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SAL THE BARBERSAL THE BARBER

by Paul Volkby Paul Volk

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Copyright © 2012 by Paul Volk; all rights reserved.

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t was a state of continual humiliation. Actually, it was a borough of continual humiliation. I lived in Brooklyn. When asked where you were from you could always say, “New

York.” But you knew that you had only delayed the inevitable. “What part of New York?” “Brooklyn,” you replied, with what to anyone with the least bit of discernment was a transparently feigned air of confident indifference. “Oh, Brooklyn,” came the response, with an air of pity, or dismissal, or some combination of the two, an air that even someone with no discernment at all could not help but recognize. The next question, sometimes stated but always implied, was, “Why would anyone live there; why would anyone remain there given a chance to move away?” There was a stigma; no one could escape it. There were all those movies, especially the war movies that had the predictable kid from Brooklyn, with a thick accent, augmented by bad grammar, as if no one from that forsaken borough ever got past the third grade. And as the sixties replaced the fifties, who became the chief representative of Brooklyn to the television watching nation and world? Archie

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Bunker from the Bushwick section of Brooklyn: crude, racist, beer drinking, and obnoxious.

Like everyone born into a place or condition looked down on we adopted a reactionary sense of superiority. Ours was not the self righteousness of the rich and well bred; it was the self righteousness of the perennial underdog. We liked living here. We had nothing to be ashamed of. We had Prospect Park, much smaller than Central Park in Manhattan and never listed as a place to see in any tour book, but it did have a lake, and a zoo; a smallish lake and a rundown zoo, which made it somehow better and more virtuous. No, we preferred living here, that is, until we could afford to move. Many a born Brooklynite dreamed of escape, at least to Queens, the borough next door, and at best to “The Island,” which is how the two counties east of Brooklyn and Queens were always referred to. The fact that Brooklyn was geographically part of Long Island was of no consequence. Brooklyn and “The Island” were in different worlds, different planets. We who remained nurtured a contempt for those who left. But really no one could ever leave. Escape, be it to “The Island” or elsewhere, was illusory. You were stamped at birth in indelible ink: Born in Brooklyn.

Many who left retained their identity. They even boasted of their origin like immigrants recalling all that to their selective memories was good back in “the old country”. Far worse, and worthy of no compassion, were the ones who remained but turned traitor. And

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traitors they were, like soldiers abandoning their posts and going over to join the enemy And who was the enemy? No Brooklynite had any doubts; the enemy, our moral and mortal foes, were the Yankees, and most especially, the Giants. Yes, they were two baseball teams, but they were far more than that. They were representatives, symbols, embodiments of all that taunted, mocked and humiliated Brooklyn.

hat united all Brooklynites was our affection for and devotion to our team, the Dodgers. The Dodgers were more than a baseball team; they

were Brooklyn, they were us. Even the name, Dodgers, epitomized the lowly status of the borough they represented. Brooklyn was crisscrossed with electric trolleys that ran on tracks, and were attached overhead to electric lines by slender poles like the long antennae of an insect. Pedestrians would have to dodge the trolleys to get across the street. The local team took the name Trolley Dodgers, later shortened to simply the Dodgers. Up in the Bronx there were the Yankees. And in Manhattan were the Giants. But in Brooklyn, where the inhabitants dodged insults and ridicule long after the last trolley tracks were torn up or paved over, we had the lowly but beloved Dodgers. They were us and we were them. Transcending race and economic status and social position the Dodgers brought us together.

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Baseball was very different back then. Teams did not move from city to city in search of greener infields and larger parking lots. When the

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Boston Braves picked up and moved to Milwaukee it was as shocking and unheard of as a divorce in the family. It just wasn’t done; it was against nature. It was no less unthinkable, no less a betrayal than it would have been for Boston and the whole state of Massachusetts to decide to become part of Canada. A team and its home city were bound by no mere practical arrangement of convenience; they were an organic unity. There were eight teams in each of two leagues; no divisions, no wildcards, just a one hundred and fifty four game season stretching from early April to late September. Each team played every other team twenty two times. And when it was over one team stood on top of each league. There was no hope or consolation for second place. And these two survivors of the long season then faced each other in the World Series, a best of seven contest for the distinction of being baseball champions of the world, actually, of the entire universe. The baseball field was the battleground on which competing armies fought for the honor of their families, their friends and their cities. Baseball was no mere game.

