Late Night Radio

AFTERMATH – A Tuesday, long ago

"Walk with me down this crosstown street. I mark you as a nimble listener, Mr. Boyle. A great nor’easter raging centuries has o’er blown this ancient rock we call Manhattan. We have been at it here for so long that many of the places we have made are now forgotten, except perhaps by Mr. da Costa, about whom more in due course.

"We’re on our way to Yankee Stadium, looking for Chaim Glickman. We know that he was there on Lou Gehrig day, July 4th, 1939.

"The story of this island has quite outgrown the means to tell it. It is difficult to speak of Manhattan in any orderly way when the subject itself refuses to be constrained—even within the fussy bounds of time! We have discovered terra firma to be an illusion, like Plato’s cave.

"The pretty lady walking next to you is my girlfriend, Lois Nettleton. In the 21st century, she had become the understudy to Barbara Bel Geddes at the Winter Garden Theater, and later, for a time was cast in a leading role at the Schubert. But now, all of that is held in abeyance, since she and da Costa have traveled back to find me.

"And do try to remain pure in thought, won’t you? Lois is an empath. Apart from those audiences that she so adroitly controls, Lois usually tries to limit contact with strangers. She claims the background noise can be deafening.

"Was it Sartre who said that ‘Hell is other people’ or has he written that yet?

"Wishing to keep her hand in, our irrepressible Lois Nettleton is back on Broadway in this summer of ‘39. After the curtain falls every night, she comes by our studios to sit with me, although occasionally da Costa flies in on a panic, claiming that my monologue has opened some new portal and off they go exploring. Usually, they return in less than an hour, but typically, they claim to have been gone for days, and each time they claim to be more careful than before.

"So, Mr. Boyle! Your wire service has sent you here to see if I am off my rocker! Do not bother to deny it! I shall tell you as much of the story as you care to hear. Some of it happened very long ago. Most of it has not happened yet. And some fraction was not ever meant to be, or to become. Instead, some fraction of my story might be what we call placeholder memory—a tracing overwritten by a different version, yet persisting like the outline of an erasure. Information fades, but never vanishes. Quantum Mechanics will one day tell us this. Millions stumble out of their own time to loose or gain seconds and never notice. A great many people remember things that never happened. How many of our missing persons were empaths that stepped across before they knew they had, leaving Moms and Dads forever waiting?

Alternatively, you may pass off the whole thing as just another one of my many entertaining radio stories. Although, Lois advises me that you do have an open mind.

When did she tell you that, Mr. Welles?

"True, so far you have not heard her speak a word! Therefore, how has she advised me, you wonder?

I’m afraid, Mr. Boyle, that we are getting ahead of ourselves. That is all part of the story. I should warn you at the outset, that with me on one side of you, and with Lois Nettleton on the other, this tale is apt to seem quite vivid. I confess a taste for the vivid, from the Latin vividus, meaning life-like. Lois, poor thing, must ever seek reassurance from such intensity. Anything to make the present seem more real. She struggles to make consciousness something more than a mere transparency.  This is an anxiety which you should be glad you do not have.

Mr. Welles, we seem to be rambling off the subject!

Of course, Mr. Boyle! To the subject at hand!

Mr. Welles, why are we running off to meet with an eleven year old boy?

A certain Mr. Glickman.

Why do you refer to an eleven year old boy as ‘Mister’?

"Well, of course, in my time, I know him as an eighty-eight year old man. He is part of the history of the city, or he will be part of it—or even, he could possibly be part of it."

Mr. Welles, no one cares about history and no one can do anything about the future.

"Yes, of course, Mr. Boyle, spoken like a reporter! Actually, as regards the future, we are not entirely helpless if we understand something of the past. But as you point out, no one cares about Grant’s Tomb, other than someone named Grant is buried in it. Of course, in seventy-seven years, he won’t be buried in it anymore."

Where will Grant be buried?

Oh, in some common plot near Galena, Illinois. You see, in seventy-seven years, Grant will never have been president, nor will William Tecumseh Sherman have become the general who shelled Atlanta.

Grant never becoming president!

