In 1965, a young man, in his last year as a teenager, rode a bus from Knoxville, Tenn., to New York City, to see the World’s Fair, Greenwich Village, Madison Square Garden, the Empire State Building and Times Square.
I had 25 dollars hard cash burning a hole in my wallet, which I kept in an inside coat pocket to thwart a potential robbery.
I wanted to see everything in six days because I was afraid I’d never get back to New York.
(I have returned a few times — once for 2 1/2 years.)
Mostly, I wanted to see the old Yankee Stadium and the old Mickey Mantle.
The Mick is gone, and so are Babe, the Yankee Clipper, Lou Gehrig and Casey Stengel — and Yankee Stadium soon will be, too.
I saw it all.
The elevator lifted me to the top of the Empire State Building, and I stared up at the tower where King Kong stood; watched a go-go dancer in a cage on Broadway and was mesmerized by the bright lights in Times Square; drank my first legal beer in the Village in a bar with sawdust on the floor and listened to a group I’d never head of, The Lovin’ Spoonful; attended a political event at Madison Square Garden (an arena that since has been replaced by another Madison Square Garden); told a man who wanted to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge that, unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money; walked through Central Park; spent a day at the World’s Fair with my eyes and mouth wide open discovering what the future would bring us. I ate a 25-cent Nathan’s hot dog.
And I took my first subway ride to the (decaying borough) Bronx.
A kid saw Yankee Stadium and Mickey. It was a dream, because, finally, he wasn’t seeing them only in his dreams.
That was the real Yankee Stadium, The House That Ruth Built, not the house Mayor John Lindsay rebuilt in 1974-75. The real Yankee Stadium could hold 75,000; had the famous 15-foot copper frieze encircling the upper deck; had the monuments and plaques in play in center field; had the low wall down the right-field line at 296 feet and the high wall in center at, wow, 461 feet; had public address announcer Bob Sheppard say: “Attention, ladies and gentlemen”; and had all the memories of so many World Series, the greatest football game ever played (Giants-Colts overtime NFL championship) and fights involving Joe Louis and, much later, Muhammad Ali.
Is this heaven?
No, this is Yankee Stadium.
• • •
I also saw the newly opened Shea Stadium, which didn’t impress anyone with its fresh paint and bad location near the airport, and is to be blown up now, but I didn’t get to see Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and the Polo Grounds in Harlem. Their teams were taken away and their ballparks demolished before I got to New York.
I’ve been fortunate to visit a lot of old major-league parks that since have been torn down and a couple of others that haven’t — Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis (my first), Comiskey Park in Chicago, Tiger Stadium in Detroit, Cleveland Municipal Stadium, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Milwaukee County Stadium, Griffith Stadium in Washington and Metropolitan Stadium in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Los Angeles Coliseum (temporary home of the Dodgers), and, of course, Fenway Park (where the Red Sox and the Rox played in the last World Series) and Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs, who haven’t been in a World Series in 100 years.
All had (or have) their special quirks — The Green Monster, ivy on the walls, a short screened porch in left, brick fences, weird outfield dimensions — and were unique to their cities and teams.
I’ve been to Dodger Stadium and eaten a Dodger Dog, Candlestick Park, Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (designed by Denver’s Charles Deaton, who designed The Spaceship House overlooking the Front Range and who had never witnessed a ballgame before he was hired), Rangers Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and The Humpdome in Minneapolis. All also had (or have) their own odd characteristics — garbage bags for walls in an indoor stadium, fountains beyond center field, freezing cold in July or numbing heat in August. Dodger Stadium remains a luminary.
I showed up at the cookie-cutter, multipurpose stadiums of the 1960s in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Philadelphia, which had no personalities or distinctiveness. Round and hollow.
I’ve watched games in domed stadiums in two countries — the impressive one in Toronto, the depressing one in Seattle — and the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Astrodome in Houston. And they did nothing for me or the fans.
And I’ve hung around long enough to see “old-time” ballparks erected in Baltimore, Denver, Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Diego and the rest — nice and pleasant with their luxury boxes and cup-holders and fragrant smells and retro peculiarities, but, truthfully, they feel and seem all the same.
Baseball is trying to go forward by moving back.
• • •
No longer a teenager with a gaping mouth and naive eyes, I’ve seen dozens of regular-season and World Series games at Yankee Stadium in four more decades. Only the last one matched the first one.
I took my daughter to her first major-league baseball game two seasons ago — at Yankee Stadium.
Shannon lives on the Lower East Side in New York City, and I was on a sabbatical living on the Upper West Side.
We rode the same subway line in 2006 that I rode in 1965. I bought a Yankees cap; she bought an “Evil Empire” sweatshirt. We mingled with hundreds of young men in a sports bar, joined the masses entering the venerable edifice and climbed to our seats behind the right-field pole — in the same section where I sat before. We drank beer (legally), ate peanuts and hot dogs, talked about the monuments and plaques (rather obscure now behind the wall), Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth and Marvelous Marv Throneberry (who became a friend), and what Yankee Stadium looked like before, and how the new Yankee Stadium will look, and what a place it was, is and always will be in my dreams.
We saw a game together. We spent 200 hard cash dollars that night. Funny, I thought. And I wasn’t afraid of anybody stealing my money.
After the Yankees won over the Red Sox, on the subway ride back to Manhattan, I said to Shannon: “Want to go to the top of the Empire State Building?”
She replied, as she always does: “Oh, Dad.”
I asked: “So, what did you think of Yankee Stadium?”
“Cool.”
There will be the All-Star Game there, but I’m not going. I prefer to remember the first time and the last time. Yankee Stadium is cool. It is grand. It is great. It has served as the showcase of baseball history and a meaningful slice of the life of a young man-too-suddenly-turned-old man.
Woody Paige: 303-954-1095 or wpaige@denverpost.com
