Beyond the Lunch Pail

Amid the mad swirl of a pennant race, all it takes for Ned Colletti to find his center is to tour his hardscrabble hometown in a rental car. The sights of his childhood homes and haunts bring back memories, to be sure, but it is the sounds that remind him how he pushed himself to move forward, onward, upward.

The roar of jets flying into O’Hare airport directly over his family’s tiny brick house.

The screech of train brakes at the Bensenville Freight Yard a block away.

The low rumble of trucks pulling out of the machine shop across the street.

Growing up, the clatter built inside Colletti in times of stress. And here he was, decades later, nearing the end of his first season as Dodgers general manager, his reshaping of the roster lauded throughout baseball, reflecting on how he made it from there to here, and why he is pulled back again every chance he gets.

Colletti steered the car into the parking lot of East Leyden High and recalled a moment when the noise became so deafening he thought his head would burst.

It was 1972 and he stood in his counselor’s office, asking about college. The counselor took a look at his transcripts and pointed through the window to the rusting Thompson Steel sign obscuring the horizon.

“He told me get over there and apply,” Colletti said. “I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘You aren’t college material.’ ”

Maybe it was the subliminal swirl of planes, trains and trucks. Maybe it was his mother’s subtle prodding for him to achieve what she’d longed for and lost.

Colletti wasn’t going to work in any steel mill.

The respect and loyalty he’d learned in this blue-collar Chicago suburb didn’t mean he had to toil for low wages all day and sit on the front porch at night fretting like his dad and uncles and the fathers of his friends.

Those planes were coming from somewhere, and those trains and trucks were bound for somewhere too. There was something out there for him, he was sure of that, and it was time to get going.

*

Now that he’s moving, he can’t stop. He has made it, but won’t allow himself to believe it.

Maybe that comes from a life spent behind the scenes, raised among people content to scrape by, then serving long apprenticeships with the Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants.

Colletti is restless and anxious, even after tearing down and rebuilding the Dodgers from the manager’s office to the clubhouse in a whirlwind that began last winter. He wants to please everyone on his side, from owner Frank McCourt to Dodgers fans, and he wants to show everyone who isn’t, from those in baseball who doubted him to that counselor, wherever he might be.

“I just don’t want to let anyone down,” Colletti said.

So the wheels never stop turning. The Bensenville Freight Yard has nothing on stately Dodger Stadium when it comes to interstate commerce. Colletti brought in productive free agents such as Rafael Furcal, Kenny Lofton and Nomar Garciaparra. He shipped out perceived bad apples such as Milton Bradley and Odalis Perez.

He acquired young talent such as Andre Ethier and Wilson Betemit while holding onto homegrown prospects such as Russell Martin, Chad Billingsley, Jonathan Broxton and Matt Kemp. And he topped off the collection by adding a priceless antiquity, pitcher Greg Maddux, and a thrift-store find, outfielder Marlon Anderson.

The deals gained approval back home, where Colletti maintains regular contact with numerous relatives and friends.

“He thinks through things methodically, he weighs the plusses and the minuses,” said Colletti’s brother, Doug, a commercial portfolio manager in Chicago. “He relies on people more than other GMs might. He listens and seeks advice.”

Colletti, 52, appreciated the value of a dollar at a young age. He said his father, Ned Sr., worked from dawn to dusk six days a week, but often sent his son to the neighborhood delicatessen to ask for groceries on credit because payday was Friday and by Wednesday his wallet was empty.

That experience alone would make missing the playoffs after spending $100 million on payroll difficult for Colletti to stomach. The Dodgers already have won 11 more games than last season, but are as exasperating as they are exhilarating.

Although the prospect of missing the playoffs terrifies Colletti, he has come to terms with baseball’s capriciousness.

“You depend on so many people to live up to expectations,” he said. “It’s proven to you every day that while you try to predict performance and be as prepared as possible, the only thing you know for sure is that you’ll never know for sure.”

*

Colletti’s management style is alternately expansive and taut, outgoing and obsessive, flexible and dogmatic. But the consistent thread is action. Decisions are reached. Trades are consummated. Nothing stays on the drawing board for long.

It’s an approach that reflects where he came from -- and where he didn’t.

He wasn’t a professional player. He isn’t the relative of a powerful baseball man. He isn’t an Ivy League whiz kid.

Instead he climbed rung by rung, from a community college a few miles from Franklin Park to Northern Illinois University to hockey beat writer for a failing Philadelphia newspaper to a public relations job with the Cubs to a front-office opportunity with the Giants that evolved into his becoming General Manager Brian Sabean’s right-hand man.

Neither of Colletti’s parents nor his numerous aunts, uncles and older cousins attended college. His mother, Dolores, had aspirations of going to music school and becoming an opera singer, but she married young and stayed home to raise Ned and Doug.

