I conducted this interview with the author of Praying for Gil Hodges for Bookreporter.com in 2005.
* * *
Bookreporter.com baseball specialist Ron Kaplan interviewed Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Oliphant about PRAYING FOR GIL HODGES, his bittersweet memoir about growing up as a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the joy of celebrating their only World Championship in 1955. Oliphant, the Washington columnist for the Boston Globe, discusses what the team meant to the Flatbush faithful, what Jackie Robinson meant to America, and why intellectuals gravitate to the national pastime.
Bookreporter.com: Why did you write PRAYING FOR GIL HODGES?
Thomas Oliphant: I had this stone in my shoe all my life, and it came out talking with close friends. This memory didn’t die and get buried, only to be resurrected. It has always been, I think, because it’s a bittersweet story. There’s a lot of disappointment — personal and baseball — in there, and a lot of joy. But it was sort of teetering on the edge when I saw that little sign on that bridge in Indiana.
The first thing I did was call Doris [Kearns Goodwin, author of WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR] just because I knew she would get such a kick out of it. That book is poetry. And it was like, for once in your life would you shut up and tell your story and get it out of your system? My friends who are psychologists and shrinks say it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than five years of therapy.
It was a political year, 1998, and there was a hot House race in Southern Indiana near Bloomington, the university town. I was driving down a country highway, and as I narrate, the first thing I saw was a little sign that said “Princeton.” A little bell went off and then about five or six miles later there it was — the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. When I stopped the car, got out and sat on it, I let memories wash back over me. One of the things I appreciated in a way I hadn’t throughout my life was that all of our really honest memories are bittersweet. I mean it’s not worth it if it’s just joy.
By the time I got back in the car, I was ready for a friend, a wife, and an agent to persuade me to get off my skinny butt and do this.
BRC: A huge part of the book deals with you and your father.
TO: Absolutely! I was part of a “Dodger family” — we of course weren’t the only ones, we’re weren’t unique, and maybe we weren’t even totally typical. But this was at a time when America was still a largely blue-collar country. Everybody was just two or three missed paychecks away from catastrophe — struggling, not quite succeeding.
Everything about the Dodgers immediately pre- and post-World War II was eminently understandable to ordinary American families, not just [in Brooklyn]. Part of the task, I thought, was to try to understand the resonance. This is unique. There was no 50-year recognition last year for the Giants upsetting the Indians. There wasn’t any 50-year recognition even two years ago for the start of the Yankees’ [World Series] winning streak that probably will never be equaled again.
To me, it’s like a two or three stage rocket. First, Brooklyn: It has the largest Diaspora of any chunk of real estate in America, Ellis Island included. The experts who’ve done the demography figure that one in five — some even argue one in four — Americans either lived there or had a relative or ancestor who did. It’s the most important gateway in the country. You say “Brooklyn” anywhere in the country and it has a resonance that The Bronx and Queens don’t have.
Secondly is this idea of struggle and underdogs. It is an essential part of American mythology because it’s so true. In the late forties and early fifties, when most of America rooted from afar because there were only sixteen teams in fourteen cities — not one south of Washington or west of St. Louis — the hard luck underdog, or the hard luck struggler, was the easiest thing with which to identify. The Yankees were almost like the Roman Empire — the majestic winning machine that you were in awe of. The Dodgers came closer to being America’s team based solely on that perception.
But then the clincher for me that I think people have forgotten is that race played a huge role. I noticed in studying the Black press in the early fifties that it was routine for the Dodger train to pull into a city on a road trip late in the evening. There would be a few hundred people on the train platform, almost all of them black men with their sons, just to get a glimpse of their heroes.
And that produced a whole chunk of America that at least in September identified with [the Dodgers] simply because of the enormity of what they had accomplished at a time when nothing else good in America was happening [for them]. One of the things I fixated on after the third out of Game Seven in 1955: it’s two months, almost to the day, when Rosa Parks doesn’t give up her seat on that bus. And yet in ’55, if Newcombe was pitching, the Dodgers routinely put five African American ballplayers on the field. And there were still four teams at the time that hadn’t yet integrated.
