Fifty-Six Years of Summer

(Originally published on 8/3/19)

Yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of Thurman Munson’s death. I wasn’t a Yankee fan—quite the opposite as a matter of fact—but it was nevertheless a real shocker and very sad day. I remember where I was—in Lavallette, New Jersey on a family vacation—when I first heard the news. My father—a Yankee fan extraordinaire from way back—was listening to a game on the radio. Sipping from a can of Schaefer Beer, he was stunned and said not a word. Munson was a hard-nosed baseball player from the old school—you don’t see his likes anymore. From my youthful perspective, baseball in the 1970s was the game’s heyday. It seemed that the summers were defined by baseball—not just the professional game, but the amateur kind as well that so many of us played in various incarnations and in various places.

Presently, I’m in the midst of a 1969 “Miracle Mets” fiftieth anniversary read-a-thon. Perfectly timed for a memoir onslaught, I’ve finished retrospectives by Art Shamsky and Ron Swoboda. Right now, I’m plowing through one by utility player Rod Gaspar, whose baseball career didn’t amount to much, but whose name will be forever linked with the Amazing Mets and history itself. I’ve got one more book in the bullpen, too: They Said It Couldn’t Be Done by sportswriter Wayne Coffey. Its subtitle: “The ’69 Mets, New York City, and the Most Astounding Season in Baseball History.”

Now, I was several weeks shy of my seventh birthday when the Mets realized that miracle in full on October 16, 1969. Soon after, I officially broke from family tradition—and most of my Bronx neighbor baseball fans—by declaring allegiance to the Mets. I don't actually remember choosing sides like I did, but I do know that in the spring of 1970 I was watching Mets' games on the family's black-and-white television set and listening to games on a radio, a gift from my godmother for my "First Holy Communion." I wanted it solely to listen to Mets' games, which totally Metsmerized me. And most of the players from the 1969 team were on that team!

Oddly enough, I do recall being in Bangor, Pennsylvania—the home of my maternal grandparents—at some point during the 1969 World Series. (That's First Street in Bangor, circa 1985, in the picture above.) We were visiting friends of my mother and a game was on television. I subsequently learned that my father lost a forty-dollar bet on the series. And that was a lot of money back then and a big deal for a family scrimping by! Of course, he bet against the Mets. My father hated the Mets with a passion just because they were the cross-town rival Mets and I would—in due time—come to hate the Yankees with equal disdain because they were the cross-town rival Yankees. And I think for other reasons, but that's another story.

As previously noted, baseball was so ingrained in our lives during those summers. On so many levels, it shaped our days and nights. It forged relationships and repeatedly tested one's fidelity. At the tenth anniversary of the 1969 World Champion Mets, the 1979 team was in last place and—when all was said and done—attendance at Shea Stadium plummeted by two million. That’s a rather precipitous fall in a very short period of time. But I remained loyal to the losers because I believed that being a fan was akin to being in a marriage—in good times and in bad—and that better days were on the horizon.

I’ve now lived through fifty-six summers. So much has changed, which is not unexpected. The game of baseball is a shadow of its former self—albeit an expensive, showy one with five-inning starting pitchers and home run hitters, who strikeout over two hundred times, making tens of millions of dollars. The cork in baseballs has been replaced by a super ball. Like countless players of his time, Rod Gaspar sampled a taste of the big leagues but was out of the game in a few years. In those days, the window of opportunity was a fleeting one for those fighting for the finite jobs. And, as things turned out, most of those guys had to find real jobs in the real world after their baseball careers.

And so goes another summer. Some of my earliest memories of this season are of fun and games —from wiffle ball to stickball to box baseball—on the concrete and asphalt of our home turf. When I was very young, a “victory garden” across the street supplied me with a portal into a past that—I didn’t realize then—would soon only be a memory. When the Mets won the World Series in 1969, the garden endured, but its days were numbered. There were a whole lot of insects around my part of the Bronx back then—lots of bees, butterflies, and ladybugs. Fifty summers later and their numbers—for a whole host of reasons—are drastically diminished.

During my first couple of summers on both Planet Earth and in the Bronx, John F. Kennedy was president. He promised that America would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In the summer of 1969—during that miraculous baseball season—Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon. My mother hung a homemade paper banner outside that read “Congratulations to Neil, Buzz, and Mike,” the astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. This woman who always put up such things on special occasions so fascinated the local rabbi’s wife. I’m not certain what else Mrs. Turk was referring to, but she was definitely a fan. Many summers have passed and miraculous things don't happen anymore. Not that anyone would notice anyway as they blankly stare into their devices, thumbing and thumbing and thumbing while the summers pass them by.

(Photographs from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

This Day in History

(Originally published 7/13/13. It's now forty-five years since the lights went out at the Big Shea and throughout the big city. A footnote: The lights permanently went out at Shea Stadium in 2008.)

Thirty-six years ago tonight the lights went out at Shea Stadium. Give or take a couple of minutes, the time was 9:34 p.m. Save a handful of Rockaway, Queens neighborhoods not served by local utility Con Edison, the rest of New York City also went dark. I was not in attendance of this historic Mets’ game versus the Chicago Cubs, but I always wished I had been on what turned out to be a night to remember. I happened to be a long away from home—on a family vacation in a place called Chadwick Beach along the New Jersey Shore—and listening to the game on my favorite radio of all-time. It was a durable Christmas gift that also picked up the audio of local television stations.