She passed on her dreams to her sons, emphasizing that higher education was something they could attain. Adjacent to Colletti’s first home -- a 30-by-21-foot converted garage behind an uncle’s house -- was a school bus stop.

“I’d tell Ned, ‘Those children are going to grade school, high school and college,” Dolores said. “It was more or less like programming.”

Colletti’s mother also nurtured his love of baseball. World Series games were played during the day in the 1960s, and she promised as he left the house for school that she would keep track of the action.

“I’d describe what happened to every batter in longhand on a pad of paper, and when he got home he could relive the game,” she said.

By then his parents had moved to the corner of Pacific Avenue and George Street -- named for town founder Lesser Franklin’s office boy. The bargain price of $8,500 for the house was due to the unrelenting noise from airplanes descending into O’Hare, manufacturing plants along Pacific and the freight yard behind the plants.

“Our windows were open in the summer because we had no air conditioning,” Colletti said. “And the trains ran on diesel, so it smelled bad.”

For relief he would walk to Joe and Al’s Deli a few blocks away. Sometimes Cubs third baseman Ron Santo would be there, eating a prosciutto sandwich.

Colletti stopped by the bustling deli during his visit to the neighborhood when the Dodgers were in Chicago recently and said hello to owner Joe Gapastione’s grandchildren, who run the day-to-day operations.

They pulled a green metal index card box from a drawer and Colletti’s eyes widened. It was the same box that 40 years earlier held grocery tabs for his and other families who needed credit until payday.

“It was ingrained that you had to watch what you spent and be wise with how you spent it,” Colletti said. “We bought such small portions of everything, a couple slices of ham, a small hunk of cheese.”

As he drove through the quiet streets of modest, tidy homes and mom-and-pop businesses, Colletti proudly rattled off names of other East Leyden High alums who made their mark in sports: Denver Broncos Coach Mike Shanahan, former Boston Celtics coach Jimmy Rodgers, former Toronto Raptors general manager Glen Grunwald and former Independence Bowl executive director Glen Krupica.

“I love the fact I grew up here,” Colletti said. “It doesn’t stun you with its beauty or its setting. But every time I come back I make a point of driving through town. It’s a good point of reference. It’s good for humility. It keeps you connected with the basics of life.”

*

Colletti’s childhood memories center around family and baseball. There’s the one about his first Cubs game on April 15, 1961, the day before his seventh birthday. His dad splurged on box seats and he was awestruck by Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and the down-to-earth player he could relate to most, Santo.

Cubs center fielder Al Heist hit a grand slam in the ninth for a walk-off victory against the Hank Aaron-led Milwaukee Braves.

“From that day, I was hooked,” Colletti said.

As a teenager he spent summer days taking a train and two buses to get to Wrigley Field and paying 60 cents for a bleacher seat. He liked to sit in the front row in left-center field and scored every play much the way he does today.

His dad and uncles told him about the last time the Cubs were in the World Series, in 1945. Ned Sr. and his brothers Pasquale and Joe slept outside the ticket booth the night before the first game at Wrigley. Their youngest brother, Frank, wanted to go with them, but they wouldn’t let him because he was only 11.

“They promised they would take me the next time the Cubs were in the World Series,” Frank Colletti said with a wry smile. “Of course, I’m still waiting.”

Frank, 72, is the only living Colletti from his generation. Several of his brothers died in middle age, including Ned Sr., who contracted lung cancer in 1980 and died less than two years later at 51.

When his dad became ill, Colletti was a writer for the Philadelphia Journal making $20,000 a year covering the Flyers hockey team. He and his wife, Gayle, bought a duplex and had a baby on the way. The Journal folded, Colletti received a $14,000 offer to become a public relations assistant with the Cubs and called his dad for advice.

“You can’t do that,” Ned Sr. told him. A few days later he reconsidered, telling his son he ought to take the job.

“He knew he was dying and wanted to make sure my mom was taken care of,” Colletti said.

Ned Sr. died a few months later and Colletti immersed himself in his new job, eventually making the uncommon transition from public relations to baseball operations when Jim Frey became general manager.

“Ned did a lot of work, statistical stuff, contract stuff, that frankly, as a field man all my life, I wasn’t prepared to do,” Frey said.

“When you are a manager, you feel blessed to have somebody who plays hard, shows up early and thinks of the team first. In my role as general manager, I had a guy who showed all those qualities, and that was Ned.”

Colletti sat with Frey during games and one day mustered the courage to ask him if he could provide the front office with statistics that might help predict performance.

“I said yes and didn’t think much more about it,” Frey said. “Then we got together to prepare for negotiations after the winter meetings and it would have taken two stevedores to carry what he brought me. Everything on everybody.”

