Remembering 1947, Baseball And What Heroes Were Like


This book is for people who love baseball, particularly people who loved baseball back in 1947, were 12 years old at the time, and had, well, a mitt.

I say this because I remember how boys behaved in that landmark year for the Series-winning New York Yankees, a team of returning WW II veterans and fresh-faced rookies.

My male classmates were obsessed with the sport: talking RBIs and double plays and box scores and related inscrutables. They worshipped Joe Dimaggio (of whom I had heard), and Phil Rizzuto (I had heard of him, too) and, probably, George (Snuffy) Stirnweiss (never heard of him, but more on Snuffy in a moment).

The boys at my innovative school on New York’s Upper East Side — where everyone, boys and girls alike, knew the United Nations song by heart and field trips to public housing were as regular as visits from Pete Seeger (whose brother, John, taught us geography) — fondled and punched, even in class, their lumpy baseball mitts throughout the thrilling baseball weeks of autumn.

Of course the girls could have pummeled baseball mitts, too, but somehow, pounding a couple of pounds of cow skin never caught on with us. We just picked sides. Rooting for the Dodgers was the way we caught the attention of boys who lived for the Yankees.

Now these mostly East Side boys were not alone. Across the river, at P.S. 69 in Jackson Heights, Queens, Frank Strauss (Frankie to Babe Ruth, more on that later, too) was another boy electrified by anything baseball. After class he would run home to 76th Street, drop his books on the kitchen table and tune in Mel Allen announcing a Yankees game on radio station WINS. In that three-baseball-team town of the late ’40s, Strauss could listen to Dodger games, too, on WHN (Red Barber), as he recalls, or Giants’ games on WMCA (Russ Hodges).

All these details are as fresh to Strauss as this morning’s walk around Woodbridge Lake in Goshen, where he weekends with his wife, Joan. So he wrote a book about that baseball year, 1947, and he called it "Dawn of a Dynasty," the start of a thrilling 18-year run during which the Yankees won 15 pennants, swelling the baseball joy in fellows like Frank Strauss well into manhood.

And far beyond.

"I wanted to tell young people today what baseball used to be like," Strauss says.

It was a lovely thing, that baseball: two leagues, no divisions, hardly any night games ("baseball was made to be played in sunlight," Strauss says), hardly any televised games, and the athletes played for love, not money.

"Every boy in New York City wanted to be a Major League baseball player," Strauss tells me.

And why was that?

"It looked like an excellent life, playing before all those people." Also, for a Jewish boy who escaped with his family to the United States in 1936 and spoke German at home (which kept Strauss from inviting friends over, at least until the war ended), loving baseball was a ticket to American boyhood — not to mention a great way to spend Sunday afternoons.

A 60-cent seat in the right bleachers for a Sunday double-header at "the stadium" was no farther away than a nickel subwayride. Strauss went alone, usually, and sometimes with his dad, who tried to like the game, "but he never got the hang of it," Strauss says.

Then there were the heroes.

Baseball was full of them. Like Babe Ruth. Distant heroes, usually.

But Strauss used to walk a dog for a neighbor who promised to introduce the boy to her uncle.

"Babe," the neighbor called into another room one day as Strauss returned her Scottie. "Someone would like to meet you."

Strauss figures he should have known. A big, black Lincoln parked in this Queens neighborhood had to signal a visitor of note.

The Babe was as advertised. "Huge. Gravelly voiced," Strauss remembers. " ‘Hiya kid,’ he said."

They talked about baseball, and loving the Yankees, and their chances for the season, and then the great man wrote in the boy’s autograph book "To Frankie Strauss, from Babe Ruth."

That summer, the Babe died.

Strauss framed the autograph and has it still.

Not all heroes were the super kind, though.

"I bonded with George ‘Snuffy’ Stirnweiss," Strauss remembers. "He was never a great hitter, but he was a good fielder, a gutsy, tough little player. I related to him. So I wanted to be a second baseman for the Yankees."

That never happened. Strauss went to Antioch, where he majored in political science, worked as a copy boy at the New York Post (yes, a reporter would type a page, yell "copy," and Strauss would run pick it up). Later he did radio play-by-play for high-school sports in Needles, CA, worked as a newspaper editor, a Democratic Party strategist, and, finally, communications director for the Council of Jewish Federations in the United States and Canada, managing his whole life to indulge his two great passions: politics and sports.

And though baseball has changed with games at night, and free-agent status splitting up team members propels beloved players from one city to another, and a pile of divisions has forced play into cold weather, "Dawn of a Dynasty" lets everyone know what the great game used to be like for baseball-crazy kids, back in 1947, like Strauss.

 

 


Strauss will be reading from "Dawn of a Dynasty" at Naugatuck Library, July 17 at 6:30 p.m., and the Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield, Sept. 18 at 7 p.m. The Web site for his book is www.1947yankees.com.

 

 

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less