She hopes the ferry won’t come, but if it does, she’ll climb aboard. She’ll tremble as she steps off the landing, because she can’t swim, and she can’t forget the many times she’s crossed this ugly river only to meet more ugliness on the other side.

But fear has never beaten Mary Lee Bendolph, and no river can stop her. She’ll board that ferry, if it comes, because something tells her she must, and because all the people she loves most will board with her, and because if there’s one thing she’s learned in her difficult life, it’s this:

When the time comes to cross your river, you don’t ask questions. You cross.

From Crossing Over by JR Moehringer

 
I wonder what Mary Lee Bendolph would say today.

By Josh Wilker

Driving Past

I.

A few months ago I saw Yankee Stadium for the last time. I was driving on the Major Deegan, headed north after a short trip back to the city where I’d lived throughout my twenties. My first impulse was to give Yankee Stadium the finger.

But then I remembered what happened the last time I gave Yankee Stadium the finger, years ago. My brother and I and another friend, call him Butch, were heading upstate for a court date. On another earlier trip of ours upstate Butch had gotten arrested for being the point man in our self-consciously absurd drunken heist scheme to steal a poster from a movie theater lobby. The poster featured an ape wearing glasses and playing chess. We were all pushing thirty by then. We had not figured anything out. Butch was apprehended by blond and tan teenagers in national movie theater chain golf shirts. They held him until the cops arrived, chewing their bubble gum.

Anyway, a few weeks later we headed back upstate on the Major Deegan and passed Yankee Stadium on the way. This was during the era when the Yankees won the World Series every single year. Every single lonely stupid meaningless drunken suffering New York year. My brother and I were Red Sox fans, and Butch was a Mets fan. We all felt conquered. We all felt like there was no place for misfits like us. We all held our middle fingers high.

(more…)

My friend Javier knows a little something about lines.

“I’ve waited in lots of them for Yankees tickets,” Javier said. “I always wanted to be first in line, but I never was. I did have some pretty good spots though. They were like gold in the days before people could get baseball tickets with a computer.”

But everyone still has to get in line to vote.

“This election is important,” Javier said. “I got up early and will stand here all day if I have to.”

Javier left his apartment on Walton Avenue prepared for a long wait. He stuffed a day-old bagel in one jacket pocket and a banana in the other.

When he spotted his friend Jose waiting in line he pulled out the banana and snuck up from behind.

Javier jabbed the banana in Jose’s back and said:

“Stick ‘em up.”

Jose slowly raised his hands and then quickly spun and grabbed the banana.

“Thanks for breakfast,” Jose said. “But when are you gonna come up with a new line? You used that banana-stick-‘em-up deal on me when I was in line for tickets at Yankee Stadium last year.”

“‘Stick ‘em up’ is always a good line as long as you use a banana,” Javier insisted. “Old lines get to be old lines because they’re good.”

“Sometimes old lines are just old,” Jose fired back. “It’s time for a change.”

“Isn’t that why we’re in line?” Javier asked.

Jose smiled.

“Oh yeah.”

Brace yourself, this may come as a shock, but…

Future Hall of Famer Derek Jeter isn’t a very good fielder. 

Oh, well.  See ya in Cooperstown, Jetes.

Studs Turkel, the great man of American letters, passed away last Friday. 

If you are not familiar with his work, check out his wonderful site, sponsored by the Chicago Historical Society.  It has audio clips from many of his books.  Studs was an activist, a writer, a radio personality, and one of the best listeners this country has ever produced. 

It’s hard for me to imagine Chicago without him.

He lived a long, rich life and will be missed.

[Editor’s Note: The Lasting Yankee Stadium Memory series will continue tomorrow.  But first, enjoy this special treat…]

By Ed Alstrom

Ed Alstrom playing the organ on the final day of Yankee Stadium behind a framed picture of Eddie Layton

There’s always something about the ‘last time’ you do something, especially when you know for sure it’s going to be the last time. Preparing for the last game at the existing Yankee Stadium was was a little easier than it might have been, because by that time we all knew it would be the last time. I was able to walk around and soak it all in with a sense of closure, and smile and say my silent farewells to this and that (jeez, it even extended to the bathroom and the elevator), without any nagging doubts that maybe we’d be back yet again.

I arrived early, as I customarily do, at noon, about an hour before the gates opened. There is always a sense of calm at that time at the Grand Dame, but especially so on this day. The place looked stunning, as it always does. The red-white-and-blue bunting always comes out for the special occasions, and the place seemed to have an extra halo around it just for the day.