In seventy-seven years, the United States will have had no Civil War! Mr. Boyle, I can sense your frustration. Perhaps if we began at the beginning…

Mr. Welles, my office has questions about certain episodes of your radio program.

Are you familiar with the legend of the blood moon?"

"The blood Moon! What has this got to do with the price of tea in China, Mr. Welles?"

Oh, very much, Mr. Boyle, the price of tea everywhere and for all time. You might consult a biblical scholar about it, in the New Testament, toward the end of it, as I recall. Actually, more complete references to the blood moon eclipse were written down by the colonial scribes of Roman Britain, as they recorded interviews with Celtic Druids.

"Oh, well, I’ll just go right back there to that bookstore and order myself a copy!"

Actually, today, these transcriptions are to be found in the Vatican Library among the shelves of banned books. But of course, these are actually scrolls.

"Scrolls? We’re into scrolls now, Mr. Welles!"

"Actually, a famous book of the twentieth century will soon be written on a scroll...in about twenty years by a certain Jack Kerouac. But pardon me, I digress. I was referring to a final tetrad of blood moons that lie outside mathematical predictions. I’ve been told this by a cab driver who boasts some authority on the subject. Six times across a span of two thousand years hardly means that the seventh and final one will happen tomorrow. That’s about the frequency the San Andreas Fault has moved and yet the people of San Francisco are hardly fleeing the city.

"What’s this? I do so enjoy coincidence! Take note of that approaching cab, Mr. Boyle. You may observe manifestations."

Manifestations of what?

"Yes, indeed! The very question that occurs to me!"

Hey, folks! I’m looking for a fare.

RINKO TAKAYOSHI!

Lois Nettleton! What’s your story, morning glory?

"Greetings, Rinko! You are looking very lovely, as usual."

What you see…is what you get!

Mr. Welles, look at the steering wheel! It’s on the passenger side!

Not surprising, Mr. Boyle, not for this particular cab.

I say! This cabbie is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. What does the rest of her look like when she gets out?

I’m afraid your whispering is pointless, Mr. Boyle.

The steering wheel…it just moved to the left side.

A change in plan, Mr. Boyle. Forget the subway. We’re going to cab-it.

So, Orson! What is this blown in? Some deck out there is short a joker.

This is Mr. Hal Boyle, Rinko. He works for the Associated Press. He wants the story of my radio program. Hang on. Here we go.

Orson, this time you got the fuzzy end of the lollypop. This pug would take three rounds just to lick a stamp.

But Mr. Welles, you haven’t told her where we’re going!

She knows.

News flash, Orson. The kid you’re looking for will be sitting on the top row of seats, halfway to first base. He’ll be the one wearing saddle shoes.

Did you have anything to do with the seating arrangements, Rinko?

The boys got in the cab and stepped on seven free tickets to the game. They hit the floor faster than a bride’s nightgown.

Mr. Welles, I don’t believe that the driver’s eyes have left the rear view mirror since we got in. Shouldn’t she be looking at the street?

Mr. Boyle, the only thing that is not safe about this cab is the leaving of it. At present, you find yourself in a brand new 1939 Checker Cab with perhaps a million miles on it. A 1939 model cab in the year 1939 is one thing. But in the Manhattan of the 21st century, I wish you could see the charm of this behemoth motoring down 5th Avenue. The police tip their caps. The lights stay green and embarrassed pigeons forebear to relieve themselves and, instead, fly out to open sea.

Mr. Welles, could you please bring some order to all of this rambling?

"Of course, Mr. Boyle. I shall begin back there, where we were walking, on that particular crosstown street, seventy-seven years into the future. In those days, I had never founded the now famous Mercury Theater of the Air, which of course has become known as The Campbell Playhouse, now that we have sponsorship from the Campbell Soup Company. Did you hear our War of the Worlds broadcast last Halloween?"

If we could stay on the subject, please!

"Of course, let me tell you about the crosstown street as it will become. And by the way, Mr. Boyle, you will soon become a legend from your reporting of World War Two!"

"Did you say ‘Two’?"

