by Roger Kahn
Olga Rockow Kahn, who had majored in ancient history at Cornell, “under Westerman, the Professor Westerman,” was a slight, forceful woman with smoldering eyes and round red cheeks. “Olga the Opple” they called her at Cornell, and Olga the Opple was a classicist. While teaching English literature and composition at Thomas Jefferson High to pupils named Gotkin, Flaum and Kantor, she longed to live the Athenian Experience. “My God,” she complained, “before some silly game with Samuel Tilden the organized cheering in assembly, that shouting ‘Tee Jay Aitch Ess,’ was Spartan, or perhaps simply animal.” She took secret pride in the intellectual level of the TJHS English Department but never relaxed her vigilance for Philistinism. She entertained elegantly, taught five days a week, relished radical theater and feasted on concerts conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, which still left time to exorcise Philistinism from her home. At three I was required from time to time to mount a wicker chair, being careful not to grind heels into the cane, and announce to imprisoned guests, “I’m studying to be a doctor of philosophy with a major in psychology.” Many chuckled and a few, but not enough, winced. Although my hands were small and my digital coordination appeared inferior, I began piano lessons at five.
The friendly cow
All red and white
She gives us milk and cream.
Now can you play that (said the straw-haired piano teacher) and see if you can make the piano sound a little bit like a cow. How does a cow sound? Mooo-c-under-middle-c-no-that-one-that-one-moooo-hold-the-note-moooooo. Ah, that was fun. Olga, he may have real talent. (My mother could pay real bills during the Depression.) Olga would not clutter my mind with vagrant tales of goops or Winken, Blinken and Nod. Instead, she worked bedtime stories into a well-disguised course in Greek mythology. By seven I knew the Lethe from the Styx (if I forget thee, River Lethe, let my right hand lose its cunning), and I knew the Olympians from the Titans and how Hephaestus, son of Zeus and Hera, god of blacksmiths, jewelers, goldsmiths, masons and carpenters, built himself a throne from every different metal and precious stone. Olga was the first of her friends to give birth, which stimulated her pride and overstimulated a sense of destiny. Her son, she said, “might, mind you just might, strike Promethean fire before he’s through.” There was a history of accomplishment in the family. Her own mother, Emily Rosenthal, had graduated from Medical College in Berne and, about 1900, became one of the first women physicians in Brooklyn. Dr. Rosenthal was slight, her practice was small and it was her misfortune to die before reaching forty. But the brief career appeared brilliant to Olga. “And we may have another brilliant one,” she remarked to my father, “if he’s given the chance, if only you’d stop that incessant ball throwing with him in the hall.”
“Applesauce,” said Gordon J. Kahn. “Bosh.” He was lying on a blue velvet sofa, his black shoes resting on a cream-colored antimacassar, as he completed the crossword puzzle in the New York Sun. “A seven-letter clinical word for lockjaw is trismus,” he announced, and turned 45 degrees to go to sleep. Gordon Kahn taught history at Thomas Jefferson and basic English to adults at a night school, which allowed time for a game of catch, a crossword puzzle and a brief nap each afternoon. His relaxation, like his life, was carefully ordered. His forebears, settled people, came originally from Strasbourg. Usually Jews from Western Europe enjoyed a social advantage over Ostjuden. This was canceled in my parents’ case. Not only had Olga attended Cornell, while Gordon worked his way through City College; both of her parents bore the title of Doctor. Also, Gordon’s father had been a butcher. Olga needed no heraldry to trace sources of persistent Philistinism in the household.
Gordon Kahn, once nicknamed Genghis, claimed to have played third base for City College. He explained carefully that he was a good fast-ball hitter, bothered by curves, and in the field he covered no more than a half dollar. This would seem to contradict my age-ability hypothesis, but it does not. Gordon Kahn was too sophisticated to have claimed stardom. He mentioned weaknesses as well as strengths, even stressing them somewhat in order to build plausibility. He was five feet seven, and horseshoe bald by thirty, but he did have powerful arms—“from hoisting sides of beef,” he said, goading Olga—and I saw him hit with power in softball games. Years afterward, when I could have found the City College baseball line-up of 1923 in newspaper files, choosing to believe, I lacked the heart to check.
