Anyone who knows that Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place is the address of Ebbets Field also knows that Sept. 24 will be the 58th anniversary of the Dodgers’ last game there. The heartbreak known as the move to Los Angeles followed. Or, to quote Mr. Willensky again, “For many loyal fans, the fate of ‘Dem Bums’ represents the fate of Brooklyn.”

Judging by the photographs in the newspapers, the pass the general received looked like most lifetime passes, which are about the size of a credit card. A pocket watch, it definitely was not. When Jose Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays posted a photograph of his pass to every major league ballpark on Instagram in 2013, the website BuzzFeed declared that a lifetime pass was the “ultimate wallet accessory.”

MacArthur’s pass was presented by Walter F. O’Malley, the president of the Dodgers, and was “solid gold” and rectangular, according to The Brooklyn Eagle. Neither The Eagle nor The New York Times mentioned a lifetime pass for Colonel Story, whose departure from the military had followed the general’s.

Colonel Story told Mr. Neary that only two lifetime-pass watches were made, and the other went to MacArthur. “I said back to Colonel Story, ‘And the reason you got this was President Truman fired your boss,’ ” Mr. Neary recalled, adding that Colonel Story had shown him the watch many times before his death in 1991. “But I never knew he was giving it to me,” Mr. Neary said.

Mr. Neary had known Colonel Story since the 1950s. Mr. Neary’s first job in the United States, after he immigrated from Ireland, was as a porter at the New York Athletic Club, and he met Colonel Story there. After Mr. Neary opened his restaurant — Neary’s, at 358 East 57th Street, near First Avenue — in 1967, Colonel Story became a regular. “A daily communicant,” Mr. Neary called him.

In the 1950s, Colonel Story was enough of a celebrity that he figured in stories about MacArthur. When the general’s corncob pipe disappeared on the way to a Senate hearing, it was Colonel Story who found it in the Army car that had taken them from the airport to the Capitol. When smoke seeped from a window at the Waldorf Astoria and Colonel Story reported it, the headline was about him, even though the article misspelled his last name as “Storey.” (The curtains in Room 1286 had caught fire. The people staying in that room were out, and no one was injured.)