Subtract 50 from any year and you're deposited in an era when things were definitely different than they are in the year you started with. Go ahead, try it.
If my father were to do this exercise in 1965, he would get 1915, the year he was born in a cold-water flat at 32rd Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan, the third of four brothers. The month was May, but the date is only an approximate May 22-24, depending on how long it took the birth to be registered by the midwife with the city's department of health. Very common.
Thus, we could be swept back from a Lyndon Johnson presidency all the way back to Woodrow Wilson. In his era and mine, we learned about the presidents.
And now that I've attained grandfather status and an age denoted by a 7 in the tens place, I can easily remember what 50 years ago looked like. Yes, the Mets did win the World Series in 1969; Cleon Jones caught the last out in left field in a televised, weekday day game not but 2 miles from where I lived in Flushing; Cleon kneeling while gusts off Flushing Bay blew some paper debris around him.
In Saturday's NYT Tyler Kepner gives a glimpse of the nostalgia that is going to grip New York City baseball fans as Opening Day approaches. It's going to be all Mets, all nostalgia, for the whole season as the 50th anniversary of the Met 1969 Miracle is celebrated.
Tyler interviews some of the Mets from that team, while reminding us that not all Mets from that era are still alive, and some are somewhat sick. "The 1969 Mets, forever young in their minds will be honored at the New York baseball writers' dinner, mingling with the stars of today—Mookie Betts, Jacob deGrom, Christian Yelich—who are young enough to be their grandsons."
Clean Jones tells us what the lyrics to a Mary Chapin Carpenter song, "Come On, Come On say: "now you're older than they were then" when he remembers Gil Hodges, Casey Stengel, and any other seasoned adult who was watching the youngsters pull off the miracle by the Bay.
I was slightly over 20, employed, but home on vacation that October week, watching the World Series and the improbability of the Mets, the freakin' Mets! demolish The Atlanta Braves three straight and then sail past The Baltimore Orioles for the title in five Series games. The team my father and I went to the Polo Grounds to see when they entered the league...they were the champions!
Bill Gallo's Basement Bertha team was No. 1. in the National League. To celebrate this before the Series the Daily News offered the above pin, a Bill Gallo cartoon, for 25¢ if you went to the their building on 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue. Since I then worked at 2 Park Avenue at 33rd Street, the Daily News Building was an easy trip.
The euphoria in the city was so great that it was considered by political pundits to be so overwhelming and long lasting, that New Yorkers from the "outer boroughs" forgot their deep, deep-seated enmity toward Mayor John V. Lindsey and elected him anyway in the November election. After all, didn't Lindsey forget to have snowplows ready to scrape the streets in Queens after the February blizzard? Didn't his first administration have more strikes in it than a baseball game? Wasn't he Silk Stocking John who didn't know there were four other boroughs under his governance? That there were middle-class people and not just rich and poor people living in the city?
Jesus, it was exciting. Years later I remember Vin Sculley recounting the tale of when the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Yankees for the World Series in 1955, the only World Series Da Bums ever won. Vin Scully tells the story of traveling downtown through Manhattan's streets and there wasn't anything that would lead you believe history had been made, or that a home team had won the World Series. Brooklyn vanquished the dreaded Yankees.
That is until he came out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and it was "Bed...lam." Horns were honking, people were cheering and dancing, and it wasn't because it was VE or VJ Day. The Brooklyn Dodgers were the champions!
Since I was only home with my mother my celebration was very contained. She didn't really know much about baseball, only enough to lean out the front door in 1955 and tell me as I was playing that the Yankees had just lost to Brooklyn. She was rubbing it in to a kid who then was following the Yankees but not watching television. Maybe the set was at the "the shop." It was often "at the shop" in the 50s.
The ticker tape parade was like all ticker tape parades, full of paper and steamers tossed out of the buildings along Broadway in Lower Manhattan, open-back limos full of players. At the time I was going to night school in the Royal Globe building off Fulton Street. Every tree, every spiked surface, was still covered in toilet paper from the downtown celebration.
Anytime I'm on the Belt Parkway headed for the Verrazzano Bridge and look over to see the Gil Hodges Little League field I can't help but think of the Miracle of 1969.
Not quite yesterday, but not all that long ago as far as 50 years go.
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