Gordon Kahn possessed a phenomenal, indiscriminate memory. Snatches of great poetry, subplots from inferior detective stories, mathematical formulae, themes from Brahms, lyrics from a Ziegfeld Follies, phrases from political speeches, measured sentences from Jefferson, and the sequence of roads that intersected a Westchester parkway forever were imprinted on his brain. When a loud, abrasive former union organizer struck the format for the radio program “Information Please,” he at once consulted Gordon Kahn. My father used his recall as a party trick and to win arguments. “Witch hazel comes from a shrub of the genus hamamelidaceous, not from a tree. It’s explained on the upper part of page 206, in Croft’s Dictionary of Trees and Shrubs.” Dan Golenpaul, having heard him, asked his help and my father subsequently bent “Information Please” to his own inclination that Brahms, Jefferson, Shelley and baseball could and indeed should fascinate equally. As the program grew, and Gordon stopped teaching night school, our dinners became contentious question bees.
Gordon: Three lines of poetry, please, with the word “light.”
Olga: When the lamp is shatter’d, the light in the dust lies dead.
Dr. Rockow: Waat light troo yonder winder breaks?
All: Roger?
Himself: We were sailing along on moonlight bay.
Gordon: Fine.
Dr. Rockow: Waat is daat?
Olga: Not a poem, certainly. And he’s not eating.
The delicious attention to the only child, whose hair curled and whose eyes were large and dark, was diluted by the arrival, with the New Deal, of a sister, Emily for her late grandmother, the doctor, very round and very blonde, with a round blonde curl, trained by Elisabeth, a methodical plain-faced broadbodied governess from Austria. The household did not end with resident kin. Elisabeth, brown-haired and taciturn, had been a village kindergarten teacher until Mitteleuropa began to go mad and—bitter lines around the mouth may have told of this or only of bad dentures—she had to come to America, where she kept house for Jews. She was efficient and free of ordinary vices. Her only indulgence was attending the New York Philharmonic Thursday nights. She earned $60 a month, plus board, and idolized Toscanini and Beethoven. Her radio played classical music constantly and she sneered at Olga Kahn’s taste. “Your mother likes Koussevitzky only because he is handsome,”
Elisabeth said. “He is not a musician. Toscanini is a musician.” When Dr. Rockow opened the bathroom door once, when she was in the tub, Elisabeth screamed as though scalded. Then she screamed as though scarred, “Don’t look!”
“All right,” Dr. Rockow said. “Stop getting so excited.” Later he told Gordon Kahn that if a woman wanted priwacy to bathe, she locked the door before taking off her robe.
What a house. Two parents teaching. A grandfather pulling teeth. A housekeeper screeching. A sister pouting. A cleaning woman arriving for “the heavy” work. A radio program, Brahms, sex, poetry, Karl Marx and Freud. The bond between my father and me was baseball.
First a little toy bat came and we climbed out a rear window that led from the apartment to a pitch roof over a stationery store. “I’m going to show you how to use that thing,” said Genghis Kahn. “Take your stance. Not that way. Sideways. You’re resting the bat on your shoulder. Hold it off the shoulder. Not that far off. Elbows out. Hands together. Bat a little higher. Be comfortable! Oops, my fault, a little high. Oops, try to keep a level swing. Oops, you swung a little late. Well, that’s three strikes, but today I’ll give you four. Oops, hold that darn bat tighter! You could have plunked me in the shins.”
“Gore-don.” Olga stressed the second syllable and enunciated it as the title of
an Oxford tutor. “Bring the child in immediately. The roof is no place for him to play. He could fall off.”
Gordon Kahn had gray-green eyes that lost their kindness when he was rebuked. “He can’t get the ball off it, much less himself.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” And to me, “Let’s go in. It isn’t that important for the moment anyway.”
“Do you like this playing baseball?” Olga said, with faint, obvious distaste. She and Hephaestus had been kept waiting in the living room.
“I really like playing baseball. I think I’d like to play first base for the Dodgers.”
“Oh, God,” Olga cried, pressing a hand to one round cheek. “A ball player, is that what we’re raising?”
“First basemen have to be tall,” Gordon Kahn said with great authority. “With his genes, I wouldn’t worry.”
