Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America

by David Halberstam

  One of the most famous features on the Yankees’ train was the bridge game. (Poker, starting in the McCarthy years, was a no-no, even a low-stake game. Tensions that already existed could have been exacerbated by the loss of money. “For sure the best poker player will be the utility infielder and he’ll be taking money off my All-Star shortstop. It always works like that,” McCarthy once said. “Always tears the team apart. My rule against poker is real—don’t break it.”) In the thirties the bridge game had included Gehrig; Dickey, the catcher; Red Rolfe, the third baseman; and Arndt Jorgens, the third-string catcher. Charlie Keller watched the game closely when he first came up, edging closer to it all the time. When Gehrig finally retired, Dickey, who was fond of Keller, asked him if he played. “A little,” said Keller, showing that he was properly modest. They asked him to join them. When the game was over Dickey turned to Keller and said sardonically, “Well, C, you didn’t lie. You said you played a little, and you play a little.” That meant that Keller was in the game, although it also meant that he had to start taking lessons from Dickey, the acknowledged master. Eventually, as the team changed, Henrich joined in, as did Curt Gowdy, a rookie broadcaster.

  Gowdy was a country boy from Wyoming who hunted and fished, and that helped him bridge the gap between the players and the press. In addition, a broadcaster, hired as he was by the team, was considered more trustworthy than a writer. Gowdy loved his new job and was thrilled by his easy acceptance by the players. He had almost blown it earlier in the season when the players were sitting around the bridge table late at night talking about McCarthy. He might be the Red Sox manager now, but their reverence for him remained. “Wasn’t he a bit of a drinker?” Gowdy asked, for he had heard that at the end of his New York tour McCarthy had gone on terrible three- and four-day benders.

  Even as the words came out of his mouth, he knew he had made a serious mistake. A quick frown came over Keller’s face. Gowdy excused himself and went to his compartment for the night. Keller followed him, and grabbed him. Keller was probably the strongest man on the team, and while there was no physical violence implicit in his action, it was a terrifying moment for the much smaller Gowdy.

  “I never want you to make another remark about Joe McCarthy like that,” Keller said.

  “I didn’t mean to say anything wrong,” Gowdy said.

  “Listen,” Keller said, “there might have been some trouble with drinking—I’m not saying there wasn’t. But he always protected us from the front office, and he protected us from the writers. He never said anything bad about us to the writers. There isn’t anyone on this team who wants to hear you say anything against him.”

  Then Keller told Gowdy a story. It was his rookie year, 1939. DiMaggio had been hurt in the spring and was unable to start the season. So Keller started and played brilliantly. He was hitting near .340 when DiMaggio was finally ready to return. That day McCarthy penciled DiMaggio in on the lineup, and Keller was crushed. It signified to him that there was no place on the Yankees for him. He went back into the locker room and started to cry. McCarthy was hardly a gentle man, but he nonetheless had sensed that there would be a problem. He went into the locker room to look for Keller and took him into his office. “Charlie,” he said, “you’re going to be a great Yankee star, believe me. You have to work on pulling the ball more, particularly in this ball park, because this is not a good park for you to be an opposite-field hitter. I’m not playing you today. I’m sitting you down for another player who’s the greatest player I’ve ever seen. But it’s there for you and it’s going to be a wonderful career. All you have to do is wait your turn and work on pulling the ball.” McCarthy had kept his word: Keller soon became a regular. He had been touched by this rough man’s sensitivity, by the fact that he had spoken to him in private, with no witnesses.

  When Keller finished telling the story, he patted Gowdy on the back, letting him know that there were no hard feelings. Nonetheless Gowdy was shaken because he knew that he had broken the unwritten rules of the inner club.

