The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) Read Free

firmly in thrall than in the late summer and early fall of 1951.
    After months of comatose play, the Giants suddenly could do no wrong. They won thirty-seven of forty-four games down the home stretch, cutting away at the Dodgers’ once-unassailable lead in what began to seem a fateful manner. By mid-September people talked of little else but whether the Dodgers could hold on. All across the nation fans dropped dead from the heat and excitement. When the dust cleared after the last day’s play, the standings showed the two teams with identical records, so a three-game playoff was hastily arranged to determine who could claim the pennant. The
Register
, like nearly all distant papers, didn’t dispatch a reporter to these impromptu playoffs, but elected to rely on wire services for its coverage until the series proper got under way.
    The playoffs added three days to the nation’s exquisite torment. The two teams split the first two games, so it came down to a third, deciding game. At last the Dodgers appeared to recover their invincibility, taking a comfortable 4 to 1 lead into the ninth inning and needing just three outs to win. But the Giants scored a late run and put two more runners aboard when Bobby Thomson stepped to the plate. What Thomson did that afternoon in the gathering dusk of autumn has many times been voted the greatest moment in baseball history.
    “Dodger reliever Ralph Branca threw a pitch that made history yesterday,” one of those present wrote. “Unfortunately it made history for someone else. Bobby Thomson, the ‘Flying Scotsman,’ swatted Branca’s second offering over the left field wall for a game-winning home run so momentous, so startling, that it was greeted with a moment’s stunned silence.
    “Then, when realization of the miracle came, the double-decked stands of the Polo Grounds rocked on their forty-year-old foundations. The Giants had won the pennant, completing one of the unlikeliest comebacks baseball has ever seen.”
    The author of those words was my father—who was abruptly, unexpectedly, present for Thomson’s moment of majesty. Goodness knows how he had talked the notoriously frugal management of the
Register
into sending him the 1,132 miles from Des Moines to New York for the crucial deciding game—an act of rash expenditure radically out of keeping with decades of careful precedent—or how he had managed to secure credentials and a place in the press box at such a late hour.
    But then he had to be there. It was part of his fate, too. I am not
exactly
suggesting that Bobby Thomson hit that home run because my father was there or implying that he wouldn’t have hit it if my father had not been there. All I am saying is that my father was there and Bobby Thomson was there and the home run was hit and these things couldn’t have been otherwise.
    My father stayed on for the World Series, in which the Yankees beat the Giants fairly easily in six games—there was only so much excitement the world could muster, or take, in a single autumn, I guess—then returned to his usual quiet life in Des Moines. A little over a month later, on a cold, snowy day in early December, his wife went into Mercy Hospital and with very little fuss gave birth to a boy: their third child, second son, first superhero. They named him William, after his father. They would call him Billy until he was old enough to ask them not to.
                      
    APART FROM BASEBALL’S greatest home run and the birth of the Thunderbolt Kid, 1951 was not a hugely eventful year in America. Harry Truman was president, but would shortly make way for Dwight D. Eisenhower. The war in Korea was in full swing and not going well. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had just been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, but would sit in prison for two years more before being taken to the electric chair. In Topeka, Kansas, a mild-mannered black man named Oliver Brown sued the local school board for requiring his