A simpler life is celebrated

Early in “State of Grace,” a memoir of Baltimore Sun reporter Robert Timberg’s youth in the 1950s and the early 1960s, he sends signals that it will be a tale of some bitterness, even surliness. Centering his book on his years playing football for a successful sandlot football team, the Lynvets, he shows resentment for the divisions in society that he sensed:

“By the late 1960s, the baby boomers, at least many of the more affluent and better educated among them, had rewritten the social contract in ways that few of the Lynvets would ever decipher. Along the way, they hijacked the culture, employing it to celebrate themselves, to exalt their lifestyle, and to ridicule and otherwise diminish those who weren’t them and didn’t want to be.”

A reporter since 1973, Timberg is the author of “John McCain: An American Odyssey” and “The Nightingale’s Song,” a chronicle of five well-known graduates, like himself, of the U.S. Naval Academy and the war in Vietnam. As the book proceeds, his attitude becomes more nuanced and subtler, unfolding as an impressive story of life in lower-middle-class Queens and Brooklyn, as lived by those who emerge from it or are pulled under.

The book’s title refers, for practicing Roman Catholics, to the time between confession, absolution and the next big sin. “Twilight Time” is the name of the Platters’ 1958 song, ubiquitous on the radio then: “Heavenly shades of night are falling / It’s Twilight Time.”

His Lynvets sandlot football team and its tough, good coach, Larry Kelly, are the emotional center of the book. The team, he writes, was where its members “found a toehold on our better selves during a troubled time in our lives.” Timberg draws sharp sketches of his teammates. Many of them the children and grandchildren of Irish and Italian immigrants, their horizons were bounded by New York City and the yet-unreformed Roman Catholic Church. Their futures were uncertain; in the present, carousing and alcohol became a natural part of daily life.

Their stories, with Timberg’s own, give the book its chief value as a look at a certain group of people at a certain time in history. He spares no details of his own difficult life: an underachieving father (Jewish), a beautiful, alcoholic mother (Irish), affectionate sisters who became young Timberg’s responsibility.

The Lynvets gave Timberg the structure he needed in his uneasy life. So did the Catholic Church, which he joined at 15. So did the Naval Academy. Timberg does not brag about it, but he was ambitious and determined to break out and improve himself. He got himself into Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, St. John’s College in Brooklyn and then into Annapolis. In his first year as a plebe he was tempted to drop out, but the knowledge that if he did he would let down his Lynvets buddies kept him in. He joined the 1st Marine Division and was wounded in Vietnam.

Timberg writes that he hopes, with this memoir, “to pay homage to a time, for me and the nation, when the path to an honorable future seemed as straightforward as playing hard, hitting clean and not fumbling the ball.” “State of Grace” fulfills that hope, offering us not only an affectionate picture of a time now past but also the story of a life lived with honor. *