Faculty Book Review--Fall 2006
David Halberstam's
October
1964
By
John Van Atta
This review begins with another personal
story. I grew up as an ardent New York Yankees fan, even though we
lived for most of that time in Carbondale, Illinois, which was the
middle of St. Louis Cardinal country. While I idolized Mickey
Mantle and Whitey Ford, my best childhood friends, Mark and David
Hileman, rooted just as passionately for the Cardinals as I did for
the Yankees and worshiped Ken Boyer and Bob Gibson. I was in the
Hilemans’ living room on the last day of the regular season in 1964,
listening to Harry Caray on the radio as he broadcast the dramatic
game in which the Cardinals finally won the National League pennant that
season. For St. Louis this was the culmination of an unbelievable
comeback, aided by a late-season collapse of the Philadelphia Phillies, who for most of that summer had seemed a lock for the
league championship. On that day Mark and David were overjoyed,
while I complacently felt sure that the Yankees, who had already
wrapped up the American League title, could be counted upon the
defeat the Cardinals with ease in the World Series. No way, I
thought, could this upstart St. Louis team knock off mighty New
York—the most storied franchise in baseball history, a dynasty still
brilliant but now, as it turned out, on the brink of major
decline.
I felt so confident in my Yankees that I actually made a crazy bet with the Hilemans that if the Cardinals won the Series, I would ride my bicycle 20 times without stopping up and down our treacherous street, Skyline Drive, despite its steep hill that almost no bicyclist could manage without getting off and walking. They promised to do the same if the Yankees won. Well . . . the rest is baseball history, and let’s just say that at ten years of age I learned the hard way not to bet on much of anything, no matter how inevitable I expected the outcome to be.
The Yankees played poorly that October and lost the Series in seven games (in spite of three home runs by Mantle, one an incredible shot to the right field upper deck in Yankee Stadium off knuckleball reliever Barney Shultz that won Game Three in the bottom of the ninth). They were a physically debilitated team by that time, and many of their greatest players would never have another good season. Mantle, who now played with constant pain in his knees, would hang on a few more years but never come close to the 35 home runs he hit in the 1964 season, nor would his batting average again approach .300. Whitey Ford, whose left arm needed surgery and who pitched only in the opening game of the 1964 Series, never again performed with much effectiveness and would retire after a few awful seasons to come. Injuries had reduced Roger Maris to a just a fading memory of the player who had broken Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record with 61 round trippers in 1961. After 1964 the Yankee dominance of the American league was over: in 1965, they would finish in 6th place among the 10 teams then in the league; in 1966, they fell to dead last. Old enough to remember the last days of the old Yankee greatness, it became excruciating for me to follow an increasingly pathetic team. In 1970, after we had moved to Muncie, Indiana, I finally gave in and became a Cincinnati Reds fan for several years, then switched to the Baltimore Orioles, and finally, after coming to Connecticut in 1985, reconnected with my once and future favorite team.
David Halberstam, who is responsible for a long list of best selling non-fiction titles, including The Best and the Brightest and The Powers that Be, has written about baseball before. Like his Summer of ’49, October 1964 is about a lot more than just one memorable season—and much more than just the national pastime. This book is filled with stories within the story: the travails of the Cardinals under tyrannical owner Gussie Busch, the beer entrepreneur who stupidly thought a baseball team could be pressured and driven and bullied like a bunch of brewery employees; the smug foolishness of the Yankees in refusing to pursue promising young black players in the 1950s, even though other teams, including the Cardinals, improved themselves more and more by scouting or trading for some of the finest African-American athletes; the rise of Cardinal star pitcher Bob Gibson, one of the most obsessively competitive—and at his height, nearly unbeatable—pitchers in the history of the game; the drama of the managers of the two teams, Yogi Berra of the Yankees, Johnny Keane of the Cardinals, both mistreated by team ownership and destined, in spite of their success in 1964, to be employed elsewhere the following year. (Keane, ironically, would be the Yankee manager in 1965, just in time to be blamed for the beginning of their demise.)
For this book Halberstam interviewed about a hundred former players and other baseball employees who contributed in one way or another to the 1964 season. Sadly, there are the ones he could not interview: Maris, who died of cancer at the age of 51; Boyer, Keane, and star Yankee catcher Elston Howard, all struck down by heart attacks; and maybe most tragic of all, Mantle, who agreed to sit for an interview but whose alcoholism, by then carrying him to his death, landed him in the Betty Ford clinic instead.
I recommend this book not just for baseball fans (though they will enjoy it the most), and certainly not just for older guys like me who remember that exciting season and the great World Series that punctuated it, but also for all students of popular culture, who will realize that in America baseball really is far more than just a game.