Eventually Frey was replaced by Larry Himes, and when Himes was fired in 1994, so was Colletti. The Giants hired him and within two years he was assistant general manager under Sabean, the job he held until leaving for the Dodgers.

Colletti negotiated the contracts of every player on the Giants’ 40-man roster, including Barry Bonds’ five-year, $90-million contract that will expire this year.

Even as Colletti’s career blossomed, he remained close to his roots. Within five minutes of the Giants’ victory over the St. Louis Cardinals that sent them to the 2002 World Series, Uncle Frank’s phone rang.

“It was Neddy, telling me I was finally going to a World Series,” Frank said. “He remembered.”

*

The guys with lunch pails and sweat stains in Franklin Park aren’t so far removed after all. Colletti does toil all day, and he sits at night in a porch-like suite overlooking Dodger Stadium.

During games, Colletti becomes Nervous Neddy -- outwardly anxious and blatantly superstitious, characteristics Gayle and their two grown children would instantly recognize.

Sometimes he is surrounded by his front-office brain trust -- assistant general manager Kim Ng, scouting and development VP Roy Smith, scouting director Logan White and special assistant Bill Lajoie. All but Lajoie were hired by previous Dodgers general managers Paul DePodesta or Dan Evans, and not until the pressure-packed trading deadline did Colletti feel they had become his people.

“When Ned came in, people wondered about their future and the future of the staff,” said Ng, who also was an assistant to DePodesta, Evans and Brian Cashman of the New York Yankees.

“There’s always anxiety. You have to earn trust and respect. But he’s given everyone a very fair chance. The easy thing to do is bring in your own staff, and I give him credit for working with the existing staff.”

On the road, Colletti often sits only with former traveling secretary Billy DeLury, a Dodgers employee since 1950 and part of a generation of baseball people Colletti feels most comfortable around.

One recent game was typical. Colletti filled a foam container with food from the press-box buffet line and took it to his booth. He keeps meticulous track of the action on a standard score sheet issued by the PR department, and became distressed when reporters had taken them all. Scoring a game any other way, in his mind, would bring bad luck.

DeLury tracked down a score sheet as the game began and Colletti charted pitches and their velocity between bites of chicken. He left his green beans untouched, placing a napkin over them like a paramedic covering a victim at a murder scene.

Any comment that suggests the Dodgers are doing well or have the game in hand is met by a stern look and, sometimes, strong words.

“Watching the game is a personal thing with me,” he said. “I don’t want conversation interfering with what I’m doing. I want to watch it my way.”

*

It’s a purposeful exercise. Colletti sets aside the megabucks and multiyear deals and reminds himself of his upbringing by returning to Franklin Park when there is a lull in the Dodgers schedule or by using Chicago as a daylong connection between cities. After all, O’Hare is right there.

He and Doug went through some of their dad’s belongings earlier this summer and came across a passbook savings account from the 1950s. Ned Sr. put away the grand sum of $9 a week until he had enough for an engagement ring for Dolores.

“You could see the amount building slowly, then right at the time they got engaged, the account was wiped out,” Doug said.

Colletti’s closest friend is a local barber named Art Artman, whose son died in a car accident two years ago. Colletti took a leave from the Giants and rushed home to comfort him.

“When Ned said he was coming back, I cried in the basement like a little kid,” Artman said. “It meant so much to me.”

Mortality is more than a passing thought for Colletti because his father died so young. He counted the number of days Ned Sr. lived and woke up Sept. 5, 2005, knowing he had outlived him by one day.

“The Giants were playing the Dodgers,” he said.

Someday Colletti would like his accomplishments measured by something other than wins and losses. Tranquillity will have replaced the clamor that began outside his bedroom window as a child and has yet to cease.

“I do want to win a World Series and I want to go to Italy and help with international baseball, really live it, meld my genealogy with my career,” he said. “But the last chapter of my life I want to do nothing but help people.

“One of my goals is that when I am laid in my casket, people at my funeral wouldn’t even know I was in baseball.”

That might be difficult if the Dodgers win a World Series during his tenure -- something he never experienced with the Cubs and Giants.

“Every time I watch the final game of the World Series, I get choked up,” he said. “I know what it takes to get there and how difficult it is.”

And if the Dodgers never win it all? As he steered his rental car toward Wrigley Field and another game, Colletti said he would find solace knowing he never let down the folks in Franklin Park.

“I didn’t do anything on my own,” he said. “There were so many people who guided me, mentored me and looked out for me. When you come from a town as small and industrial as this is, when you can share your pride and joy, it adds to the goodness of whatever you accomplish.”

steve.henson@latimes.com