To sing the National Anthem in school auditorium every week, even during the worst of the war years, generally left me cold; the enthusiastic lady teacher waved her arms in the air and we obliged with the words: “See! Light! Proof! Night! There!” Nothing stirred within, strident as we might be—in the end just another school exercise. But on Sundays out at Ruppert Stadium (a green wedge of pasture miraculously walled in among the factories, warehouses and truck depots of Newark's industrial “Ironbound” section), waiting for the Newark Bears to take on the enemy from across the marshes, the hated Jersey City Giants (within our church the schisms are profound), it would have seemed to me an emotional thrill forsaken, if we had not to rise first to our feet (my father, my brother, and me—together with our inimical countrymen, Newark's Irishmen, Germans, Italians, Poles, and out in the Africa of the bleachers, Newark's Negroes) to celebrate the America that had given to this disparate collection of men and boys a game so grand and beautiful.

Just as during my high school days I first learned the names of the great institutions of higher learning, not from our “college adviser,” but from trafficking in college football pools for a neighborhood bookmaker, so I came to have a stronger sense of the American landscape from following the major league clubs on their road trips, and reading about the dozens of minor league teams in the back pages of The Sporting News, than from looking at maps of pioneer trails in school. The size of the continent got through to you finally when you had to stay up to 10:30 P.M. in New Jersey (where was raining) to hear via radio “tickertape,” Cardinal pitcher Mort Cooper throw. the first strike of the night to Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese out in steamy Sportsmen's Park in St. Louis, Missouri. And whatever we might be taught in class about the stockyards or the Haymarket riot, Chicago only began to exist for me as a real place, and to matter in American history, when I became fearful (as a Dodger fan) of the bat of Phil Cavaretta, first baseman for the Chicago Cubs.

Not until I got to college and was introduced to literature did I find anything with a comparable emotional atmosphere and as strong an esthetic appeal. I don't mean to suggest that was a simple exchange, one passion for another. Between first discovering the Newark Bears and the Brooklyn Dodgers at age 7 or 8 and first looking into Conrad's “Lord Jim” at age 18, I had done some growing up. I am only saying that my discoyery of literature, and fiction in particular, and the “love affair"—to some degree hopeless, but still earnest—that has ensued, derives in part from this childhood infatuation with baseball. Or, Perhaps more accurately, baseball, with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longeurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its heroics, its nuances, its “characters,” its language, and its mythic sense of itself, was the literature boyhood.

Baseball, as played in the big leagues, was something completely outside my own life that could nonetheless move me to ecstasy and to tears, something that could excite the imagination and, hold the attention with its minutiae as with its high drama—Mel Ott's cocked leg striding into the ball, Jackie Robinson's pigeon‐toed shuffle as he moved out to second base, as deeply affecting over the years as that night —"inconceivable,” “inscrutable,” as any night Conrad's Marlow might struggle to comprehend—the night that Dodger wild man, Rex Barney (who never lived up to “our” expectations, who should have been “our” Koufax) not only went the distance without walking in half a dozen runs but, of all things, threw a no‐hitter. A thrilling mystery, marvelously enriched by the fact that a drizzle had been falling in the early evening, and Barney, figuring the game was going to be postponed, had eaten a hot dog just before being told to take the

This detail was passed on to us by Red Barber, the Dodger radio sportscaster of the forties, a respectful, mild Southerner with a subtle rural tanginess to his vocabulary and a soft country parson tone to his voice. For the adventures of “dem bums” of Brooklyn—a region then the very symbol of urban wackiness and tumult—to be narrated from Red Barber's highly alien but loving perspective constituted a genuine triumph of what my literature professors would later teach me to call “point of view.” Henry James might himself have admired the implicit eultural ironies and the splendid possibilities for oblique moral and social commentary. And as for the detail. about Rex Barney eating his hot dog, it was irresistible, joining as it did the spectacular to the mundane, and furnishing an adolescent boy with a glimpse of an unexpectedly ordinary, even humdrum, side to male heroism.