(more…)

The New York Giants Baseball Nostalgia Society met last night at the Church on 231st street and Kingsbridge Avenue. The group met in a big room, set up foling chairs and tables. Rich McCabe, a former Giant bat boy and guest speaker at the previous meeting (check out the video here), was back again, and he brought bats, autographed balls and jerseys. Not just Giant jerseys–Fernando’s road Dodger jersey, a Glenn Davis Astros number, Lonnie Smith’s road Braves joint.

It was cold as Richie spoke. In the hallway outside of the room, new tile was being put down and you could hear the buzzing of sanders. Somewhere else in the church, the organist was practicing–in fits and starts, which gave an unintentionally comic and sometimes surreal touch to the proceedings.

Richie delivered the same exact routine he had this summer. Almost to the word. He lost the returning members in almost no time and I felt bad for him. Only Bob Mayer looked completely content, grinning as if hearing the stories for the first time. But the bat boy schtick was all Richie had. He’s been repeating the same stories for years, he didn’t have anything to add. He could have talked about all of the jerseys but didn’t. After fifteen minutes, he realized he was bombing and said,” I’ll take questions, I don’t want to repeat myself.”

The next speaker was an old sports writer that I’ve never heard of, who had also spoken at the previous gathering. He looked like a George Price cartoon from the New Yorker and refused to use the microphone that was set up. “Unless you’re deaf, you’ll hear me.” But his low, gutteral voice was drowned-out by the organ and he too, in short order, lost the audience. Not that it seemed to bother him.

Richie sat a few feet away on the table with his autographed bats and balls. He was wearing a road Giants jersey, black pants and generic white sneakers. He had long arms which he folded in his lap. Richie hung his head, lost in thought, nodding and smiling reflexively when he heard a name from the past–Burleigh Grimes, Brick Yard Kennedy. He kicked his feet back and forth as the organ played and the old sports writer droned on, an old man who looked like a boy. The bat boy.

I was freezing by the time the sports writer finished. I chatted with some of the guys, inclduing Bill Kent, the ringleader of the group, who looked a little more like Art Carney circa Harry and Tonto than ever. He gave me a tip on a mail order cataloge (“cheapest place to buy clothes…in the country“). On the way out, I shook Bob Mayer’s hand. He seemed delighted by the speakers even though they repeated themselves. It brought him back, which is why he comes to the meetings in the first place. We laughed.

“Hey,” he said as we walked out of the church, “this meeting was like Deja Vu all over again. See you next time.”

I visited my mother’s family in Belgium the summer I turned twelve and went to the seaside with my uncle, his girl and a bunch of their friends, all in their early twenties.  We were sitting on the boardwalk one grey, typically overcast afternoon and heard somebody playing the saxophone.  My uncle’s best friend, Beniot, a Germanic-looking guy with short, blond hair and round glasses that made him look like Thomas Dolby, began to cry.  He told me that the saxophone, the jazz saxophone, always made him cry.

Tonight I heard a guy playing the trumpet on the uptown platform of the 7th Avenue and thought about Beniot.  Dude was playing In a Sentimental Mood, slowly and beautifully, when I passed him by.  The sound of his horn made me want to cry.  But it wasn’t just that.  It was what he was playing.  That song, a standard that is almost unbearably melancholy when played right.  For close to a minute the sound drifted down the platform uniterrupted before being drowned-out by a passing downtown express train. 

Then my train arrived and I couldn’t hear the trumpet anymore.  But I could in my mind’s eye and I still felt like crying as I got on the train to come home.

This is my favorite version.  The Duke with John Coltrane.

Humility & Hubris

By Greg W. Prince

“I still don’t know why they asked me to do this commercial.”
—Marv Throneberry for Miller Lite

Alex Belth, apparently dizzy from inhaling Impetuous paint fumes, asked me to contribute a “classic-hater” perspective to this marvelous series of Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories. Nevertheless, despite my assigned role as the skunk that wanders into the wake — even an Irish wake — I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead. I, like many of you, know what it’s like to have the plug pulled on my ballpark against the wishes of its survivors.

I did, in fact, experience a very happy day at Yankee Stadium, my first game of five at Yankee Stadium. It was the only one the Yankees lost.

On Memorial Day 1986, I got a call from my friend Larry who used to be a Yankees fan before withdrawing from baseball altogether; he wasn’t really much of a sports fan in the first place, but the trade of Sparky Lyle to Texas drove him away for good. Anyway, he had been talking to another friend of ours, Adam, a genuine Yankees fan. There was nothing going on for either of them that day and they thought it might be fun to drive up to the Bronx from where we all lived on Long Island and see a game. They wanted to know if I wanted to go.

