Doris and Her Beloved Dodgers Have Moved On

Doris Kearns Goodwin went home recently, but it wasn’t there.

Old neighbors, some in their 90s, had gathered from afar to meet her. Schoolmates and childhood friends arrived bearing dusty yearbooks. But her childhood haunts were gone--either boarded up or under new ownership.

“Everybody was gone from the block,” Goodwin says of the stretch of Southard Avenue in Rockville Centre, N.Y., that was her entire universe as a child. “As you go forward in your life, things are lost behind you. That whole part of my life was gone.”

All childhood neighborhoods eventually disappear, but not all are lucky enough to have had their own resident historian in the making. Southard Avenue circa 1950 had Doris Kearns, a precocious redhead who would grow up to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer.

Having written big, sweeping books on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys, Doris Kearns Goodwin turned inward and intimate for her latest volume, “Wait Till Next Year” (Simon & Schuster).

It is a charming, breezy memoir of a girl who grew up as a fan of the misbegotten Brooklyn Dodgers. In a lesser writer’s hands, that would be all “Wait Till Next Year” is, and that would probably be enough. Goodwin, though, doesn’t abandon her historian’s eye, even for so personal a story as this. And so the book serves also as a history of its time: the shift of the population from city to suburb, the advent of television, the beginnings of the Cold War.

Through all the changes both personal and sociological, there was one constant: baseball. Or so it seemed for a while. Eerily presaging her own personal loss, the Dodgers would leave Brooklyn for the Left Coast in 1957, breaking Goodwin’s heart and signaling the end of her childhood. The following year, when she was 15, her mother would die and her family would leave Southard Avenue.

“It seemed important to me to re-create the circle,” Goodwin said in an interview after a recent reading and signing. “That’s the wonder of writing. I feel closer to my parents now because of the writing of this book.”

Like so many fans, Goodwin was introduced to baseball by her father. A bank examiner, he gave 6-year-old Doris a score book and taught her how to record every play so that she could re-create the game for him when he got home from work. Unaware that newspapers would print stories and box scores the next morning, she thought she was her father’s only source of information on their beloved Dodgers and took to the task as seriously as she would undertake her historical research as an adult.

Listening to Red Barber’s radio broadcasts, she recorded every play and later recounted the action to her father after dinner. It was her first introduction to the power of narrative: At first, she would cut to the chase, wanting to give her father the final score, but later realizing her tale would be more effective if she built up suspense before giving away the ending.

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She was a fan during some of the best times, as well as some of the worst. Every year, her Dodgers were contenders, even winning the pennant many years, but the World Series continually eluded them. Her favorite player was Jackie Robinson, although at the time she wasn’t fully cognizant of his importance as the first black man to play in the majors. To her, he was simply the Dodgers’ dazzling second baseman, speedy and daring, ever dancing off the bases and threatening to steal one, even home.

Although she lived in the suburbs of Long Island, she and her neighbors kept their city alliances: If you were from the Bronx, you were a Yankees fan; from Manhattan, you’d follow the Giants. And if you were from Brooklyn, as her father was, you were a Dodgers fan.

These competing alliances made for a lively neighborhood. Goodwin’s best friend, Elaine, was a Yankees fan; Max and Joe at the butcher shop were avid Giants fans who delighted in teasing their little “Ragmop,” as they called the young Goodwin. They put up a board in their window and let Ragmop record the scores of both teams.

After the devastating 1951 playoffs when the Giants’ Bobby Thomson hit “the shot heard around the world” to snatch the pennant from the Dodgers, the devastated Goodwin began avoiding the shop so she wouldn’t have to fill out that hated final score on the window board.

“It was the worst moment in my life as a fan,” she writes. A week later, Max and Joe sent her a dozen red roses and a note saying they missed her. She returned and completed the season’s record.

In 1955, she and the Dodgers were finally rewarded. Doris and her mother went to Brooklyn to meet her father at work and join the celebration in the streets. It is a lovely scene, and an enviable one for anyone who has waited, and waited some more, for their team to finally go all the way.

Goodwin arrived in Baltimore recently armed with condolences for the vanquished Orioles. She gamely stopped for a photo shoot at Camden Yards, the first of the new-old parks that seek to evoke the Ebbets Fields of the past. Goodwin said it reminded her of Ebbets because of the feeling of being right in the city, but there is the sense that nothing can compare to the park of her childhood.

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She got a full tour of the park, inadvertently, as the person who let her in for the photo shoot ended up locking her in as well. Circling the stands, her black high heels clicked and echoed through the emptiness. Finally, she was released with barely enough time to get all the way to Pikesville for her reading.

She was a sport, though, and laughed about the adventure that, as a child without the responsibilities of a book tour, she might have enjoyed even more.

Though her memoir is a break from her more scholarly books, she retains a historian’s perspective on her own story. To write it, she searched for old friends and interviewed her two older sisters.

“If I felt I didn’t have baseball as a theme to connect, I’m not sure I would have been comfortable writing a straight memoir,” she says. “If you’re a novelist, maybe you can feel comfortable just writing a memoir off the top of your head. As an historian, I felt I had to do the research. It became a collective memory; one memory triggered another.”

Much of the book deals with her Catholicism, and how the cycles of the church took over when the cycles of baseball ended. She gave a St. Christopher’s medal to one slumping Dodger, and delighted when he began hitting. And the Dodgers even figured into her confessions, as she felt the need to be absolved for the sin of wishing harm to their opponents.

This year, the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, has brought back even more memories for Goodwin. She met his widow, Rachel, recently when, in a perfect circling of her interests, Mrs. Robinson was given an award named for Eleanor Roosevelt.

One of the sweetest moments in “Wait Till Next Year” tells of the time the young Doris received Jackie Robinson’s autograph. She had brought her autograph book, filled with girlfriends’ sentimental messages like “I’ll be your friend till rubber tires or Niagara Falls.” Robinson began reading some of them and joked that he would surely be in good company. He signed it, “Keep your smile a long, long while.”

Much of these diamond memories will be familiar to viewers of Ken Burns’ massive documentary, “Baseball,” in which Goodwin was the lone woman among the talking heads. In fact, the reaction to her appearance in the documentary, which came out in 1994 as did her Roosevelt book, “No Ordinary Time,” led her to write this memoir, realizing the strong pull that baseball retains on its fans.

Unfortunately, her Robinson autograph and the childhood score books were lost as she moved farther and farther from Southard Avenue. She and her husband, Richard Goodwin, also a writer, live in Concord, Mass., and have three grown sons.

And, of course, Goodwin has managed to become a fan of the team that most closely duplicates her hapless Brooklyn Dodgers: the Boston Red Sox.