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Title: Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
ISBN: 0684847957
Author:
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Publicate Date: 1998-06-02
Publish: 1998-06-02
List Price: $15.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $2.00
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1: And The Year After That, And The Year After That . . . (* * * 1/2)
As a Brooklyn-born boy who came late into his true inheritance, love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, this book was recommended to me by a friend who appreciates my passion despite the fact that he is a NY Yankees and NY Giants fan.
I've read and enjoyed several of Doris Kearns Goodwin's books, among them Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys : An American Saga, and No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, so I assumed I was going to enjoy WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR. And there are things I enjoyed very much.
Kearns Goodwin's recollections of growing up in the Long Island town of Rockville Centre, New York predate mine by twenty years; but certain landmarks were familiar. References to Sunrise Highway, Wolf's Sport Shop, and the Cathedral of St. Agnes, Kearns Goodwin's church, connected us. Although Kearns Goodwin grew up several towns cityward from my own post-Brooklyn home in Massapequa, her compass was mine as seen from the train or through the car window as I commuted to or from home. And her reminiscences of playing in the streets and backyards of a less-crowded 1940s-50s Nassau County resonated with me. Kearns Goodwin can remember when there were 7000 televisions in America. I can't. But her descriptions of the quiet suburban streets and the general tenor of life on Long Island rang true.
Raised in a religiously diverse environment, I could smile at her memories of her First Communion, her first Confession, and what passed for sin in the mind of a very Catholic and properly brought-up young lady of her time, which was pre- Vatican II. After a while, and even with this awareness however, I had to check the spine of the book to see if it had not been co-written by St. Augustine of Hippo. So much of WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR is filled with page after page of recitative of votives lit, novenas said, Hosts swallowed, Hail Marys repeated, and Acts of Contrition uttered that the middle of the book became a tedious slog.
It was sweet to read of Kearns Goodwin's personal gift to fellow Catholic Gil Hodges of a St. Christopher's Medal blessed by the Pope, handed over at an autograph signing, and it was even more satisfactory to read that this gift broke Hodges out of a legendarily long and awful batting slump the next day. God bless!
It was infuriating, however, to read about Kearns Goodwin's childhood fear of the eternal damnation of her immortal soul for the transgression of having visited the social center of an Episcopal Church to take part in an ecumenical, interracial event, a speaking engagement by Roy Campanella on tolerance and diversity. Kearns Goodwin never remarks on the irony of the situation. To be fair, I wasn't angry at Kearns Goodwin (who was only a child), nor at her parents (who to their credit let her attend), nor at the clergy (who reassured her of the harmlessness of such an act), but at the stultifying atmosphere of that form of 1950s white suburban American Roman Catholicism that could imbue a child with such terror.
Kearns Goodwin did NOT attend parochial school. She went to public school, and her neighbors were not all Catholic, so her fixation---near obsession---on religion was unexpected (at least to this reviewer). At least she did not go so far as to say that some of her best friends were Jewish (even though some of them were).
In part, this repressiveness was due to the inflexibility of Catholic dogma at the time, and it was also part and parcel of a world which was suffering from a polio pandemic, Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, Rosenberg Spy Trial Mania, and fixed and seemingly immutable rules regarding the roles of women and men, the place of blacks and whites, the superiority of one belief system over another, and the rightness and wrongness of Right versus Left. People dealt with these issues differently. Kearns Goodwin's neighbors the Greenes (nee Greenbergs) converted to some branch of Protestantism and hid their previous identity; Jewish neighbors avowed their hatred of the Rosenbergs' presumed treason; her best friend found her personal ambitions frustrated by her family in favor of their son; Kearns Goodwin's father encouraged his family of daughters to investigate nontraditional roles; as she grew older Kearns Goodwin began questioning her received ideas about ethics and morality (as an example, in regard to the Legion of Decency's ban on Blackboard Jungle); and over all, the Brooklyn Dodgers integrated baseball, changing America forever. 1957 saw the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, and Kearns Goodwin came of age just as, and just in time for, the start of the social ferment that was the 1960s.
Kearns Goodwin had the pleasure of meeting not only Gil Hodges and Roy Campanella and Clem Labine in person, but also her favorite player, Jackie Robinson. Her love of the Dodgers bound her to her father, a lifelong fan. Her heartbreak at the Dodgers' annual loss of the World Series to the Yankees is palpable. Her joy at their World Series win in 1955 is an event shared by millions.
It seems to be a hallmark of this genre of memoir that the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers is linked to, and becomes a metaphor for, life-altering change and loss in the lives of the authors. Kearns Goodwin's mother died in 1958, when she was fifteen. Roger Kahn's (The Boys of Summer) father passed away in 1956, just as Jackie Robinson left the team; Thomas Oliphant's (Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers) father survived a severe bout with a long chronic illness in 1957 and his family relocated to California in 1959, literally following the Dodgers; Maury Allen (Brooklyn Remembered: The 1955 Days of the Dodgers) was just beginning his overseas military service as the Dodgers won the Series; Michael Shapiro (The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together) was a child just coming into his first awareness of the outside world as the Dodgers departed at the end of the 1957 season; and Bob McGee (Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field And the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers), links the departure of the Dodgers to priceless memories of time with his father: "He said it would matter to me someday, I would value the time we spent, and he was right."
