Tuesday, July 17, 2007

BOYS OF SUMMER.

Last Thursday, TBF and I headed up to the Museum of the City of New York to hear Roger Kahn speak as part of their Glory Days exhibit. This was our second trip up, having visited during opening week, when the museum was open late and admission was free. 

The description of the lecture on the Museum’s web site read as follows:

The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World
Roger Kahn, the dean of American sports writers, will moderate a discussion of the legendary plays, moments, and players that made the years 1947 to 1957 the greatest in baseball history.

A more accurate description would have read:

Roger Kahn, Brooklyn Dodger fan, will sit around with two of his good friends, Dave Anderson and Bob Wolff (who have also seen a heck of a lot of baseball back in the day) and kibbitz for an hour. It will feel like you are eavesdropping on three friends hanging out on the back porch on a Sunday afternoon. The conversation will have absolutely no form or structure. It will meander all over the place. You will hold your breath the entire time that it’s going on and not want it to stop. Towards the end of the panel’s allotted time, you will consider running out to the nearest bodega and buying a case of beer in order to bribe them to continue.

[more after the jump]

As I alluded to above, this wasn’t a formal discussion in any sense of the word. It was, however, oral history, and I was afterwards a little appalled to realize that the museum didn’t tape record the evening. (Please, someone, tell me this is being done somewhere, by someone, before these people who saw those teams play are no longer on this planet.) Had we realized this, or thought about it for a second, we would have brought our own damn tape recorder.

They just told stories, and I tried taking notes, and then the note-taking was getting in the way of the listening and the magic. I am sorry, but the magic won. They also talked about records being made and broken, and how baseball really isn’t just numbers, because the numbers don’t give you the real sense of the players. And stories about the Dodgers on the road, and Jackie Robinson, and a NY Times editorial that claimed that Pee Wee Reese didn’t call time during BP in Cincinnati and walk over to Jackie Robinson and put his arm around him. And Roger Kahn proceeded to describe that afternoon in such vivid detail that I could see it, I could feel the midwestern heat and the sun in my eyes and the dust rising from the infield and see the stadium from the field and not the other way around.

The whole evening reminded me of the time I went to the Experience Music Project in Seattle, when they were doing public oral history evenings, and got to hear Sam Phillips (yes, the Sun Studios Sam Phillips, the guy who discovered Elvis) talk for three hours. It was like Sam drove up to me in a big pink Cadillac, opened the passenger door, invited me in, and drove me back to Memphis in the 50’s. All he did was talk, with a little help from Peter Guralnick, Memphis music historian extraordinaire. What happened at MCNY last week was similar. When they talked about Brooklyn of the 40’s and 50’s, they took us back there. When they talked about Ebbets Field, it was like we were sitting in the outfield bleachers.  My only regret was that Roger had to be both moderator and faciliator, and I would have liked to have a knowledgeable, neutral fourth party guiding the discussion along and extracting yet more nuggets from the participants.

Before the Q&A with the audience began, Mr. Kahn prefaced it by saying that he was often asked why he didn’t write about the players misbehaving on the road, and his answer was that he was busy trying to behave worse himself. I wish I could say that the audience questions were clever and insightful, or even gave you the sense that the person had waited most of their life to ask a subject matter expert about the issue, but they weren’t; they were trainspotting of the worst kind, and these trainspotters were determined - in one case, even after all three panelists disagreed as politely as they could, the questioner still attempted to get support for his thesis. I am sympathetic to audience questions in a situation like this, but almost wish they would have been submitted in writing in advance (here’s another place where a moderator can greatly help, so the questions add value and don’t just take up precious, precious time. Although it was fun watching the three guys diss the questioner in the most elegant, subtle way.)

There were Dodgers fans and baseball fans and Mets fans and Yankees fans; I was pleased that when Dave Anderson said that he liked Derek Jeter because he was the only player that smiled and was excited, that a loud polite yet insistent collective murmur saying JOSE REYESSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!! permeated the auditorium.

If you haven’t been up to the Museum of the City of New York yet to see the exhibit, you should probably think about it. I know no one wants to spend a summer day inside, but it’s next to the park, and there’s a *great* Spanish restaurant on the southwest corner of 103rd and Lex, right near the subway. They’ve got a big screen TV and will put the Mets on if you ask.