Roger Maris was traded to the Saint Louis Cardinals in 1967, so the New York Yankees weren’t the same again. He thought of this as he closed his locker for the last time on the last day of the last class of his senior year of high school.
His team would be quite different from the Yanks of “61” and “62”, The team he grew up with, that legacy team of the 50s that seemed to win a World Series every year was slowly changing. They lost the World Series in 1964 and getting older. The first brother is getting older but will always play Baseball and follow his Yanks. With the winter snow melted away to expose the spring grass of his baseball field on Ellsworth Street, those familiar feelings of Yankees and younger days stir once more. He thought we would play Baseball one more time on the baseball field. After all, it was his field and graduation party; if he were old enough to be drafted into Vietnam, he would certainly do what he pleased. He made his Field of Dreams, and nobody else but his friends could play there.
The summer of 1967 on Ellsworth Street started with a graduation party and a baseball game. There’s a photograph of the first brother standing there, hands up in jubilation, while friends look on in the background, drinking beer. The picture had gotten such notoriety of family lore that each of his younger brothers tried to imitate the photograph of him standing, hands up in triumphant jubilation, with gleeful confidence at a job done, a mission completed. It’s a photograph that has been re-staged repeatedly; it’s that feeling of high school graduation in 1967. The media concocted an idea for calling it the summer of love, but that term was just invented to sell records and newspaper articles. In reality, the summer of 1967 was the summer of the Open House baseball game Graduation Party of Ellsworth Street.
The Ellsworth Street House looked a little different in 1967. the house was white, and there were more trees as Dutch elm disease hadn’t taken its toll yet. There were several lilac bushes, and the old concrete retaining wall remained intact. There was no garage, making the baseball field yard larger. The driveway that went around the house was dirt and gravel. Home plate was next to the lilac bush at the top of the driveway facing Ellsworth the first base line went North to Rezneak’s yard, the second base went to the boundary of the Kryzacks and Morello house; third base lay behind the oak tree.
His high school graduation in 1967 was warm but humid, one of those days that waits for a graduation party like this, with cold winters forgotten and the inconsistencies of spring giving way to burst out of life everywhere, becoming proper summer. The first brother was the first one to graduate in his generation, so everyone was there. They were grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, relatives who came from far away, neighbors, and friends. The father put a big sign saying “open house” at the corner with a banner stretching from one end of the property to the next. There needed to be more outdoor lawn chairs. The kitchen was a buzz of activity and drinks, and sandwiches were prepared. Hamburgers had to be cooked outside on the father’s grill. More chairs from the house were put out as well. “Open House” is a term used to describe a house selling, but today it’s a special meaning because today, there will be a huge graduation party and an even greater Baseball game.
The father bought kegs of beer. The first brother’s friends drink and talk about future ideas. The grandfather sat on the chair underneath the Apple tree, whose buds had just started to come out. Drafted in 1917, he went off to fight in a war to end all wars. Setting up the charcoal on the fireplace that he built to cook burgers, the father, after his own graduation, joined the Navy in 1941 to fight the second war to end all wars. These men knew combat and wanted their son and grandson to have nothing to do with it. After all, this is what they fought for, to live in peace, but today was not that day. It was not the day for negative thinking. It was a day of celebrations and backyard baseball.
Maybe it was the combination of beer on a hot summer day and the fact that his friends and family were having fun one more time on this field that they enjoyed so many times that first brother and his friends playing Wiffle Ball on their ball field became their heroes of past Yankee teams. So instead of the first brother and his friends playing on their field, they were playing with the “61” Yankees. The party was watching Yogi Berra, Don Larsen, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris play Baseball in the backyard of Ellsworth Street or, to be more precise. Forty-two minutes, nineteen seconds, North by seventy-four degrees, ten minutes and twenty-four seconds west of the prime Meridian. This was the location of his home plate, the baseball field, the Whiffle Ball game, and the old Yankee Stadium for one summer graduation day. The father, the grandfather, and all the younger brothers and family members were in the stands.
Baseball’s one of those fine summer sports where you can sit back and relax and watch, no television, no music necessary, it’s a sport for backyard summer graduation parties. The first brother started the game with the ball connected to deep right field, almost going to Rezneak’s yard, and making it into a double. Yogi Berra hit a line drive to score the first run. The next batter hits a high line drive only to be caught by a leaping grab from Mickey Mantle. The ball field is smaller than when First brother and his friends first played on it ten years ago. They had gotten bigger and taller. The wiffleball in the backyard will not carry like a baseball.
But with two men on and two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the baseball game took a serious tone. It’s time to bring in Don Larsen. Larsen approaches the mound, the only man to throw a complete game no-hitter in a World Series. The batter comes to the plate, with the first pitch a screaming fastball, and the batter swings. Ice cream pops. Larsen does his wind-up second pitch. The crowd sits on the edge of their seat, the younger brothers waiting in anticipation, dropping down their sodas. A swing and a miss, strike two. Everyone at the graduation party stops what they’re doing and looks at this. This is the last strike to the final out. Can they, do it? Can they win the game?
Memory is an uncertain thing. Still determining if it was a miss or if they finally got to Larsen in the end, but all the boys knew was the day after the game on Monday morning They’d have to report to the Draft induction center. Brushed up on their French because Vietnam was a former French colony.
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