What a strange idea, I thought. I’d always held to a principled stand of never setting foot inside Yankee Stadium or anywhere the Yankees were playing. I refused to go on a day camp field trip in 1975 to Shea Stadium because it was for a Yankees game. At twelve years old, I was highly principled.

(more…)

‘Member this mid-Nineties Underground Posse cut?

Sadat, Large Pro, Puba, Finesse. ‘Nuff Said.

By John C. McGinley (as told to Alex Belth)

I’m spit-balling with you but my favorite memories of Yankee Stadium came from a period of time when everyone I knew was an unemployed actor. I’m from New York originally. I was born in St Vincent’s in the Village and lived in Peter Stuyvesant Town until I was ten. Then my parents moved to the suburbs in Jersey but later I went to NYU and then lived on Perry and Bleecker for close to twenty years before I finally came out here in ’91. I got out of NYC to 84 and for the next five years, everyone I knew was unemployed actors. You’d get an off-Broadway play, or a day job on a soap, but mostly it was a grind, it was a struggle.

I loved to go up to the Bronx on an afternoon and catch a game. I’d go up to a day game at 161 and find all the other unemployed actors. Some guys would go to Shea but I never rooted for the Mets until Willie became their manager a few years ago and then I loved them.

The Yankees were terrible then. It wasn’t like today, getting a ticket was no sweat even if you were dead broke. Seats weren’t hard to come by. If a scalper was eating a scalper ticket sandwich two innings into the game, you could get it on the cheap. The scalper would have to eat it by that time. So we’d start up in the cheap seats and then move down. Most of us brought our own booze in with us, everybody brought what they needed. There would only be something like 12,000 people in the Stadium on a weekday afternoon. The ushers would let you down by the dugout because they were unemployed actors too.

The one thing that was understood was that nobody asked each other what they were doing. Cause the answer was, you’re doing nothing. You’re going to a Yankee game cause the phone’s not ringing. There were no cell phones in those days so guys would get up during the game and go use a payphone to call their machine to see if anyone on the planet would give them a job. And then you’d go back and watch the game for three hours and get lost in it and be happy.

We’d bust each other’s humps and argue and see who could memorize the most statistics. Tommy Sizemore had a photographic memory that was not dissimilar to Bob Costas’s ability to recall stats and facts. I was so pathetic I’d bring Roger Angell books up. I read his stuff in the New Yorker and his collections. Halberstam’s writing in the Summer of ’49 and especially The Teammates. I’m a sucker for baseball writing because the game lends itself to poetic prose. Some people think it’s too much but I think it’s great. So we’d talk about baseball and be having a good time.

I loved Yankee Stadium because of the colors and the smells and the potential for anything to happen in the bottom of the ninth. Baseball dictates that you can always come back and even in those years when the team was awful anything could happen. It was the perfect place to be for a young, unemployed actor. Things just seemed unlimited. Day games are from God. They are the greatest.

John C. McGinley plays Dr. Perry Cox on NBC’s Scrubs.

My wife Emily and I painted our apartment a few months back.  When we got to the bedroom, we chose a pale green.  “Green is a tricky color,” my mother said, and sure enough when we stared slapping it on the walls, we realized we had made a mistake. 

Lesson: Never buy a color called “Impetuous.”  So we tried another shade of green, which we liked…until the sun went down and our room turned into something out of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. 

Wait til we put the pictures back, then it will look better.  Emily gave in.  The thought of re-painting was worse than living in a Fun House.  And eventually, with the pictures back on the wall, it did start to feel like home. 

The new site here doesn’t feel like home yet.  It has that new car vibe.  The technology is new, there are two new contributors, and a bunch of issues to address–the archives, the comment section, the links.  It has been overwhelming.  Exciting, but strange and new. 

I’m amped about where we are headed.  I just wanted to let you know, that I empathize with some of your reactions to the change and appreciate all of the feedback you’ve provided.  It’s going to take a minute, and things will continue to be tweaked over the next couple of months, but we’re working on it, and you aren’t alone in getting used to the new digs. 

Thanks for coming back.

But we’re going back again in a couple of weeks…

By Will Leitch

(Writer’s Note: I wrote this piece in October 2003, right after Aaron Boone hit his epic home run to briefly stave off the impending Red Sox juggernaut. Five years later, I’m a little embarrassed by it. It betrays a New York newbie’s naivete and dopey slack-jawedness about this strange new city in which he found himself. But I still thought about this story’s Jerry every time I went to Yankee Stadium, and, all told, I still think about him a little every time I ever go to a game anywhere.)