CHAPTER ONE

A Great Weight of Mezuzahs

East of the alley, the crosstown street between 7th and 8th is noisy with Yiddish. This street is home to the extended family of the Glickmans. They are a numerous clan with five generations housed in a single, great apartment building, busy like a vast wren house.

I work at the radio station on the north side of the street, opposite this building. Watching it through the studio window is a constant entertainment on those rare occasions when I broadcast in the daytime, filling in for others.

Observing the ground floor of the Glickman building, you see the bookstore, the law offices, the Essen Delicatessen and the Glick Delicatessen. The delis are located on either side of the law offices of Nathan Nemeroff. They surround it.

Around the corner at 7th, more shops and offices occupy the street level, and these turn the next corner to extend to the next crosstown street to the south because the Glickman Building is one block long and a half block wide. At each of its four corners, the apartment building has an entrance with a lobby, an elevator shaft, and a stairwell.

Nemeroff finds many of his clients from among the Glickman family, which is contentious as well as numerous. Nemeroff gives the Glickmans a volume discount since much of Nemeroff’s practice comes from Glickman Building evictions and from petty disputes, which the younger Glickmans are quick to litigate.

The east half of this crosstown street is studded with large-breasted, dyed blondes in three-inch heels. They have in common the same fully expressed, rolling walk of curves set to rhythm, repeating like a memory not your own. This encourages a hopeful lunchtime trade from the nearby diamond district.

They rarely cross the alley that divides the crosstown street in half. This alley runs along the west side of the Glickman Building. Further west along this crosstown street, and closer to 8th Avenue, is Hanrahan’s Bar. This is where the Irish start, on the other side of the alley.

Nathan Nemeroff has eaten lunch next door at the larger Essen Deli each day for forty years. He enjoys being the kind of man they hold a table for. The Essen has a dining room with waiters dressed in vests and bowties. For takeout, it has a retail deli case near the cash register, which complicates the traffic at the door.

On the other side of Nemeroff’s offices is the Glick Deli, which is mainly a grocery with a deli case, although it has a steam-table fronted by a cafeteria tray slide serving a single row of tables along one wall. The Glickman’s are more likely be found on this side, saving the other, more expensive side, for non-family.

The Glickman’s world is neatly divided into family and non-family. The non-family side is further subdivided into the observant and the non-observant, the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim, and various gradations of goyim and schvartze.

The Fahy family across 8th Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen, has provided each of the Glickman generations with their Shabbos Goy while the Fahy youngsters are still in junior-high. Later, in their teenage years, after they have finished learning to fight, the Fahy boys take their accustomed place in the Westside Irish Gang of Hell’s Kitchen. They are known throughout the five boroughs as The Westies. They still retain their association with the Glickman family when the law offices of Nathan Nemeroff prove unequal to the task.

It does not appear obvious from the street that both delis are owned by the Glickman family. In fact, they share a common kitchen, linking between the two delis behind Nemeroff’s law offices. In this same way, it does not appear obvious that both the Irish and the Jewish halves of the block, on either side of the alley, coexist in such a connected harmony. Yet they do and it is a tradition for both the Glickmans and the Fahys going back many years. They each feel the presence of the other across the alley, even when they do not cross it.

The apartments begin at the second floor, and run up to the eighth. At the top, the great-great grandparents, Chaim and Vera Glickman, live in the largest apartment. It was enlarged thirty-one years ago, by knocking out a wall to join it with the corner apartment next door. The resulting corner room, overlooking 7th Avenue, is the larger of two dining rooms, which together seat one-hundred persons. For the Shabbat mid-day meal, Vera’s two kitchens must be supplemented by the main kitchen on the first floor.

Always, there is such fuss. Aunts and great aunts, working in the two kitchens at opposite ends of the sprawling apartment, send out runners.

Liebchens, take this to your Aunt Sharron in the other kitchen. Tell her to keep it warm. And don’t spill any on the carpets. Wait! Use a pair of oven mitts! You want you should spend the Shabbat in the emergency room? You want you should have dinner in Bellevue?