So right.
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2: Reminds me of College
As a college drop out I am not what many people might consider well read. While school was never my strong suit, and studying was an event that rarely ever happened, I did manage to read a few great books along the way. My first and best semester of college I read Wait 'til Next Year. While I am not a fan of sports and am not competitive at all, this book was beautifully written and takes the reader on a tour through the author's life, all in the language of baseball. Using the sport as a way to framework the personal story was a wise choice as it gives great metaphors and context to the tale. I suppose I also have good memories tied into the novel as well, considering that I did really well grade-wise that semester and I remember really enjoying this book when I read it at that time.
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3: great story about a child and her father with the love of the dodgers as thier strongest bond
Doris Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. She is a democrat and mostly she writes about politics. However several years back she took part in Ken Burns documentary film on baseball and portrayed her memories and love of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s and later as an adult in Massachusetts, the Boston Red Sox.
This stimulated her to reflect on her childhood days as a Dodger fan and she decided to write a book about it. But as she carefully researched her memory and her past she found that it was all intertwined with her life groing up as an impresionable girl on Long Island in the 1950s. Her parents her friends and her future wriing career were all tied togehter. So this delightful book is a memoir of her childhood growing up and living and dying for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I am 55 years old, slightly younger than Goodwin but I too grew up in the 1950s on Long Island and can relate to many of her experiences. She discusses how she started learning about baseball and the Dodgers when her father taught her how to fill out a scorecard. In the evenings during their quiet time together she would use the scorecard like a cue to narrate the game she listened to on the radio that day. This brought the game to life for her father and created an interest in her in narration that carried on into a career of writing.
The book flows marvelously and you see the world from the eyes of an impressionable grammar school girl. Goodwin is somehow able to go back and put herself back in the mind of that little naive child. We see her devotion to the Catholic church, the fear of polio in the ealry 1950s before the vaccines. I know this so well as I contracted polio in the summer of 1953 though I never got it so bad as to need an iron lung. We here of her confessions as she admitted to her priest that she wished harm on the Dodger opponents. We learn about the kids in the neighborhood, all Dodger, Giant or Yankee fans. I was a Yankee fan but my brother and all my friend that I played ball with as a kid were Dodger fans. The Dodgers were the most popular team in New York. They were the underdogs and the team for the common working man.
Goodwin's first boyfriend was a boy she got to know because he was a Dodger fan and they could talk so comfortably about the Dodgers. This is a story about the Dodger players she admired; Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Don Newcombe and Carl Furillo and the Yankees and Giants that she dispised, Mays, Mantle, Martin, Berra and others. It is a story about devotion and heartbreak; Bobby Thomson's home run, the story of Mickey Owens' dropped third strike. Billy Martin's heroics is 52 and 53. But it is also the thrill of 1955 when Dodger fans finally didn't have to say wait till next year.
As all this goes on we also hear about her mother's health problems and her childhood girlfriends, the beginning years of television, the Army - McCarthy hearings, the cold war, the civil defense drills and the fallout shelters, memorable events for those growing up in the 1950s.
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4: Baseball and Life
Wait Till Next Year is about baseball and life. It is the title of Doris Kearns Goodwin's memoir of childhood. Set in suburban New York in the `50s, and lived before the backdrop of baseball, the account follows Goodwin through her childhood ending when she is fifteen at the death of her mother Helen, and the move from the family home. The opening line: "When I was six, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball."
When Thomas Kearns teaches his daughter to keep a scorecard on each Brooklyn Dodger game he initiates her love for baseball, as well as for telling a compelling narrative. Baseball bonds their relationship. With careful records Doris relives each game with her father after he comes home from work. Baseball permeates other relationships. Doris listens to games on the radio after school with her mother. Her first boyfriend shares her love for baseball; her best girlfriend Elaine does too, although she was a rabid Giant's fan. The repetitive disappointment about the team's poor results demanded optimistic philosophy. Ever hopeful of winning a pennant, "wait till next year" became the family theme at the close of a season of defeat.
Defeat overwhelms the Kearns' family when Helen dies. For a time Thomas' grief was inconsolable. Doris threw herself into activity and study. One of the final scenes in the book takes place in the attic. Doris and her father are looking at a box of old scorebooks. Thomas admits he cannot live in the house anymore without his wife. It is time to move on. Baseball continues, as does their family. Cycles repeat. In the final pages of the memoir Doris initiates her own sons into the culture of baseball teaching them, like her father had taught her, how to keep a scorebook. Like her father she opens her sons' hearts to the game of baseball. "Wait till next year" prevails.
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5: Wait till Next Year
Most interesting for me since I am a "wait till next year" Red Sox fan. She's an excellent writer and commentator and this lives up to her standard.
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