I was just a kid, a naïve kid still free of disillusionment, who believed that honesty really was the best policy and that righteousness is its own reward. I knew that if something was printed in the newspaper, or spoken on the evening news, it had to be true. And I knew that loyalty and shared identity meant more than money, success and fame. I loved, almost worshiped my team, our team. We weren’t mere fans; we were

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followers, devoted followers whose identity was entwined in the identity of Dem Bums, as our team was affectionately called. My Jewish mother, who didn’t know one end of a baseball bat from the other, or from a hockey stick for that matter, loved the Dodgers. She even had a favorite player, perhaps the only Italian she ever loved, Carl Furillo, the right fielder.

p in the distant Bronx, the borough that bordered on wooded and patrician Westchester County was Yankee Stadium, home of the mighty, pinstriped Yankees.

They played in the American League, and were the perennial champions who would consistently proceed to humiliate whichever National League team had the good fortune to win its league championship and the bad fortune to face the mighty Yankees in the World Series. And in the years of my youthful awakening that team was most often the Dodgers. We hated the Yankees, but we respected them. It was no disgrace to lose to them, however much it hurt. Going to the Bronx to take on the Yankees was like a band of farmers, plumbers and shopkeepers, armed only with hoes and bathroom plungers, going up to the Coliseum to do battle with a legion of Roman Gladiators. Mighty Rome: you hated them for their wealth and power, but you could not help but feel awe in their presence.

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The other New York team was the Giants. They played in the same league as our team, which meant head to head confrontation and

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combat twenty two times each season. We hated them also. But unlike the hated Yankees, we had no respect for them at all, only disgust and contempt. How could you respect them when no self-respecting team would call itself “The Giants.” Why not “The Ogres” or “The Child-Eaters”? They played in the Polo Grounds, a large oval never intended for baseball. The Stadium was the home of gladiators. The Polo Grounds, well, who could respect a team that played on a field built for polo? And the Dodgers? We played in Ebbits Field, named after the team’s owner, built in 1913 on the sight of what was then the Pig Town garbage dump. It was a small, old, dinky ballpark in the heart of the borough. Eleven times each season the Giants came to Ebbits Field to play the Dodgers. And eleven times each season the Dodgers went up to Manhattan to the Polo Grounds to play the Giants. The rivalry was fierce and bitter. Losing was never a joy, but losing to the Giants was galling, bitter, ignominious.

n 1951 I was six years old, already old enough to know and love our Dodgers. In 1951 Brooklyn was in first place in the National League, thirteen and a half games ahead of the

Giants well into August. And then the baseball gods ceased to smile on Brooklyn. We won about half of our remaining games, but the Giants began a surge which brought them to the last day of the season tied with the Dodgers for the National League championship. The two teams met in a best of three playoff to the death. Brooklyn lost the first

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game, then won the second. The Dodgers led the third and deciding game four to two in the last inning. Then, with two runners on base, Bobby Thomson of the Giants hit a ball into the seats in left field for a three run home run and in a single moment a long season of hope and promise ended in defeat. Bobby Thomson is remembered as the man who ended the Dodgers’ season that day. But we all knew and understood that someone else had set the stage for that devastating blow. The Giants would never have overcome the Dodger lead that summer; they never would have forced a three game playoff if it had not been for one man. That man was Sal Maglie.

I had no love for anyone in a Giant uniform. But there was one member of the Giants for whom a special, a concentrated hatred was reserved. Just as Goliath epitomized the Philistines, just as Goliath mocked and tormented the weak and lowly army of Israel, there was one Giant who more than any other mocked and tormented our Dodgers: Sal Maglie. Baseball is the game that perfectly unites team and individual play. Nine individual players are dispersed over a large field and the fate of the team rests on the performance of each of them. And the point at which all attention is concentrated, the one player who more than any other holds the destiny of his team literally in his hands, is the pitcher. Maglie was the Giants best pitcher. Sal Maglie was a good, a very good pitcher. Through the course of the 1951 season Maglie compiled a record of 23 wins and only 6 losses. Without

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him there would have been no playoff that year. Sal Maglie was not just one of the Giants, he was the Giants. We hated him with a perfect hatred.

