Stanley Corngold’s evocation of his first time in Yankee Stadium reminded your editor of a Q&A with another Brooklyn boy (and friend of First). When the late Jules Chametzky was in hospice last year his son, Rob, asked him if he’d ever seen Willie Mays play when Mays was in the minor leagues. Rob recalled their exchange at his father’s Memorial…
Mays was playing in Minneapolis (where my father was in graduate school) in 1951. He said Mays was not there long–I looked it up and he was only there for a few months, though time enough to hit .477–but he had seen him because a friend had insisted he come along to do so. I pointed out that he was also in the crowd when T.S. Eliot spoke to about 15,000 people on campus. Yes, he was. So, I asked, who was better? Mays or Eliot? He laughed hard enough to start coughing. Then, “Hmmmm…
Both had power. But Mays had everything, and you couldn’t take your eyes off him. You’d’ve paid to watch him eat a peach. Definitely Mays.”
What follows is another story about youth and New York stadiums that the author, Robert Paul Wolff, passed on to Rob in the aftermath of his father’s memorial. Jules Chametzky figures in this one too…
There is a story about Wallace and my involvement in politics that I have been telling for fifty years. It goes like this: One day in the late summer of ’48, Johnny Brown and I set out from Kew Gardens Hills to attend a Wallace rally at Yankee Stadium. When we got there, it was raining, and we decided that our politics were not serious enough to get us to stand in the rain just to hear political speeches. As we left the stadium, the rain let up, and it occurred to us that right across the river the Dodgers were playing the Giants at the Polo Grounds. Since we were both avid Dodgers fans, we walked across the bridge, paid our way into the cheap seats, sneaked down in the nearly empty ball-park to the expensive seats, and, after the rain finally let up, watched Rex Barney pitch a no-hitter. It is the only no-hitter I ever saw, and it is forever associated in my mind with progressive politics.
Well, that is the story, and I have, or think I have, visual memories of each element of it — the rally at Yankee Stadium, the walk to the Polo grounds, and the no-hitter. As I prepared to write this bit of my memoir, I went on-line to check the component parts of the story. Sure enough, I found an account of Rex Barney’s no-hitter against the Giants, which mentioned a one-hour rain delay and showers in the sixth, eighth, and ninth innings. September 9, 1948. I also found an account of the Wallace rally at Yankee Stadium. It turns out Pete Seeger was on the program, which may in fact have been the real inducement, for me at least. But the rally was held on September 10, 1948, not September 9! So regardless of what I think I remember, I could not have walked with Johnny Brown from the rally to the game. Did I really go to the rally at all? Did I go to the game one night, and the rally the next?”
A month or so after writing that paragraph, I was having lunch with a group of friends in Amherst, all of them professors at the University of Massachusetts, where I was teaching. I told the story as a humorous example of the fallibility of memory, but one of the group, a marvelous old left-wing emeritus Professor of English named Jules Chametzky, said “But I have been telling that story for fifty years. I was there.” “What do you mean,” I asked, mystified, “you were there?” “Yes,” he said, “I was one of Vito Marcantonio’s lieutenants. [Marcantonio was a Congressman and a left-wing member of the American Labor Party.] My story is that fifty thousand people showed up for the rally, and when it was rained out, all fifty thousand came back the next night!”