BRC: Why did you name the book for Gil Hodges?
TO: I was looking for a metaphysical story. [During one World Series, when Hodges was having a particularly rough showing, a Brooklyn priest told his congregation, “It’s too hot for a sermon. Go home, keep the commandments, and pray for Gil Hodges.”] [A]nd it had the additional advantage of being true, because my father was from rural Indiana [as was Hodges] and to me Hodges just seemed to embody the stoicism, the purpose with which the Dodgers confronted adversity. He wasn’t a jovial man; he was more of a majestic figure and all the parents in Brooklyn wanted their kids to be like him. You don’t complain, you don’t shout, you don’t quit. And it was really true. I guess what we didn’t know is that he kept a lot of it bottled up. [Hodges died of a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 48.]
BRC: Is Hodges your favorite player?
TO: It doesn’t work that way with the Dodgers. This is where the politics of this discussion comes in. It is definitely a collective appeal. You do not have anything that approaches Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle. I mean, [Duke] Snider obviously does as a ballplayer, but I mean in terms of adulation. It’s Dodgers first, ballplayers second.
BRC: Was Jackie Robinson’s importance to the team overstated or justified?
TO: I wanted to check, dig more deeply than that, and go beyond 1947. After I talked to the African Americans who were involved at the time in helping to make this happen and then making it work, as well as the people with more national experience and some memory (Vernon Jordan is a very good example), I realized that most of us have forgotten the fact that nothing was happening after WWII ended. Nothing. You couldn’t even get a vote on the Senate floor for legislation outlawing lynching. Branch Rickey singed Robinson three years before Truman’s executive order [integrating the Army]. In the black community, the disappointment and anger of returning vets thinking “well, maybe now after what we’ve done…” was palpable. But what made Jackie Robinson so special was that he was involved in a team sport that just happened to be the national pastime, and this was the first segregation barrier to fall. The country understood this when Robinson came up in 1947, no question. It was a huge occurrence that helped pave the way for what would come immediately thereafter.
BRC: What about minority ballplayers? Is there an appreciation for the pioneers like Jackie Robinson, Joe Black, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe?
TO: I think a lot of us have forgotten how the Dodgers also taught America, before it learned from any other venue, what immigration means. On a typical day in 1955, if Newcombe was pitching, you had Newcombe, Campanella, Jim Gillian, Jackie Robinson and Sandy Amoros on the same field. That’s a majority. And this was ten years before the bill passed Congress outlawing segregation in public accommodations. That’s a pretty big deal. And what I discovered, which I didn’t fully appreciate as a boy, was how big this was in the African American community throughout the country.
BRC: Do you think today’s players appreciate what their athletic predecessors did?
TO: We forget. This has long since become part of history, and history has a different resonance from something current. There won’t be a 75th anniversary event. This is it. The important pieces of the historical memory have pretty much gotten their due. But understanding how vital the Dodgers were to post-World War II American history is very important because it was huge. It just wasn’t noticed at the time.
BRC: What is it about baseball that engages such scholarly affection inspiring so many writers who can be considered “intellectual,” such as George F. Will, Jay Stephen Gould, Charles Krauthammer — and yourself — to write about the game?
TO: A lot of us like to do it just because it’s a way of emptying our own notebook. Some of it is embarrassing and I think that’s why you see writers take refuge in statistics. To me, every time you get to a number, you fail. I don’t understand all of what’s made it so important in American history, but I’m positive that memory and these insoluble arguments will go on forever.
BRC: What’s your favorite baseball anecdote?
TO: One time Babe Herman was playing right field. There was one out and a man on third. And somebody hits a fly ball to him. He comes under it, catches it, puts the ball in his pocket, runs off the field, and the run scores. I don’t think you can ask for a better mental picture of what fun [the Dodgers] were and how creatively terrible they could be.
However majestic 1955 was, I think it’s the memories that made them so human and worth loving.
is available on Amazon.com,
Comments on this entry are closed.