Gil Hodges 1952 Baseball Card
(c) Topps Chewing Gum Company
From her well-deserved spot in Heaven, Mom smiled this week. Fifty years after his death at age 47, and long after it seemed to be an attainable goal any longer, Gil Hodges has finally been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. On July 24, 2022 his widow Joan, their son Gil, Jr., and their three daughters Barbara, Irene, and Cynthia will travel to Cooperstown for a ceremony that in their darkest moments none of the five of them likely believed would ever happen.
Mom was a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan. It is important here - as it always was for her - to note the geographical nature of her fandom. The Dodgers were her team growing up and she lived and died with them every autumn. Once they moved to California, and regardless of whether Walter O'Malley or Robert Moses was the true villian of that piece, they were dead to her. Mom never rooted for the Los Angeles Dodgers just as Dad, who was a New York Giants fan, never rooted for the San Francisco Giants. Talk about Irish Alzheimer's. My folks embodied it - at least when it came to baseball and teams that had abandoned their respective boroughs of New York City to move 3,000 miles away.
Her love for the Brooklyn Dodgers never waned. I did not realize just how many books related to her Boys of Summer I had bought her as presents until she died and Kara, Jill, and I packed up her condo in Jupiter, Florida. It turned out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen or twenty. When we drove north at week's end, I brought them all home with me. I did not have the heart to throw them out. I still have them. I have only read a few of them in the four and one-half years since Mom died.
I actually read Praying for Gil Hodges which Thomas Oliphant (then writing for the Boston Globe) released in 2005, years before Mom died. I had heard Oliphant discussing the book on the radio one morning with Don Imus and as it sounded like something Mom would enjoy (the story focuses on the 1955 World Series and, also, on Dodgers fans all over Brooklyn literally praying for Gil Hodges to break out of a bad batting slump, which Mom had told me years earlier was something she had done herself), I bought if for her for either Mother's Day or her birthday. When she completed it, she called me to tell me that she had enjoyed it very much. She also called to ask me if I had known, when I bought it, Oliphant wrote in it about Dad. I told her that I had not.
As fate would have it, in the fall of 1955, when Brooklyn's beloved Dodgers battled the Yankees in the World Series (ultimately capturing the only World Series they would win while calling Brooklyn home), Thomas Oliphant was a fifth-grade student at the Browning School for Boys in Manhattan. Dad was his history teacher. In the book, Oliphant noted (correctly) that Dad, a Giants fan who hated the Dodgers but loathed the Yankees, taught Oliphant and his classmates the concept of "the enemy of the enemy is my friend" as he rooted for the Dodgers to finally vanquish the Bronx Bombers.
Oliphant's references to my father, while brief and while undercut somewhat by the fact that he misspelled our last name (he added that second "e" between the double n and the y), described a man who, frankly, I never knew. The almost twelve years that passed between Oliphant's introduction to Dad as a fifth-grader and my introduction to him as a newborn baby exacted a greater toll on Dad than I ever could have possibly fathomed, as did the fourteen-plus years that passed between my birth and his own death at fifty-seven, in 1981.
A Borough's prayer has finally been been answered. For Gil Hodges, for Joan, and for their children, "waiting 'til next year" no longer is an empty platitude but is, instead, a declaration. It is next year, 2022, where a dream, long believed to be impossible, shall be fulfilled.
Somewhere, Mom is smiling. And I suspect that Dad is too.
Photo Credit: Metsmerized (Twitter)
-AK
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