I wasn’t there. I was back in the office at Newsday, getting updates from my colleagues about the meals and the wine and the music in picturesque corners of the city.

Boredom set in, and merry pranksters like my friend and mentor, Stan Isaacs, planted a rumor that Yogi Berra was going to be traded after the Series for the Giants’ lefty Johnny Antonelli. It took a day or so before the regular insiders, the guys in the know, were whispering and writing the false gossip. Nowadays, in the age of text messages and Twitter, gossip gets around in the flick of a thumb. This is called progress.

Lest the players fall out of shape, the Yankees held a practice in Modesto, out east in a dry valley. After the Series resumed, Willie McCovey hit a line drive into Bobby Richardson’s glove to end the seventh game.

I finally discovered San Francisco in 1964 — fell in love with the cable car (I still ride outside, hanging off the rail, peering down the steep hills), hung out in Tommy’s Joynt and the Buena Vista and Earthquake McGoon’s and the Fillmore Auditorium and the Haight-Ashbury district, exotic secondhand smoke everywhere. (During the recent National League Championship Series, the Phillies’ management played the ’60s anthem “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)” to mock the city as a haven of the effete. They should have been there in the Summer of Love.)

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The Giants did not get back to the World Series until 1989. They lost the first two games in Oakland, and were ready for the third game on a warm, still evening, when all hell broke loose — not the Big One, but quite big enough, 6.9 on the Richter Scale. Sixty-three people died in California.