Thanks to the glory of blind Internet luck, I scored tickets to Game 6 of the American League Championship Series, for the blood feud between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. My seats were in the right field bleachers, notoriously the most profane, obnoxious and uproarious section in Yankee Stadium, probably in all of baseball.

Manhattan interlopers like myself, and outsiders who only know what they see on HBO, have a distorted view of what the people of New York City are like. They see glammed up urbanites in high heels and Prada sunglasses, sipping martinis and staying out until 4 a.m. They see artists, they see writers, they see stockbrokers, they see the fast living, non-stop, run run run lifestyle, the one that embodies Manhattan, the one that makes everyone want to come here, and they think that’s what life is like in New York. And for a certain, tiny-but-endlessly-self-promotional section of the population, I suppose it is.

But the real New York can be found in right field of the Yankee Stadium bleachers.

(more…)

Another Fine Mess for Bud Selig’s MLB.

Before the 2-2 game can continue the $64,000 question remains:

This is what we want from sports, most of us, a remembrance of happy times and experience shared, warmth and kidding laughter, a marvelous sense of the importance of the unimportant.

Leonard Shecter

Bronx Banter is just a few weeks away from completing its sixth full season yet it feels as if we’re just getting warmed-up.  I am proud to bring the site to the SNY network of blogs.  Along with Steve Lombardi’s Was Watching, our inimitable take on all things Yankees, helps give SNY great Bronx Bomber coverage, soup to nuts. 

Much thanks to Steve Raab, Fred Harner, Matt Cerrone, John Keegan, and Ken Arneson for helping make this a smooth transition.  And the move should be seamless for you guys as well. 

You’ll notice the banner ads for SNY but otherwise, things are remarkably similiar to how they were at Toaster.  Just so you know, as part of our deal, I retain complete editorial control, so the content will not change because we’re affliated with SNY.  You will have to register for the comments section from scratch, an inconvenience I trust won’t be too much of a hassle.  The new Loggin button can be found on the top left-hand portion of the page.  I’ll keep reminding y’all as the week goes on.  (In the conversion from Toaster, we’ve lost the comments for all posts that took placed during the last week, however the older posts still contain comments).

When I stared this site back in November of 2002, I didn’t choose the title Bronx Banter randomly.  Sure, it had a nice ring to it, but if I had lived in Brooklyn at the time, I never would have used “Bronx” even if it was a Yankee blog. 

Banter is what this blog has always been about.  I’ve never thought that my opinion is the end all.  I’m no expert.  I’m an enthusiast.  I love initiating convesation, banter.  That’s what gets me going.  I learn as much from you guys in the comments section as I do from anywhere else. 

So, in addition to the usual Bronx Banter crew–Cliff Corcoran, Bruce Markusen, Will Weiss and Emma Span–Todd Drew, who writes the brilliant man-on-the-street blog, Yankees for Justice, is joining the team and will be posting on a regular basis.  Diane Firstman will also be on board, providing a daily one-stop-shop of Yankee links around the ‘Net.  I’m thrilled to have both of them jern the club, and honored to have such a strong group of writers working with me to bring you our own unique brand of Yankee coverage. 

The look of the site is in Beta form, and we’ll be tweaking things as we get our bearings during the winter months.  Bear with us as we get the hang of the new technology.  As always, I encourage you to give me your take on what you like and what you don’t like about the site.  The hope here is to make Bronx Banter bigger and better while remaining true to the spirit of intelligence, humor, empathy and curiosity that has marked our first six seasons.

And that’s word to Big Bird.

In November of ’02, I started Bronx Banter on Blogspot.  The next year I took it to All-Baseball.com, and for the past four seasons, I’ve been with the crew at Baseball Toaster. It’s been a great run and a true honor to blog alongside the talent here.  Now, Bronx Banter is moving again, this time to the SNY network of blogs. 

The new address is www.bronxbanterblog.com. 

The Banter writing crew, Cliff Corcoran, Bruce Markusen, Emma Span and Will Weiss, are all coming along, I retain complete editorial control, and the new spot will be poppin.  Please jern us.  Once again, I want to say what a great time we’ve had here at Toaster.  Special thanks to Ken Arnesen for making the transition a smooth one.

Thanks, and as Kane says:

Three games in, and this has been a fun, competitive World Serious.  The Rays were down 4-1, came back to tie the game, but the Phils pulled it out with a cheap hit in the bottom of the ninth. 

Go Baseball!  Hope we get four more just like it.