Erskine Street

Every spring, my wife and I drive through Brooklyn to Old Montifiore Cemetery in Queens to visit my father’s grave. These melancholy excursions heighten my emotional state; fugitive lines of poetry and unbidden associations vie with the mundane mechanics of driving. A recurrent motif is Auden’s couplet from “As I Walked out One Evening”: “And the crack in the teacup opens/A lane to the land of the dead.” In as much as it leads us to the cemetery, the Belt Parkway is literally a lane in Auden’s sense.

As we pass the Starrett City high rises, a sign announces the intersection of the Belt Parkway and Erskine Street, named for Carl Erskine, noble righthander of the Boys of Summer whose name is a touchstone for surviving fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The conjunction of the evocative Erskine Street sign and the destination of our trip opens a treasury of memories. They appear in no particular order, related not by time but by content. What are gravesites for, if not memories?

Somewhere, I’ve heard that just before Erskine’s second no-hitter, against the Giants in May 1956, the newspapers published a comment by someone in the Giants’ front office who opined that “Oisk,” with his arm trouble, couldn’t pitch any longer and was serving up “junk” to opposing batters. As soon as the final out had been recorded, Jackie Robinson walked over to the field box occupied by the Giants’ brass, removed the offending clipping from his pocket, tossed it into the box, and inquired, “How do you like that junk?” Ah, Jackie! As Leo Durocher pungently observed, “You want a guy that comes to play. This guy doesn’t just come to play. He comes to beat you. He comes to stuff the goddamn bat right up your ass.”

My father was an avid baseball fan, instilling in me an early love for the game. He took me to my first baseball game in 1947, riding the Kingston Avenue trolley from our home on St. John’s Place, in Brooklyn, to Empire Boulevard, where we got off and joined the crowd walking to Ebbets Field. I was seven years old that summer. We sat behind home plate and watched Ralph Branca pitch; at age twenty-one, he went 21–12. Many years later, my son Dan and I attended an old-timers dinner, and afterward, Branca stood with Dan for a photo. I told Branca that he had pitched the first game I had seen. “It seemed to me that your curve ball broke at least a foot,” I said. “More,” he replied with a smile. The picture of Ralph Branca with Dan resides in the bookcase in my study.

In 2005, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ lone World Series victory, Dan and I attended a Brooklyn Cyclones game in Coney Island. Old Dodgers Carl Erskine, Clem Labine, and George Shuba were there signing autographs. Small replicas of the 1955 championship banner were handed out to attendees, and these were autographed in great numbers. The line of fans moved slowly because each had some memory to share or question to ask when it was their turn. I had one for Clem Labine. I recalled the 1951 playoff against the Giants, ended by Bobby Thomson’s third-game, ninth-inning home run off Ralph Branca. In the second playoff game, the Dodgers had defeated the Giants 10–0 behind a complete-game effort by Labine, evening the series at a game apiece. Why, I asked him, with such a big lead, hadn’t manager Dressen taken him out, saving him for relief in Game Three? That way, Labine, not Branca, would have been available when Newcombe faltered. Labine looked up at me with an amused smile. “I could have pitched,” he said, not missing a beat. And I believed him, too. Years earlier, the Brooklyn Union Gas Company sponsored a Brooklyn Dodgers old-timers event. Dan (then five years old) and I took our camera and trekked into Brooklyn from New Jersey. Clem Labine was pleased to pose with his arm around...