Or, Telephone the kitchen on the first floor. Ask them to send up two cans of chicken broth, the big cans, and some schmaltz, and some chopped chicken liver, and a box of matzos, and a jar of pickles, and go in there and tell your uncles not to eat so much they won’t be hungry.

And, Go find one of those Irish boys and send him down the street for a case of beer. Ask your Uncle Abe what kind and get the money for the boy and tell your uncles to turn the game down a little. We can’t hear ourselves think in here—and wait, come back a minute. You watch yourself around those Irish boys.

As the Glickman family rapidly enlarged, they grew to occupy half of the apartment building. Mezuzahs are fixed to incline on the frame of every front door. Two-hundred and twenty of them, regardless of the occupants, giving notice to the Gentiles that you live there only so long as the Glickmans did not need the apartment for yet another new family of Glickmans. The four elevators are constantly busy, and need frequent repair, and the stairwells reverberate with the pounding feet of noisy children.

Usually, six or eight Fahy boys, brothers and cousins eager for spending money, are kept continually busy on the Shabbat, as the Glickmans feel that they must refrain from all work on their seventh day. The older ones run errands to the various Glickman enterprises throughout the boroughs, while the younger ones run to the store or take out the trash. On Saturdays, the Glickman building fairly hums with life and the Shabbos Goy make regular runs down to Hanrahan’s for hot pizza beginning several hours after the big communal midday meal is over. It is then that Chaim’s sprawling apartment buzzes with televisions and their baseball games in summer and a motley collection of televised sports the rest of the year.

Chaim and Vera bounce their great-great-grandchildren on their knees, council their great-grandchildren on the couch, admonish their grandchildren in the kitchen and argue with their children out in the hallway. All the while, the Fahy boys pocket the cash. With everything long settled, it is a good life for all concerned.

Nathan Nemeroff stands at the outer door of his law offices, watching the street. He waits to greet eighty-eight year old Chaim Glickman. More than that, he wishes to watch the shikseh walk. Nathan thinks that she has a walk like a stripper. It is Monday morning. Vera has called down. Chaim wants an appointment. Barbara will bring him.

The wife of Chaim’s oldest great-grandson hands the old man off to Nathan. Chaim tells her that Nemeroff will telephone her when they are almost finished. She leaves.

This is Barbara, the most beautiful of the Glickman women and Chaim’s favorite. She was born a Fahy and she has their even temperament, which best suits Chaim, now that his contentious days are behind him. Yet Chaim privately reflects on the fact that there is a steely and redoubtable side to Barbara that lets her keep her head when everyone about Chaim is losing theirs and blaming it on him.

Nathan walks him left through the outer office and into his private office. He carefully sets Chaim down in an ancient leather chair in front of his desk. Nathan sits with his back to the crosstown street, and if he craned his neck left, he could see the intersection at 7th Avenue, and Chaim’s entrance.

Chaim was looking at the traffic as he spoke.

You look pale, Nathan. You need some exercise, some sunshine. When I was your age…

Sunshine I got plenty, coming free through this window. Look above you, I don’t even have to have the lights on.

You don’t have the lights on at ten o’clock at night.

I’m not here at ten o’clock at night. You want I should let the lights burn all night?

You’re not getting your exercise, Nathan. You should take a walk. Live longer.

I should take a walk to the bank if your check ever comes. If I’m not here I lose business. Chaim, my friend, we beat around the bush. What is bothering you? I can tell. Something. Why are you here? You want I should guess all afternoon and drive up your bill, which you never pay on time anyway?

I’ve known you forty years! A friend cannot visit another friend anymore?

Chaim, what is bothering you? So far this has cost you twenty dollars, but I’ll put it on account.

On what account?

On account of nobody else is waiting to see me. Chaim, my friend. I can tell. What is it?

Nathan. It is my death I worry about.

Your death?

My death.

Chaim, I can do a will, but after that you are on your own.

That is all they talk about now. I catch them talking about it. They think I cannot hear, but every word is loud and clear, Nathan, loud and clear, every word. They think I am an alter cocker.

No, they don’t.

"I know what they think; a schlemiel is what they think. When did we do my will?

