History as Connection: Doris Kearns Goodwin Talks Baseball, the Fifties and Writing Memoir

"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another."
― Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s but it is more than that. It is also a loving portrait of a series of bonds between neighbors, friends and family all of which are nurtured by and defined within the context of baseball. It is a book that is very different in some ways from the body of Goodwin's other work. Since 1977 she has written books of "big" history – tales of presidential politics and "political genius," winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and teaching at Harvard for 10 years.

It seems fitting that this most local of histories is a selection for World Book Night, and a free book giveaway right here in our own neighborhood.

This Wednesday night, April 23, is William Shakespeare's birthday. Every year on this night, "book givers" from World Book Night fan out to distribute half a million free paperbacks to encourage and spread the love of reading. The givers make a proposal to the organization in advance of the night, offering a location to distribute copies of the book they have selected from a list they are provided. The publishers and writers of the books have donated their royalties so that the book can be distributed.

Look for an announcement later today for the location where I will be distributing this wonderful book. But just as exciting as the opportunity to give the book away, was the chance to sit and talk to Doris Kearns Goodwin, about history, baseball, the Fifties and yes, Walter O'Malley.

HH: Could you talk about the idea of community to get us started. Has it changed and do you think the kind of community you are writing about here could exist today?

DKG: For people who grew up in that era, there was universality to what childhood was like. It's so interesting because many times the book is used in high schools as a coming of age story and I hadn't really thought about the fact that it is about the 1950s too. That's what's scary as you get older – it becomes ancient history.

There is something about belonging to the community in which you live and sports has the magical ability to connect people across class lines and racial lines to feel about of your town and your city. There was something about the old Brooklyn Dodgers – a sense that this team that always won, and then always lost and perhaps because Jackie Robinson becoming the first African American in NY. It was a special time to grow up in NY, when all three teams were there. It was the golden age of baseball. When I travel especially there are lots of women who come up to me and say I had a similar relationship with my father. We always think of sports as the province of men, but for lots of little girls loved their team, whether it was the Dodgers or some other team.

HH: We read that you were the first female journalist to be allowed into the Red Sox locker room. Can you tell us about that?

DKG: What happened is after the Dodgers abandoned us and moved to Los Angeles, I eventually moved to Harvard and became an equally rational Red Sox fan and when my kids were little I used to go down to Winterhaven, FL for spring training and I would write articles just so I could go to spring training and bring my kids. It just happened that one of the years I was there a law suit had been filed against MLB by Sports Illustrated on behalf of a female reporter because she couldn't get into the locker room but needed to for her professional job. So the lawsuit was won by Sports Illustrated and I happened to be there, sitting on a bench outside, so the owners said, "go in." It later became a Trivial Pursuit question in New England, "who was the first female reporter in the Sox locker room?" but it was just happenstance. Bizzarely, I later became friends with the woman, Melissa Ludkey, on whose behalf the lawsuit was filed.

HH: Is it different being a female fan?

DKG: Less so now, I think. Even when I was in high school or graduate school there would be football games on Sundays and the girls would be in one room and the guys would be in one room watching, although because I loved sports I would be going back and forth. But now days, you go to the ball park and you see so many women there. When you go up the escalator to get to where our season tickets are, there are pictures from the 1900s and later and all you see are men with hats and suits. Now it really is different.

What happened in my case though is that the book I wrote on Franklin and Eleanor was published the same year as Ken Burn's documentary on the history of baseball, which I was involved in. And everywhere I went to talk about Franklin and Eleanor, there was invariably some woman who came to me and said I had the same relationship with my grandfather, my father, my uncle, somebody – at that point it was usually a man, but now it could be a mother passing it down, as I passed it down to my sons but that's what made me think about writing the memoir. And then, as you say there was something about that decade, even if you lived in a different place, there are memories: the early days of television, riding your bike without locking it up, playing on the street until your parents called you in – it is not just nostalgia but a certain commonality for a lot of people.

HH: We got the feeling reading this book that you believe that the blend of baseball that you got from your father and storytelling from your mother made you a better historian?

DKG: Oh, there is no question. There are two things that I think that led to my love of history. From my mother, because she had been so ill with her heart condition, I loved to hear her tell me stories from the days when she was young before her premature aging set in – she died when she was 51, so all my childhood she had this heart condition – she would tell me stories of her girlhood. I later realized, when I had my sons, that maybe it was unusual that I kept saying, "Mom, tell me about when you were young" but maybe I wanted to remember her from before she was so prematurely old. On the other hand, my kids have never begged me to tell stories about when I was young, so I realized it was probably the context of the time. And then it was my father, who had grown up in Brooklyn and was actually a kid when Ebbets field was built and loved baseball so much. He's the one who had me retell him the story of the game in the evening, when he came home from work. I do think I learned how to tell a story from that: I learned how to tell a story from beginning to middle to end.

Much later my heroine was Barbara Tuchman – I read her Guns of War in college – and the idea that there was a female historian talking about war and such a brilliant writer – gave me the idea that this was possible. Later I read an essay by her saying that when you're writing about history, you have to imagine to yourself you don't know how the story ends—even if you're writing about a war, don't let the reader know how the war ended, because people living then didn't know. So I finally learned that I couldn't tell my father how the Brooklyn Dodger game ended before I even began telling the story. Instead I went through my miniaturized symbols and recreated the game as if I didn't know, and he didn't know, how the story would end.