I vividly remember Mets’ announcer Ralph Kiner saying that he could see cars going over the darkened Whitestone Bridge in the distance. Ralph had mistakenly called it the Throgs Neck Bridge in the past, which is not visible from the radio booth. The man, a great storyteller who is sorely missed, had a charming knack for sometimes getting things wrong.

Riveted at this blackout that I wasn’t home to enjoy—history in the making—I continued listening to the suspended game. I figured it was a temporary glitch that would soon be remedied—but it wasn’t for twenty-four hours. It didn’t take very long for the Mets’ radio station to lose its signal—several minutes—leaving me in the dark concerning the goings-on back in my hometown. Awaiting the power’s return, I subsequently learned that New York Mets’ organist Jane Jarvis plowed through her entire repertoire, and even started playing holiday carols like “Jingle Bells” and “White Christmas” to keep the fans entertained until the lights came back on, which they didn't that night.

Although not nearly as brutal as New York City’s infamous three "H" weather—hazy, hot, and humid—it was a rather steamy evening in Chadwick Beach, too. While the thermometer hovered close to one hundred degrees that day in the Big Apple, it was in the nineties in our vacation hamlet. That summer, our Bronx neighbors from just up the street shared the same shore house with us. They resided in the upper floor while we set up vacation shop in the lower half. Without air conditioning in this two-family rental, which they were accustomed to in the Bronx, it got a wee bit too hot for them a day or so prior to the blackout, and they returned home to bask in refrigerated indoor air until the heat wave broke. From their prospective, it was preferable to sweating putty balls on the New Jersey Shore. The fact that both Barnegat Bay and the Atlantic Ocean were a stone's throw away mattered little.

Ironically, as things turned out, our neighbors were back in the Bronx, instead of on vacation, when the city went dark and put their air conditioning on ice. I know they didn't see it that way, but I recall thinking how lucky they were to be back home, sweating and suffering, watching and waiting, for the lights and the air conditioners to come back on. Such was the passion of youth.

The Summers of Sam’s

(Originally published on 6/22/18)

Today is the first full day of summer. Once upon a time that distinction meant a great deal to me. For summertime in my youth—while often incredibly hot and humid—was chock full of fun, freedom, and frivolity. It little mattered that I didn’t have air conditioning in my family’s upstairs lair and that local utility Con Edison periodically zapped neighborhoods—typically the less well-to-do ones—with brownouts. In other words, our ice cubes would half melt, refreeze, and taste pretty awful at the end of the day. A cool refreshing drink during the worst dog days of summer wasn’t always possible.

While I consumed an awful lot of pizza in the fall, winter, and spring, there was something special about summertime and a place called Sam’s Pizza—a hot dog at the ballpark sort of thing. In its Kingsbridge heyday in the 1970s when I was a teen, the spot was my preferred dining establishment. A slice cost fifty and sixty cents then—a different era for pizza and just about everything else. On the hottest of hot days, there was nothing quite like dropping by for a couple of slices to go or, better yet, a couple of “Sicilians,” which cost a whopping ten cents more.

Forty years ago, Sam’s Pizza sole source of beating the heat was a small fan atop the front door. Suffice it to say, the contraption didn’t do much in combating the torridity of the Summers of Sam’s. In fact, the fan underscored the unbearable clamminess that came with the territory of peddling pizza on a busy Bronx thoroughfare in the months of June, July, August, and September.

I can vividly recall the humming of the fan on an oppressive summer’s afternoon. While my slices of pizza warmed in the oven, I perspired in the stifling interior of Sam’s while awaiting my take-out, which locals could readily detect by the grease stains on the brown paper bag. Sometimes the bags were so laden with oil, they would come apart on the street. Grease was definitely the word back then. The funny thing is that it either enhanced the fare—good grease—or took it down a peg or two. Bad grease! Bad grease and summertime were a nauseating combination.

In the good old days, George—the venerable owner of Sam’s—would prepare a rack load of pizza pies in the morning before the shop opened. This modus operandi ensured that the over-the-counter slices weren’t always the freshest. And it assumed further significance when the thermometer topped ninety degrees. But even during those sultry summers, there was nothing quite like a piping-hot-out-of-the-oven Sicilian slice from Sam’s. My younger brother and I frequently hankered for one, but knew we had to apply the “petrified” test before proceeding. Typically, this could be accomplished with a glancing visual of the Sicilian pie on the countertop. If the pie was down to a precious few rectangular slices—or had been sitting around for too many hours to count—the pizza was deemed “petrified.” Regular slices were then our only recourse. For they had a knack for surviving the sands of time and could more often than not be salvaged during the reheating. Still, it amounted to casting your fate to the summer wind.

It was definitely a hot affair in those hot times. Sam’s Pizza only sold pizza, Italian ices, and soft drinks—and eventually Jamaican beef patties—in the 1970s. Regular or Sicilian slices were the be-all and end-all. The topping possibilities were limited to extra cheese, pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, and anchovies. There was no such thing as lasagna pizza, salad pizza, or white pizza. In fact, it always grossed me out when someone ordered a slice with mushrooms or anchovies. I’d be forced to watch George stick his hands into big cans and smother the slice with said toppings. He would then wipe them clean with a dirty rag.

Happily, I have lived to tell. And in commemoration of the Summers of Sam’s, I ordered a couple of Sicilian slices from a local pizzeria. They were pretty good as far as contemporary Sicilians go. But I can say without exaggeration that the fresh Sicilian pizza enjoyed in the Summers of Sam’s—thick, doughy, and oozing with cheese—will never be tasted again.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)