The Column: Hodges' honor as bittersweet as summer's end
Gil Hodges, the great Brooklyn first baseman, was inducted into the Hall of Fame on July 24.
Nine days later, Vin Scully, Dodgers broadcaster since 1950, died at age 94.
Childhood was over, at last.
Here’s a memory:
It is Labor Day weekend, probably 1951.
We — Mom, Dad and their only child, yours truly — are in Southampton at the cottage of Aunt Ann and Uncle Jack.
This meant the world was in its place because we went to Ann and Jack’s every year before school started — the only vacation my parents could afford. And, hey, no complaints. Everyone else we knew was sweltering back in Brooklyn.
The vacation house was outside of town — not in the famous high-rent districts — and we had a better chance of bumping into a farmer on his tractor than a celebrity who had just blown in from the Coast.
But it was grand, as I recall, knotty pine, stone fireplace, big easy chairs, card table always up, shuffleboard court out back, screened-in porch where Aunt Ann would bring me bologna sandwiches and Coca-Cola in bottles.
For a kid who lived in an apartment about the size of the one Ralph and Alice Kramden made famous on “The Honeymooners” a few years later, this was something.
A feature of the place was that the bedroom walls did not extend to the high ceilings of the cottage but served, more or less, as partitions.
I judged this a masterful architectural gesture because, in bed, I could clearly hear the adults telling jokes and laughing in the next room, ice clinking in their highball glasses as they played endless rounds of Pinochle, having a glorious time way out in the country as cicadas chirped and the moon peeked through half-opened windows.
“Another hand?” Uncle Jack would ask.
“Vacation, isn’t it?” Dad would answer.
“Nightcaps?” Ann inquired, hopeful.
“Oh, my,” whispered Mom. “Well, maybe just one.”
All that was lovely, the thrill of eavesdropping on adults, but not the best part.
Better, still, was that I found a little radio on a night table in the bedroom assigned to me that — even so far from the city — could pick up the Dodgers broadcast fading in and out as if it was a wartime transmission from London or Berlin.
With the set under my pillow to keep the grown-ups from catching on, I listened to Red Barber and Connie Desmond call the game and this young fellow, Vin Scully, just out of Fordham University.
Scully was special from the start — on-air essence of the beloved Boys of Summer whose steady, unmistakable voice so easily summoned Hodges, Robinson, Reese, Snider, Furillo, Campanella, Erskine, Branca, Newcombe, the whole immortal, glorious bunch.
Hodges, strong and restrained and uncomplaining even in the worst of times, was, to me, the model of manhood. Scully, in every call, observed essentials that went beyond baseball: Less is more, choose words carefully, never humiliate an opponent.
After the 1957 season, the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles. Had the United States offered to become a province of Canada the news could not have been more shocking.
Down the line, Hodges became manager of the Mets, led the team to an unlikely World Series victory in 1969 and died of a heart attack three years later at the age of 47. It took too long, but, Hodges, at last, has a plaque in the Hall of Fame.
Scully moved with the Dodgers to L.A. and was on the air until 2016. The Washington Post called him “a Babe Ruth of the Broadcast Booth.” In Newsday, John Jeansonne recalled the “silver-tongued accounts, somehow simple yet sophisticated” that made Scully so outstanding.
Once, in middle-age, I went back to Southampton and found Ann and Jack’s summer house. The place was smaller than I remembered, a modest retreat, sweet but not so grand as I recalled. Life sometimes is no friend of memory.
Still, drifting back, I could hear the adults late at night, their jokes and laughter, the clink of their glasses, the flutter of cards being shuffled and, from under a pillow, fading in and out, the Dodgers game — Barber and Desmond, and the terrific young guy, Scully. Long past, those September days, but forever.