  The writers and players were friends but never peers. The players were apart: They were the ones who with 60,000 people watching had to stand up to the Bob Feller fastball, or had to pitch to Ted Williams with the bases loaded. That was the line, the line between doing it, and being the best in the world, and writing about it. Certain things could be written about—on-the-field activities, mostly. But other things, even if they clearly affected on-the-field behavior—for instance, serious drinking—could not be written about. Rather, it was the writer’s job, if the player was drunk, to get him safely back to his room (and it was the player’s job, if the writer was drunk, to get him back to his room). The writers observed the code because they cherished their jobs and considered themselves immensely privileged. They knew about the personal lives of the players, but that information was never to be used. Yet there was always a line separating them. Among the players there was the fear that perhaps some writer might write something unwelcome one day, the fear that although the writer might observe the code, he was outside it. He might slip and talk to his wife—and wives were outside the code. One spring Clare Trimble, the wife of Joe Trimble, seemed to be spending a lot of time with Vi Dickey, who was Bill Dickey’s wife. Soon the word came down that this was not a good idea, the wife of a player being too close to the wife of a writer.

  The tensions were always there. Lou Effrat remembered one time when he had been a young reporter and another writer named Bill Slocum got sick from eating a bad hot dog. The Yankee doctor gave Slocum some medicine. Someone mentioned it to Lou Gehrig, a man about whom it was believed nothing critical had ever been written. Gehrig said, “A writer sick—good, I hope he gave the son of a bitch rat poison.”

  Occasionally, open hostilities broke out. Joe Trimble of the Daily News was a constant critic of Nick Etten. One time Etten left his glove near first base during an inning and a foul ball rolled into it. Trimble wrote, “Etten’s glove fields better without Etten in it.” Another time Etten was so angered by what Trimble wrote that he tried to throw him off a train. John Lindell also hated Trimble, who had once informed his two million readers that Lindell was a plain, unadulterated bum. Lindell cut out the story and kept it in his wallet so he would never forget. But generally the relationship between the New York writers and players was amicable. It was a far cry from the Boston locker room, which was sometimes seen as an open war zone, mostly because of the way some writers harassed Williams.

  But that was largely the extent of it. It was not an iconoclastic era, in the coverage of sports or other news. There had been serious debate about whether Life magazine should publish photos of the American dead scattered on the beach of Tarawa. Sports reporting was even more timid. The writers were not even truly independent of the club, which bought their meals and paid for their hotel rooms and train rides. The writers were beholden to the players, and even more so to management. A writer did not take lightly a player’s side against management.

  In January 1949, when the sportswriters were preparing for their annual dinner, which was a major event in those days, they included a song about George Weiss, the Yankee general manager. They all loathed him, not just because he treated them badly but because he was perceived as a cold, petty, cheap man who treated the players badly. But they were afraid of him. Weiss had recently fired Bucky Harris, whom the writers liked, and Lou Effrat wrote a song for the show, to be sung by an actor playing Harris. “Lord of the House,” he would sing, “you turned out to be a louse.” It was too strong, the writers said, and finally it was toned down. When the actor sang it, he merely mouthed the word. With luck, the audience would guess it. Tame stuff, Effrat thought, and they kill it.

  The sportswriters loved the game, their jobs, and the prestige it gave them on the paper. They were not about to make waves. There was much talk when they were together about whether a certain story “hurt baseball,” an odd phrase for it implied that they not only had to cover the sport but protect it as well. Ther
e was a quiet consensus that such stories were to be avoided.

  They were an odd mix, the players and writers. The players were more often than not rural Southern Protestants; the writers were urban Irish and Jews. The writers were fifteen to twenty-five years older than the players. Some were even older than that. In 1949 Dan Daniel was fifty-nine. He had been covering baseball for forty years, and he was, in his own mind, if not in the minds of his colleagues, the official oracle of the sport. He had started on the old New York Herald when a stringer who covered the Dodgers in spring training wanted five dollars a day instead of three. That had angered the Herald’s sports editor, who, rather than pay such outrageous wages, wired back that he would send a college kid to cover the Dodgers. When Daniel started out, most reporters wrote their stories in pen and ink. He was one of the first men at the Herald to go to a typewriter. His legal name was Daniel Markowitz, but he did not use his last name at the injunction of his editor because of the era’s anti-Semitism. His byline was simply “By Daniel.” Soon that became “Dan Daniel.” When he asked his father if it was all right to change his name legally to Dan Daniel, his father had no objections. “Markowitz isn’t your real name anyway,” he said.