Sure, Maglie was good, so was the German army when it dismembered Poland, so was the Japanese navy when it destroyed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor. Like Goliath taunting Israel Maglie would leer and sneer and tease and torment us. Only we had no David to silence or slay him. He was crafty and smart, and feared. He was known as The Barber, Sal the Barber Maglie, because he would shave opposing hitters with his fastball. Sal was not afraid to throw at a batter’s face. His shaves were always close, very close. He stood atop the pitcher’s mound, a Cheshire cat’s grin on his stubble covered face, and mocked our hitters by his demeanor before he ever threw a single pitch. His curve ball was paralyzing, almost magical. Over the course of many seasons he consistently beat our boys, and those losses were the most bitter of all. Then something wonderful happened. The baseball gods who had forsaken the Dodgers in 1951, turned and smiled on us.

In 1955 the Dodgers amassed a huge lead right from opening day. The Giants were far behind, though the memory of 1951 was still fresh in our minds. Then in August we woke to the news that the Giants had traded Sal Maglie to the Cleveland Indians in the American League. It was like picking up the Jerusalem Daily News and reading that the Philistines had traded Goliath to the Amorites. Oh, the

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Philistine army was still there and a force to contend with twenty-two times between April and September. But their champion, the tormenter, the Dodger slayer would not be there anymore. Truly the gods were smiling on Brooklyn.

hat year the Dodgers met the Yankees again in the World Series. After losing to them again and again 1955 was finally the year of redemption. In seven games we

slew the Roman legion and won our first, and what would turn out to be our only World Series in Brooklyn. That year the long, barren stretch of months between October and the beginning of spring training in March was sweetened by the warm glow of long-delayed victory. The 1956 season opened with a World Champions banner blowing in the breeze over Ebbits Field. My pre-adolescent sense of justice had been vindicated. The poor and downtrodden, the lowly and despised ones, who had not compromised, who had remained true while suffering long, had been rewarded with victory. We held our heads high as the Dodgers began the new season as the defending champions of the world. But alas, like Job in the Bible, I had been lifted up only to be all the more crushingly cast down. I was thrust with terrible suddenness into the first and greatest moral crisis of my life.

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On April 21, 1956 Sal Maglie started a game for the Indians and lasted only three innings, giving up six hits. On May 4 Maglie pitched again for Cleveland, this time lasting only two innings against the

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Baltimore Orioles. Then, later in May, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the inconceivable happened. The Cleveland Indians traded Sal Maglie…to the Brooklyn Dodgers. On the 24 of May Maglie pitched two scoreless innings against the Philadelphia Phillies, wearing the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers! I was stunned, confused, uncomprehending. There he stood, the object of my unreserved scorn and hatred, on the pitcher’s mound in Ebbits Field, on holy, sacred ground, wearing Dodger blue. Love and hate collided; I was morally, emotionally derailed. And it was only May.

ow could this possibly have happened? How could the Dodgers, our Dodgers, my Dodgers welcome into their dugout, into the bosom of the borough, Sal

Maglie? How could Peewee and Duke and Carl and Roy sit beside him, spit sunflower seed shells with him, play their positions behind him? So what if he could help us win another pennant! Surely it would be better to lose without his help than to win with it.

HIt was like waking up during the Second World War to a headline

proclaiming, “Allies sign Goebels to head information office.” Or living in constant humiliation in Israel, tormented by the Philistines, only to hear on the evening news, “King Saul announced today that Goliath had accepted an offer to join the Israelite Army. Details of the contract are still secret but it is known Goliath was offered a large signing bonus. The Philistines received two thousand oxen and a

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general to be named later.” No, Goliath in an Israelite uniform was still Goliath.

And Maglie, how could he accept? So things hadn’t gone so well for him in Cleveland, but still…. Had he no honor, no sense of dignity, no sense of what is right and good? Why wouldn’t he rather sit out the season and not pitch at all, why wouldn’t he rather work frying burgers, or selling insurance, or live on the street begging for food than put on a Dodger uniform? How could he sit beside the very men at whose faces he had year after year thrown fastballs? Would they all go for dinner together after a game and smile and laugh as if those years of arch-rivalry, of bitter hatred, of elation and despair were, were…nothing? Were loyalty and honor and struggle and enduring hope just illusions after all? I trusted my team; I believed in these guys. How could they? My world shook. This was a moral earthquake, the sureties upon which my view of life and reality stood were shaking and toppling like Lincoln Logs, like Tinker Toys. Was that all these feelings of loyalty, these years of shared ignominy and glory were, just a game, just a construction with pieces that could be interchanged at whim?