I don’t think we had a bridge to Brooklyn when we did your will. I can look it up. I got a copy in the safe.

Nathan, I want you should think of something.

And what would that be, my friend?

That is what I pay you for. So think of something. I don’t feel safe around all those people anymore. They look at me funny.

Chaim! Of course they look at you. They are family! What do you want? To go into a home or something and then everyone is a stranger? You don’t want that. Chaim, what is bothering you?

I’m sorry. I’ve lost it. I had it coming down in the elevator, but now I’ve lost it. Telephone Barbara. She’s upstairs. Tell her to pick me up now. I will come back the day after tomorrow. Have my will out when I come back. We’ll do it then.

Yes, but we will do what then? Write it down if you should think of it.

I’m trying to tell myself something. You think about it until then. I’ll think about it tonight and tomorrow night, also. This problem is like a splinter working its way to the surface, Nathan. The day after tomorrow I tell you. I don’t sleep anyway.

What is wrong with tomorrow, Chaim? We should do this tomorrow before you forget again.

No, I’ve got one of my brokers tomorrow. I got to go look him in the eye to see if I still got money. I go in that brokerage office I feel like I am Lot, sent by the lord to find one honest man.

Nisht gedeyget, Chaim.

"At my age and not to worry?

That is why you have me.

Now I am really worried. Make the call, Nathan. I’m up to fifty bucks. I can feel it.

Same time the day after tomorrow?

Yes, unless you want that you should take me to lunch!

Chaim, it would be my pleasure to buy lunch. In that case shall we say, an hour earlier on the day after tomorrow?

You are not thinking the cheap side, Nathan? We’re going to the Essen, right?

Maybe, Chaim, we should leave it at the same time the day after tomorrow. Wait. I have Barbara on the line. Barbara, dear! Nathan here. Chaim is ready you should pick him up and then back again here the same time on the day after tomorrow. Yes, goodbye. A sheyn ponem that one! A regular Marylyn Monroe.

Yes, maybe now we should have some real blondes in the family. Those two should get busy on that, I’m telling you. I can’t wait around forever. Don’t worry about the day after tomorrow, Nathan. I’ll bring a sack lunch.

Lately, Chaim Glickman does not sleep well. He is worried—now that he has time enough to worry. He has too many hours, but not enough days. It used to be that he listened to the first hour of my radio program, but now he stays tuned to the end, until two a.m.

During commercials, if I take a break and walk out on the street, I can look up and see the light on and the drapes pulled open, up eight stories. That little face, just above the window sill, shines down every night onto this street of tribes.

In recent years, bad luck follows those doing business with the family, so now they say the Glickman’s have a jinx. But staying too busy to notice affords the Glickmans a touching naiveté. They shrug off the futility of human nature saying, Glik on saichel iz a lecherdiker zak. Luck without sense is a sack full of holes.

It has gotten so that Vera will awaken at two a.m. by habit, expecting to feel his side of the mattress sag. But that is only Monday through Friday. I’m off on weekends, but the family exhausts Chaim on weekends, and he could not stay up late anyway.

This is Monday and Chaim Glickman will listen to me late at night, as will most of New York City and those other millions sprawled up and down the eastern seaboard.

Time creeps ahead slowly—so orderly and patient, like people ahead of you in line at the bank. Yet if you look behind you, time sprawls like a mob in a blurry, confused commotion.

New York has become an ancient city. Surely somewhere nearby, some one of these million families has buried twenty grandfathers within the alluvium of this great, scalloped, inroad of the North Atlantic.

Several years ago, Chaim pulled a chair to a tall north facing window in his apartment. Today, the imprint of its legs into the carpet remains deep and undisturbed. The window sill is low. Each night of the broadcast, Chaim leans forward with his arms upon his knees so that he can look down to the glow that my studio casts upon the crosstown street. He watches as he listens to the broadcast from an old, squawky radio plugged in nearby.

The Glickmans admonish each other. Don’t move that chair. That’s your great grandfather’s. He looks down at the street from there. Let him have his chair. Is one chair too much to ask? Go down to the first floor. Bring up two folding chairs, you need a chair so badly.