  By 1949 Daniel had been around so long that he had stopped going to the clubhouse to get quotes, since he had heard them all before. He knew with unfailing accuracy what a manager or a player would say. Once Joe McCarthy complained about some quote, claiming he had not said it. Daniel was hardly flustered—“Well, it’s what he should have said,” he noted. There was, his younger colleagues noted, no way to scoop him, even when they might beat him by a day on a story of a major trade. For the next day there would be a Daniel story and it would begin: “It came as no surprise to this reporter yesterday when the Yankees traded for ...”

  To the other young reporters he was somewhat self-important and pompous, his use of language outdated. As Red Smith once noted, the people he quoted in his stories did not say things, they exuberated or vehemed. Once when he was discussing an earlier pennant race, his friend Frank Graham said, “Oh, Dan, stop veheming.” In 1946, when the American League had crushed the National League 12-0 in the All-Star Game, he wrote that this proved the National League was in danger of becoming a minor league. Then in October, when the Cardinals beat the Red Sox in the World Series, he wrote that this showed that the American League was second-rate. When a colleague noted the inconsistency, Daniel was not at all disturbed. “That’s okay,” he said, “I’ve warned them both. Now they’re on their own.” By 1949 his age was beginning to show. Daniel sometimes fell asleep at games. “Shall we wake Daniel?” a reporter once asked Will Wedge of the Sun. “No,” Wedge replied, “he’s busy interviewing John McGraw.”

  In those days the job of a baseball writer was a cherished one. To the young journalists of the era who had not gone to college and who did not want to cover politics or foreign affairs, or who worked on papers that lacked foreign or Washington correspondents, it was the best job on the paper. Everyone coveted it. Trying to get a position as a beat baseball writer was like waiting for a Supreme Court justice to retire. It was a position held for life.

  John Drebinger of the Times was fifty-eight in 1949, and immensely proud of the fact that for twenty years he had written the Times’s page-one stories on every World Series game. He still had fifteen years to go until retirement, and when he did finally retire in 1964, at age seventy-three, he told Clifton Daniel, the Times’s managing editor, that there was no other job he had ever wanted. “No other job?” asked Daniel incredulously, for he was a former London and Moscow bureau chief who thought the jewels of the Times’s kingdom were its foreign posts. “No,” said Drebinger, “and I surely wouldn’t have taken yours.”

  When a beat job finally opened up, the new reporter became, overnight, the star of the paper. When he walked into the city room, all the other reporters clustered around him: He knew the stars of the baseball team, and he was full of the inside dope, even if he did not always write it. He was also the source of tickets for big games, something of which senior editors were always aware.

  But the job also had its drawbacks. The endless travel separated the writer from his family. (Effrat was away so much that his children called him Uncle Lou.) And he was loath to take vacations for fear that some younger member of the staff might come in and prove to be a better writer. Of Dan Parker, sports editor of the Mirror, it was said that he deliberately hired mediocre writers so that none would outshine him.

  The writers did not make a lot of money, but their salaries went surprisingly far because of the perks. In the late forties the base annual salary for a writer was perhaps $5,000 or $7,000. But thanks to the clubs, they stayed at the best hotels and ordered from room service. At spring training they went to Florida for two months. In truth, it was two months of sitting in the sun doing what they liked best—talking baseball—and then deciding among each other what the day’s story was. If their families were coming down, the club found them small houses and picked up the tab.