My ten year old soul new nothing of moral ambiguity. Relativism was a concept waiting in my distant future. No, good and evil, light and dark, were absolutes, eternally opposed. God and the devil were not secretly friends who went out for a few beers together after a hard day battling for control of the universe. Yet there he was, Sal the

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Barber Maglie, on the mound, winning games for the Dodgers. And compounding my confusion was the sight of the fans of Brooklyn cheering and applauding. Fickle fools! How short was their memory? Maglie was there just five years before, jumping joyously with Bobby Thomson as he touched home plate and broke Brooklyn’s heart. And I began to guess at what had been true all along but unseen until then by innocent eyes. They didn’t care. It was only about winning and not how you won. No love, no hatred was lasting and true. Now a dark shadow, a great fog shrouded what I had thought would be a season-long exultation in last fall’s World Series triumph. May turned into June and June into July and July into August. Then September came; it always does. No matter where your team is in the standings, summer moves inexorably towards September, the month of decision. The Dodgers were holding on to first place and it was looking likely that they would face the Yankees again in the World Series.

Maglie won two games in June, two more in July, and three in August. Then in September, the critical, decisive month of September, Maglie went six and one. One of those wins, on September 25, was a masterful no-hitter against Philadelphia. There he was, bewildering the Phillies just as he had bewildered the Dodger hitters so many times as a Giant. My resistance was crumbling. It had been gradually eroding all season long. Who could stand against the rising tide of adulation coming from every quarter of the borough? In September my fortress

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of honor and pride was penetrated; the gates had been unlocked and the enemy had come in. He was our guy, our hero. I mean, a no-hitter! In the World Series Maglie took the mound against the mighty Yankees. He beat them once, allowing only three runs. And he lost once, but what a loss it was. He gave up only two runs and five hits in eight innings. But that was the day Don Larson of the Yankees pitched a perfect game. Twenty-seven Dodgers, three in each of nine innings, came up and they all made out. We lost the Series to the Yankees but by the end of the season I had caved in. I was loving Sal Maglie. What did that say about him? What did that say about me?

t was another long winter. I waited for spring training, scavenging through the sports pages for any scrap of baseball news. Only this winter I had something new to contemplate.

You’ll say eleven is too young to be pondering the meaning of shifting loyalties and human emotions. It’s too young to truly reflect on your own heart’s deepest sentiments and the meaning of life. And I’ll answer; you have forgotten what it was like when you were eleven. No, not with the intellectual and moral tools that come with years and experience, but no less profoundly, at eleven, and even much sooner, we feel and are moved as illusions vanish in the glaring light of reality. “Foolish illusions, childish fantasies,” the adults all around you (and years later the adult within you) say: “It was just a game and now its time to grow up.” Yes, it was a game, but it was not just a game.

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Loyalty, moral absolutes, the love of good and the need for true heroes with values that transcend money, fame and pride may not be understood at eleven years old, but they are nonetheless, perhaps all the more felt and real and crucial. I am older now; I have put away childish things (for the most part). The times have changed. Ballplayers move from team to team pursuing multimillion dollar contracts. And scandals concerning their personal lives and drug usage are the commonplace of the sports pages. Relativism and cynicism are the norm now. That is supposed to be a sign of having grown up. So why do I still feel the stab of disillusionment and deep disappointment when someone who was supposed to represent virtue and love of truth and putting the team, or the city, or the country above self, lets us all down?

al Maglie pitched for the Dodgers again in 1957. And he finished his career with, of all teams, the Yankees. He was probably a pretty nice guy. The leering Goliath we watched

on the black and white television screen or from the seats at Ebbits Field was not the reality. But the passions aroused and squashed and revived and confused were real. It’s all part of growing up. For me, it was a big, a very big part of growing up in Brooklyn. I don’t ask how Sal Maglie could have put on a Dodger uniform anymore. I don’t have to look outside for examples of moral ambiguity, for examples of loving and hating the same things at the same time. I can look within; I have

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enough examples of disillusionment and confusion within myself to keep me occupied through those times of life between one season and the next. But my serious, grown up reflections began back in Brooklyn, when I was an innocent kid whose emotions rose and fell with every pitch and every inning and every Dodger game. They began with Sal Maglie. What a curveball he threw. Like life, it could fool the best of hitters.

It was only many years after the 1956 season that I discovered that Leo Durocher, the hated manager of the hated Giants, had been the beloved manager of … yup, the Dodgers back in the Forties. Leo, how could you? But I had no idea. Leo was someone else’s earthquake. He was the crisis of some other ten and eleven year old Dodger and Giant fans. To each his own.

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