For many Baby Boomers, the events of October 1962 may have been the end of innocence. On October 22, President Kennedy revealed the crisis involving the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and announced a blockade, which could have led to nuclear war.
Just a few days before that, however, the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the New York Yankees ended with a dramatic deciding Seventh Game, which the Giants lost 1-0 -- but only because, in the bottom of the Ninth Inning, with two outs and Matty Alou and Willie Mays in scoring position, Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson snared a screaming line drive from Willie McCovey. If the ball hat been hit a couple of feet higher, Alou and Mays would have scored, giving the Giants the World Series Championship. The universal delayed reaction of Giants' fans the world over was memorialized by Charles Schultz in
Peanuts.
The recent
death of Willie McCovey brought all of these memories back.
One of my earliest memories is of sitting in my Bubby's house in the Bronx in 1951, with my father being incredibly excited (and me sharing the excitement) because the then-New York Giants had just defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers on a bottom-of-the-ninth winning home run by Bobby Thomson, capping off what became known as the
Miracle of Coogan's Bluff. Coogan's Bluff was a high hill overlooking left field of the Polo Grounds, where the Giants played. As a child in the 1920s, my father would see his beloved Giants for free along with other fans who watched from Coogan's Bluff. I inherited from him my love of the Giants. The highlight of my first decade of life was in 1957, when I "caught" a batting practice foul ball at the bottom of a scrum in the Polo Grounds' right field stands; when I got home to Silver Spring, I told all my friends that it had been hit by Willie Mays -- even though, in fact, it was hit by Dale Long of the opposing team.
My love of the Giants continued when they moved to San Francisco. Indeed, for years I kept scrapbooks of Giants' games. I have every box score from the end of the 1957 season through the 1962 World Series. Truth be told, I was tiring of keeping the scrapbooks by the time I became a teenager, but I was determined to keep them until the Giants won a pennant. Had they not won the National League title in 1962, I might have kept on until college.
Anyway, Willie McCovey's passing prompted me to remember these joys of youth. And how they began to give way to the realities of a frightening world. Until today, I had not thought of the juxtaposition of the date of the '62 Series to the scary
Thirteen Days that followed. Why? Because until now, as scary as things have seemed from time to time in the last 56 years, I never lost total optimism that we somehow would stumble through and see better days. We seem to be at another cross-roads now, and those in the White House do not measure up to the leadership we had in 1962.
I want to be able to look back with fondness, not wistfulness. But still, somehow, I am optimistic that we will stumble through and see better days. That is up to all of us. I hope we will see the beginning of this improvement Tuesday evening.
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But for any Giants fans out there, I am reproducing the pages from my scrapbook about Game Seven.
