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.