“Well, I suppose we’ll have to humor him,” Olga said, and a few days later brought home a baseball suit, complete with genuine Dizzy Dean insignia.
“Ma! Who wants a suit like that? Dizzy Dean is a Cardinal. I’m a Dodger.”
“Gore-don, I think you’d better have a talk with him. His manners and sense of gratitude are incomplete.”
Although on two occasions Gordon Kahn clipped his firstborn child with righthand punches, he had to be fearfully provoked. Now he simply walked into the hallway and without a word we began to catch. “Other people’s feelings,” he mumbled presently. “No disgrace in Dean. He won thirty ball games last year. Your mother is a sensitive woman. It’s never dull around here. Don’t push the ball when you throw. Try to snap it.”
When Babe Ruth, drinking through his last days as a ball player, came to Ebbets Field with the Boston Braves, Gordon said that he wanted to take me on Saturday. “Ruth is more exciting striking out than somebody else hitting a home run,” he announced at dinner. “And as a historian I can assure you that he is part of American history. He should be seen.”
“Wance I umpire,” Dr. Rockow said. He was eating buttered asparagus one at a time, pinching the base between thumb and forefinger and swinging the stalk into his mouth. “Firrrst pitch werrry high, but I said strike. Next pitch werrrry good, so I said ball.” Dr. Rockow, my father and I all laughed. Olga glared at a stalk Dr. Rockow dangled above his face and said, with great determination, “Is the Boston playing Sibelius’ Fifth Friday night?”
“No,” Gordon Kahn said. “They’re playing the Seventh.”
“I just wish,” Olga said, “that Sibelius were a little less diffuse.”
“Is Ray Benge pitching, I hope, Dad?”
Olga’s anti-Philistine glare danced from me to my grandfather and finally settled on my father. “Talk later,” Gordon said solemnly. “Eat now.”
“And later,” Olga said, “if he must talk, encourage him to talk about something of consequence.”
Guilt made my father furtive on Saturday morning. Were there any errands he could run for Olga? Could he get something from the Schenectady Avenue library? A new criticism of Whitman? No? Was there enough meat for the weekend? He might pick out a good bottom round? Not necessary? Fine, fine, but he was alive and kicking and if Olga needed anything, she had only to ask.
“Could we have a catch?” I said.
“No. Not this morning. Don’t you have schoolwork?”
“Just some junk.”
“Homework is not junk. When I was at Boys’ High, we had three to four hours of homework a night and we were glad of it. We considered it a privilege to be able to work that hard. And in City College—when I took a course called vector analysis—well, you wouldn’t understand.”
At two o’clock the old Boys’ High homework lover and CCNY vector analyst silently led me onto a trolley at Kingston Avenue and St. Marks Place. After we had ridden three blocks, he began to relax. “Ruth swings upward,” he said. “They call that uppercutting and it’s not good for most batters, but Ruth is a special batter. When he rides in an auto, he distinguishes other cars’ license plates five seconds sooner than anybody else. That’s the sort of eyes he has. In one World Series, he pointed to the bleachers and then hit a home run exactly where he pointed. He could have been a great pitcher if he hadn’t decided to become a home run hitter. He’s never been known to make a mental mistake. He never throws to the wrong base.”
We got off at the corner of Empire Boulevard and Bedford Avenue. Only two blocks away loomed the brownish bulk of Ebbets Field. Babe Ruth did not play that afternoon. Someone said he had a head cold. “What he prob’ly has is a snootful,” said a man in a straw hat and suspenders.
“What’s a snootful?” I said.
“Head cold,” said my father. “A snoot is a nose. With a cold, your nose is full.”
“Hey, that’s a good one,” said the man in the straw hat. “That was quick. You think quick, Mac.”
“I do,” my father agreed. His voice was normally deep. Now he managed to lower it half an octave.
“Ain’t it a shame,” said the man, “there ain’t more people? Bad times, I guess, but if they’d ever win, they’d draw.”
“They’d hit a million,” Gordon Kahn announced. His full voice rang among the empty seats behind first base. “Unquestionably they’d hit a million with a serious pennant contender in Brooklyn.”
