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue and approached the arched windows of the legendary brick stadium, he explained how, as a boy, he had watched the ballpark being built, since the place where he had been sent to live after his parents died was only two blocks away. He was at the site in 1912, when Dodger owner Charles Ebbets pushed a shovel into the ground to begin the excavation. And when the park opened a year later, he was in the bleachers watching the first official game, against the Philadelphia Phillies. He had seen the Dodgers win their first two pennants in 1916 and 1920, only to lose to the Red Sox and the Indians. He had sustained his love affair with “dem Bums” through the frustrating period of the thirties, when he Dodgers were stuck at the bottom of the division, into the happier era of the forties, when under General Manager Branch Rickey they began to look like a championship team. And now my own pilgrimage was about to begin.

The marble rotunda at the entrance to the shrine looked like a train station in a dream, with dozens of gilded ticket windows scattered around the floor. The floor tiles were embellished with baseball stitches, and in the center of the domed ceiling hung an elaborate chandelier composed of a dozen baseball bats. As we started through a tunneled ramp into the stadium, my father told me that I was about to see the most beautiful sight in the world. Just as he finished speaking, there it was: the reddish-brown diamond, the impossibly green grass, the stands so tightly packed with people that not a single empty seat could be seen. I reached over instinctively to hold my father’s hand as we wended our way to seats between home plate and first base, which, like the thousands of seats in this tiny, comfortable park, were so close to the playing field that we could hear what the ballplayers said to one another as they ran onto the field and could watch their individual gestures and mannerisms as they loosened up in the on-deck circle. There, come to earth, were the heroes of my imagination, Snider and Robinson and the powerful-looking Don Newcombe; and there were the villains-the “hated New York Giants,” an epithet that was to us a single word-Monte Irvin, Sheldon Jones, and the turncoat Leo Durocher.”

Excerpt from the EPILOGUE of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“Although time and events outdistanced and reconciled my personal losses, my anger over O’Malley’s treason still persisted. At Colby College and in my first year at Harvard-where I would teach for almost a decade before leaving to become a full-time historian-I refused to follow baseball, skipping over the sports pages with their accounts of alien teams called the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. Then, in my second year of studying for my doctorate, a young man invited me to Fenway Park. Allowing my desire for his companionship to overcome my principled reluctance, we took the subway to Kenmore Square in Boston, and together we walked up Lansdowne Street to the park. There it was again: the entrance up the darkened ramp disclosing an expanse of amazing green, the fervent crowd contained in a stadium scaled to human dimensions, the players so close it almost seemed that you could touch them, the eccentric features of an old ballpark constructed to fit the contours of the allotted space. I watched the players, the dirt scars which marked the base paths, the knowledgeable fans shouting their imprecations and exhortations.

For years I had managed to stay away. I had formed the firmest of resolutions. I had given myself irrefutable reasons, expressed the most passionate of rejections. But I could not get away. Addiction or obsession, love or need, I was born a baseball fan and a baseball fan I was fated to remain.”


Yesterday’s writers – Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Tomorrow’s writer – Mollie Gregory

Source: Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir. Touchstone, 1998. ISBN 0-684-84795-7. Dedication: page 7, Excerpt: pages 45-48, Epilogue excerpt: pages 253-254.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
Center: Doris Kearns Goodwin from the website achievement.org