Tonight, at the first commercial break, the suspicions of sponsors everywhere are confirmed by Chaim Glickman when he drifts off to interrupt the first of these intruding messages. He overlays our commercials with his own private mutter—that on a stage might become a soliloquy.

"Yes, Mr. Welles! Baseball. The old Yankee Stadium! We said goodbye to the Iron Horse that day, July 4, 1939. I think it was a Tuesday. We were a gang of kids. Sixty-one thousand in the stands that day! I was eleven years old. And we found seven tickets to the game on the floor of the taxi cab! It was meant to be!

"I always thought that Lou Gehrig looked like Hank Greenberg. Now there was also a baseball player. They should have had a Hank Greenberg day. The stands we would have filled. On such a day even the crackerjack would have been kosher.

Ah, but Gehrig was a hero too. He reminded me of Greenberg. America had scrubbed all of the German out of Gehrig. America’s triumph is the individual, elevated above the meanness of the tribe.

Chaim begins the sing-song litany spoken by every true fan. "Both men born in New York City. Both men played first base. The Iron Horse was the American League batting champion in ’34 and ’36 and the Hebrew Hammer did it in ‘35. To spoil Gehrig’s three-in-a-row was such a shame, but you swings your bat, and you takes your chances.

"I know, I know, Mr. Welles, what you would say. When you are eleven years old, baseball is enough. And then later on, nothing is enough. All the world is not enough.

And then you wake up old, and baseball becomes enough once more.

Truth is a skittish bird. It will settle in your hand for only as long as you see it out the corner of your eye. Perhaps this is why Chaim Glickman meditates from the eighth floor, down upon the glow of the radio station’s windows along the crosstown street. Chaim intuitively knows that his radio has some quality of creation that his television cannot have because television trades in faces—and God has no face.

In English we haven’t even given God a name. Although other languages are equally obsessed with nouns, and those have given God several names among which worshipers may choose. But in English, we simply call him God. This is like calling your wife wife, or your boss boss. Of course, we call the President Mr. President.

When the roots of English fail in naming, we resort to the prepositional phrase or perhaps even several of them stringing in a row. Or, we might use acronyms, when space is tight or time does not permit.

The Germans use compound nouns. They can fuse together anything—naming nouns like welders welding.

Imagine what we would accomplish if we worked that hard on verbs. Or envision how beautiful the world would look, if only we loved adjectives the best.

There is in words some quality of the soul. There is in night some quality of the infinite.

I recall the Uncertainty Principal. As Heisenberg puts it, The more closely we observe the location of a thing in motion, the less we understand where it is going. After liquids, solids and gases, humans are the fourth, and sentient, phase of matter, making man the least predictable particle of all. Such a tender notion of free will. A pity that it is no longer true.

On the second floor, an image of a young woman named Bathsheba collects upon a canvas, stretched upon a frame, inclined upon an easel, in a window overlooking 7th Avenue. To begin, it shows just her head, long hair parting in the middle, hanging almost where her waist will soon be painted, brushstrokes from now. This is less a work of art, and more a careful witness, painted slowly as the vision of it reveals. When the light to paint is gone, the artist listens to my program late at night.

CHAPTER TWO

Orson remembers Victory Field

SOUND EFFECT: THE LONG, SLOW, CREAKING OF A DOOR, 10 seconds

ANNOUNCER (pre-recorded): And now, from the broadcasting studios of WIWO—710 on the AM dial, the fifty-thousand watt powerhouse voice of New York City—we present Orson Welles…Late at Night."

MUSIC: PRELUDE AND FUGUE FOR ORGAN, Johann Sebastian Bach. 15 seconds

ORSON WELLES: Good evening. Thank you for joining me this Monday for the start of another week of late night radio. You will spend the next four hours protected by the WIWO broadcasting signal, which warranties against meteors, space debris, and the bullets that those misguided ones overseas are always firing up into the air in the sure and certain knowledge that once their bullet leaves the barrel, it instantly becomes someone else’s problem.

Like when you send your kids off to school.