It surprised me that my father had abandoned his reserve as soon as we sat down. That man in the straw hat lacked a front tooth and wore no jacket. “Watcha thinka this team?” he said.
“Need one more pitcher and a shortstop,” my father said.
“Nuthin’ wrong at third, though.”
“Nope, but he’s only one man.”
“Who plays third, Dad?”
“Jersey Joe Stripp.”
“And, sonny,” said the man in the straw hat, “he’s a professional and don’t you ever forget it.”
“That’s right,” said Gordon Kahn. “Never underestimate Jersey Joe Stripp.”
The two men chattered on and it began to seem less strange, my father talking to a toothless man without a jacket. The Dodgers would finish a poor fifth. The Braves would fire Ruth and finish last. But amid the spellbinding conversation of grown men, these inglorious teams transfixed me. What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game. I studied Stripp and Frenchy Bordagaray and Buzz Boyle and Tony Cuccinello. Stripp flagged a line drive backhand. That was something. He dove and reached across his body for the ball and rolled over twice and didn’t drop it. My father and I and the straw-hatted man jumped up and cheered together. In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might even have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a man and who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer.
Now the streets beckoned and ball games ruled streets before the automobile pandemic. Interminable, fierce, ingenious improvisations were set on asphalt every afternoon. Stickball is famous. Willie Mays played stickball, and Duke Snider maintains that never, not even the year that he hit .341 for the Dodgers, could he match locals at stickball in his summer neighborhood, Bay Ridge. “I couldn’t hit the damn thing with the damn skinny broomstick,” Snider says. You needed a stick and a red rubber ball manufactured by Spalding, sold for ten cents and called, no one knew why, the Spaldeen. The pitcher threw the Spaldeen on one bounce at a manhole-cover home place, and by pinching the ball, “fluking it” we said, he made the bounce eccentric. You could run up and swing the light stick like a whip, but you looked ridiculous if you whipped the stick and the squeezed ball fluked into your chest. A ball walloped to a roof was lost, so on the roof was out. Stickball produced centerfield hitters, who had seldom touched a bat, could not recognize a curve, but with broomsticks were murder against fluked Spaldeens.
If there were no sticks, or if the police were running one of their sporadic campa
igns against stickball (“Now look, son, you could hurt a lady hittin’ one hard with a stick”), there was punch ball. The police tolerated punch ball. Somewhere, in the windy heights of Fiorello H. La Guardia’s administration, a command decision had been taken. Attention: All Precinct Commanders, Desk Sergeants, Undercover Men. Calling All Cars. Punch Ball is Okay. Legal, even on St. Marks Place, Brooklyn West. But no stickball. Repeat. No stickball. Stickball is forbidden. Be on the alert for stickball players, particularly in the area of St. Marks Place. Be prepared to seize sticks. Use necessary force. A kid could hurt a lady hittin’ one hard with a stick.
The stick was crucial. Punch ball was not much of a game because you couldn’t punch a ball very far without Popeye forearms. Slapball, played in a chalked triangle, was delicate. Girls played slapball. Sometimes, you threw a Spaldeen against the white cement steps of 907 St. Marks. In stoop baseball, a Spaldeen rebounding safely from the steps to the street was a single or a double; a rebound reaching the far sidewalk was a triple. One carrying clear into Mrs. Beale’s yard was a home run, but perilous. Mrs. Beale always called the precinct. Attention Cars Eleven, Eight and Four. Proceed at once to Kingston and St. Marks. Boys playing stoop baseball. Spaldeen has landed in Mrs. Beale’s privet. Break up game. Confiscate Spaldeen. Be careful of hedge. Watch crocuses, Cars Eleven, Eight and Four. That is all.
In alleys safe from the prowl cars we played pitching-in, the only street game really close to baseball. The hitter held a stick. The pitcher threw a tennis ball, from which the fuzz had been shaved, at a chalk rectangle behind the hitter. A good pitcher made the shorn tennis ball jump, and a killer pitch was the high overhand curve. It passed the batter above the brows, then dropped down into the rectangle for a strike. If the tennis ball struck you, it stung briefly, but no one was afraid of a tennis ball. That was all the difference. Soft dream and hard reality. Once hit by a real baseball, a boy (or man) crumpled.