  They were catered to by the fans as good friends of the ballplayers. Once, Harold Rosenthal, a swing reporter for the Herald Tribune, wanted to wire his apartment so that his neighbors could hear his children if he and his wife went out for the evening. That way they wouldn’t have to hire a baby-sitter. This required a relatively complicated electrical procedure at that time. Rosenthal was given the name of someone at New York Bell, and he made the call. Harold Rosenthal? The baseball writer? Of course it could be done. By the way, how did the Yankee pitching look?

  Joe Trimble frequently experienced the same phenomenon. If he took his car to be repaired, the garage owner would look at the name. Trimble ... not the same one who covers the Yankees? We’ll have your car ready in an hour, Mr. Trimble.

  In any city with a halfway decent baseball team, nothing was more important than the box scores. The Daily News had a circulation of more than 2 million, and though its predominantly blue-collar readers did not thrill to its editorials bashing Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, they lived and died by its sports reporting. Its editors knew this. The great years of the News’s growth had coincided with the ascendance of Babe Ruth. The paper had made him its personal property, and that had set a tradition. Whenever there was a star athlete in the city, the News would assign a reporter to him full-time. And the Mirror, of course, would take up the challenge.

  In the early evening, the News and Mirror delivery trucks raced through the city to make their drops. During the baseball season men and boys would eat their dinners early and leave home to line up at the candy stands, which were near the drops: Fifty-seventh and Eighth Avenue, Seventy-second and Broadway, etc. As they waited they argued the merits of the best players on the three local teams. At around seven-thirty P.M. stacks of paper would be thrown off the trucks and quickly unbundled. The fans would pick up their papers, argue a bit more, and head home, usually before eight-thirty. The papers recounted what they had often already heard, and, even more important, gave the box scores.

  Among the people who waited faithfully by the candy store in Flatbush at Avenue M and East Seventeenth Street with his two cents for the Daily News was a boy named Maury Allen, who was sixteen and a half in 1949. Maury Allen was a passionate baseball fan, which was not unusual, although as a Yankee fan in Brooklyn he was unusual. Allen, who later became a prominent sportswriter, would recall those days with wonder. His boyhood was about baseball. He and his friends played ball all day, listened to radios on the front steps, and argued endlessly about which team was better, or which player was better—DiMaggio or Williams. But the arguments did not end there: They ranged beyond the question of the ballplayers themselves to the question of who was the best broadcaster, Mel Allen or Red Barber, or the best reporter, Dick Young or Joe Trimble or Milton Gross. If you rooted for the Dodgers you rooted for Young, who was the liveliest and most irreverent sportswriter of his day, and Barber, whose voice was Southern and crisp and whose use of language was elegant.
If you liked the Yankees you spoke of Mel Allen, Trimble, or Ben Epstein, a former wrestler who wrote for the Mirror.

  In retrospect, the singularity of the baseball connection in those days struck Allen. No one on his block had a television set. His friends were baseball fans. Football fans, with the exception of those who rooted, with some help from the arch-diocese, for Notre Dame, were rich people who had been to college, and who rooted for their college teams. They did not live in his neighborhood. Nor were Allen and his buddies interested in singers. They did not argue the relative abilities of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. A generation later, young people were more hip and more affluent. They were linked by their feelings about rock and roll stars, about the television shows they watched, and about the cars or motorcycles they drove. But in these simpler times it was only baseball. Probably, he thought, it meant that boys were more separated from girls in that era.

  Monday, May 2, 1949, was the worst day of young Maury Allen’s life. He was the local baseball bookie, and he had to pay out. He had been beaten and beaten big. Small baseball pools were not unusual in that era. The idea was quite simple: Other kids, usually friends, would each put down a dime and pick three hitters. If one’s chosen hitters got six hits among them, Allen would have to pay back sixty cents. Generally such pools were quite profitable: About thirty kids might bet, and it was rare that more than one or two would beat the system. Allen usually made about eight or ten dollars a week, which was a nice sideline. It was easy to figure out how his clients would bet. The Yankee fans would invariably offer up the three best Yankee hitters. The other kids, the Yankee haters, would bet on whichever team was in town playing the Yankees.