The mere mention of that word school transports me into the past, back to my hometown, and to a time when the future was still frozen in a block of ice.

In those days, we lived on West Wyandot Avenue, two blocks from the ballpark, from the legendary Victory Field. That is where the Capitol City Ironmen played, and where they still play—the perennial American Association champs and the Triple-A farm club of the Cincinnati Reds.

Whenever the Ironmen had a home game at night, seven of us, all in fifth grade, would loiter in front of McSoley’s Drugstore waiting for a beer truck. None of us had any interest in beer. That was the spring we were ten years old, soon to be eleven years old. But we had a great and abiding interest in the beer truck and in the driver. His name was Frosty Reisbeck. He was a huge man with arms like a ship’s hawsers. He was at least sixty. He had a full head of snow white hair and a close cropped snow white beard. And best of all, he always took his time. He was very slow and deliberate. He probably never broke one bottle of beer in all the years he drove that truck.

The thing of it was, Frosty always parked right up against the left field wall. That way he had a little less far to walk. Not much, but over an entire shift, it adds up. The wall was fifteen feet high. It was red brick with a heavy limestone coping on top. The truck was ten feet high. We were five feet tall. You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?

That meant that after we climbed up on the hood of the truck, and after we had scampered across the windshield, and when we were standing on the top of the truck, all we had to do was to reach up, and then our fingers could overlap the top of the wall.

The first summer that we tried this we were only nine years old, going on ten. Standing on the top of the truck, we knew we were too short. But we knew that we were growing. All the rest of that year, and through the next winter, all the way up until the next spring, we did chin-ups on a chinning bar that Ricky Schroeder’s father rigged up for him in his garage. We exercised with such determination, that if we had somehow kept that frame of mind, we would all have become billionaire’s today. By the following April, we were ready.

Truth be told, old man McSoley must have seen us, at least one time. Maybe he saw us every time, but if he did; he never said a word about it. And in return, we would never steal his comic books again.

The combination of old man McSoley keeping our secret, and Frosty Reisbeck’s beer truck changed our lives.

Victory Field seats fourteen thousand and, with the exception of one single game, they never had more than twelve thousand attend. That meant that, after climbing the wall and after sneaking into the ballpark, finding seven seats together was never a problem—and if we sat up high enough, there were no reserved seats.

Naturally, by the end of the game Frosty was long gone, but all we had to do was to walk back out with the crowd. They only check your ticket coming in.

That happened to be the summer that the Cincinnati Reds came to town to play an exhibition game and that was the season that the legendary Pete Rose was the team’s player-manager. If ever there was a season to start going to the ballpark, this was it.

On the night of the exhibition game with the Reds, Victory Field was packed. My friends and I took the last seven seats in a row way at the top, along the first base line. The roar of the crowd sounded like an entire city on its feet. The organist, tucked in a room somewhere up near the press box, played with the full repertoire known to baseball, following our emotions up and down the scale. The beer vendors cried out like opera singers COAL-BEER…COAL-BEER! The peanut vendors never missed the strike zone as crunchy bags landed in the center of your chest with a KER-WHALLOP! And far out, where right field merges with the first base foul line, at the Forge of the Capitol City Ironmen, the two Ironmen, dressed like blacksmiths with leather aprons, showing bare arms like hams, swung their sledge hammers against the permanently mounted half-ton iron anvil and the public address system sent the clangs of their mighty blows ringing across the stadium. The air crackled with electricity.

If anyone had expected the Reds to blow past the Ironmen, they were in for a rude awakening. Our team had always been always been major league except the National League would not let us into the majors because our stadium was too small.

By the middle of the first inning, the Reds led by three runs. No matter! The fans were still cocky. The Ironmen were only then coming up to bat. Capitol City remained unbowed.

For the next eight and one-half innings, line-drives were answered by homers and diving catches by double plays. There was so much sliding into bases that their uniforms hung in tatters. It was a slug-fest. It was a meat-grinder. It was a spectacle of athleticism unlike the world had ever seen. Throughout it, the Ironmen stood like iron. And on the other side of the field, along the