WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster, 261 pages, $25
When documentary filmmaker Ken Burns turned his lens on baseball a few years ago, most of the voices speaking their love of the game aloud belonged to men. One notable exception was Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose 1950s childhood in Rockville Centre, Long Island, was bound up in the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers. As Kearns talked about her team, about the heartbreak series of ’51 and her hero, Jackie Robinson, it was clear that, once upon a time, the national pastime was exactly that: She was 6 years old, keeping track of every game in her bright red score book, but she was part of something large and grand and–it seemed then–inevitable.
Some 40 years later, both the country and baseball’s role in our daily lives have changed dramatically. But in Goodwin’s memoir, “Wait Till Next Year,” the game’s glory days come alive again through an adult’s loving reconstruction of a particular childhood world. Baseball was part of the fabric of everyday life, as necessary as school and church and riding a bike. Goodwin records her obsessions with her team and favorite players (the heroic Robinson, the down-to-earth Roy Campanella, a rookie pitcher named Clem Labine), and with the baseball seasons that seemed always to begin with hope and end in despair.
In documenting her unswerving devotion to the “bridesmaid” Dodgers, Goodwin documents, too, the American decade in which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed, polio epidemics emptied a nation’s swimming pools, and television brought black-and-white Howdy Doodys and Joe McCarthys into every living room. With a historian’s eye for the “right” detail, Goodwin offers us a compelling portrait of America, and America’s pastime, in an era that might seem to live on mainly in the broad strokes of TV sitcoms and rock ‘n’ roll revivals. But Goodwin makes clear that the decade lives on, too, in fans of baseball.
Doris Kearns, the 6-year-old whose father taught her to score baseball games, was the youngest daughter of one of the post-war families that filled the tree-lined streets of the nation’s new suburban communities. Kearns’ father, Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, and her mother, Helen, were both survivors of tragedies–he a childhood string of loved ones’ deaths, she health problems that aged her prematurely–but they created for their children a secure home in which books and baseball were equally loved.
Kearns shows us both her family and her family’s place in the larger world: the Kearnses are citizens of Rockville Centre, of the Catholic Church and of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Their neighbors, whose homes are as familiar to Doris as her own, may claim the Yankees or the Giants as their teams, depending on their “borough of origin. . . . In each home, team affiliation was passed on from father to child, with the crucial moments in a team’s history repeated like the liturgy of a church service.” In fact, Goodwin writes, her early years were governed by the dual calenders of the Dodgers and the church. Her first confession is enlivened by her attempts to slip in the sin of wishing harm to others amid a list of lesser wrongdoing. The priest asks her to elaborate, and Goodwin has to admit she has wished harm to a long list of opposing players, from a bad knee for the Giants’ Alvin Dark to a derailed train car for the Yankees traveling to Boston. The priest, himself a Dodger fan, assures her the team will win the World Series one day.
That good priest’s faith, and Goodwin’s, would be tested as the Dodgers won the pennant and lost the series, time and again. There was a reason, after all, that “Wait til next year!” became a litany for Brooklyn fans. But there were other events, too, that were shaping the decade. It’s that material that makes “Wait Till Next Year” something more than a baseball book. In one of its best scenes, the children of Goodwin’s close-knit neighborhood, caught up in the drama of the televised McCarthy hearings, conduct their own living-room investigations. What begins as a game quickly escalates as the children trade accusations and half-truths. Sickened, and a little afraid, they choose at last not to pick someone else to play the accused, but to stop the game. There are other strong historical moments in the memoir, including the arrival of television in the neighborhood, house by house, and, later, the impact in Rockville Centre of the civil rights struggle at faraway Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.
But, always, there is baseball. In 1955, the Dodgers won the World Series. The final game over, Goodwin and her mother met her father in Brooklyn to celebrate with tens of thousands of other fans. Although Goodwin couldn’t know it then, that wonderful night marked a turning point for both the Dodgers and herself. Within two years, Jackie Robinson would retire and the Dodgers would leave Brooklyn for Los Angeles. In another year, Goodwin’s mother would die, and her childhood would be over. But her love of history, inculcated in a baseball-loving, book-reading home, survived, as did her memories of the “real” Dodgers. In “Wait Till Next Year,” Goodwin has provided a context for her love affair with the game that may make readers actually pine for the 1950s, if only we could watch Jackie Robinson stealing home.