What history is in many ways is telling stories – about people who lived before in the hope that you can learn from their struggles and their triumphs. To be honest, what mattered so much about writing the memoir, more than I could have imagined when I started, was that I was trying to bring my parents back to life for my sons, just as I tried to do with presidents. I went back to Rockville Center, my old town when I was growing up, found my old friends, and now when I talk about history I somehow weave in the telling of the tales of your own life, of the people you loved and lost, as well the public figures I am recreating whether it is Franklin Roosevelt, Lincoln or Teddy and Taft. History became an emotionally happy experience to me.

HH: Was Wait Till Next Year a pivotal book in your career in some way?

DKG: I think it was. The other books took me so long. It was ten years to write Lincoln, seven years to write Teddy and Taft, six years to write Roosevelt and this one took me a much shorter period of time and it was a different kind of book, one that I hadn't written before – I still had to do research but it was much more of an emotional story. So now whenever I go to talk about history the real message is, if you tell the stories of the people you care about, they can live on. Important Presidents would live on without me. Like the old days of oral tales before the printed word, when you traded stories around the fire – telling stories is a critical thing for all of us and it certainly is the way to make the people who matter to you live on in memories of your children, grandchildren, family and friends.

HH: the title of your book suggests a cyclical aspect to baseball – that you can wait until the next season when things may change for the better, even as some things remain the same. Do you look at history the same way?

DKG: I think that's right. Even now, having spent the last seven years writing about the turn of the century when there was a huge gap between the rich and the poor, big companies were swallowing up little companies and the middle class was struggling, and here we are in 2014 facing a similar situation. You're right, things change and they're not the same but human nature is still the same, the problems we face as people in society, there's some connection to the past. There is an optimism in the hope of "wait till next year," if you've been sad this year, perhaps next year will be better – a happier ending. That's why the famous headline when the Dodgers finally won their first series in 1995 was, "This is Next Year!"

Of course, when I became a Red Sox fan, I thought, what have I done? I managed to find another team exactly like the Dodgers – they hadn't won since 1918 – and then my kids became such rabid fans, I thought what have I done to them? And then they finally won, in 2004, 2007 and last year and now my kids have been really spoiled, compared to my experience.

HH: I remember reading about the day after the first Red Sox series victory, in 2004, how all over New England people put hats and things on grave sites, as a way of continuing a bond with a fan who hadn't lived to witness the "next year."

DKG: That's exactly right. That was one of the most touching things to read. Even this year [2013] the Red Sox finally won at home and it was the first time anyone alive today would have seen that – it was a real sense of we're seeing something special. Last year too, the success of the team, the team spirit, was caught up in the Marathon bombing – somehow the players last year became a part of Boston in a way that helped them win – it's all invisible and magic. Even now, when they're not doing so well, I'm not feeling greedy at all. They gave us such a happy summer last year.

HH: It also struck me in reading this book that we tend to think of the idyllic American experience as being the pastoral, but you have created an idyllic American experience that is rooted in the suburbs. Is the type of community involvement you describe with the Dodgers still possible today?

DKG: The living circumstances are so different today. In Rockville Center when I was growing up, for so many of those people it was a first home and that created an excitement, a bond of common experience. Because too, there were not so many other sports that people were following, baseball was the thing that people connected to – there weren't as many distractions as today. On our block there were Dodger, Giant and Yankee fans so there was a common conversation continually. Now though when you are out in the suburbs there are the bigger lawns – more separation. But the thing about baseball is that because the season occupies takes up so much of the year, it occupies your thoughts and it intrudes itself into daily life. It's funny, the older I get what I wish for is different – I just want them to win more games than they lose – so I can wake up happy more days, instead of just wishing for a happy week in the fall.

HH: Do you have a favorite book that you wrote?

DKG: The experience of living with Lincoln for ten years was special. There was something about him, among the presidents that I have written about: his ethical side, and his ability to forgive people in the past, you just felt if you could be more like him, you'd be a better person. Then there was the whole adventure of it being turned into a movie, with Spielberg and being to really spend time with Daniel Day Lewis. But FDR was great, as was Teddy and Taft – usually whichever book I'm working on at the moment is my favorite. But if I had to chose one of the presidents, it would be Lincoln.

And yet, this one, Wait Till Next Year, really mattered a lot. More than I would have thought. It's interesting after your comment about nostalgia, I thought that when they eventually change the cover of the book, they should add something about growing up in the 1950s – it's not baseball, it's about rendering the time as well.

HH: What is your approach to organizing all your research for a book?

DKG: I learned from Barbara Tuchman to think first about how I am going to proceed – from what angle I will approach a story – and then I go forward chronologically, it's the only way I can keep track of everything. It's the spine of the story – as we said before – you have to know what comes before to know what comes next. I use huge notebooks that will be filled with six months of somebody's life, and the other person's life that I am connecting to. Eventually I have entire rooms related to the life of these people, then they get moved out to the barn.

I'm so glad we talked about what this book meant emotionally. I am honored that this thing is happening. I hope that this book awakens memories for the people it is given to – that it will stir memories that they can talk to their children, or grandchildren about – that they can pass some of those stories on to the next generation. That's what you really hope when you write these things, that the stories will be shared with others. If more people reading this book do that, then I'll be really glad.

HH: Not to end on a bad note, but do you have anything to say about Walter O'Malley?

DKG: [laughing] last night I was giving a talk and was asked the same thing. Growing up, he was the evil man – he took our Dodgers away from us. Recent books have argued that there were economic pressures on him, as well as Robert Moses undoing a deal that he was counting on to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, that the fan base had moved – that he had to do it. In the same way that Lincoln looking back on the people who hurt him in the past just said, "don't let those feelings fester, or they'll poison a part of you," I now can look back on Walter O'Malley without the shame and terrible feelings I had as a child. I am so glad you're doing this and World Book Night is doing this...

 

W
Submitted by Westport, CT

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