There Used to Be...

I probably did read the obit in 1989 for the musician, songwriter Joe Raposo, but I don't remember any details from it. His name came up on a recent Jeopardy clue/answer for being associated with writing songs for Sesame Street and co-creating the show with Jim Henson and Jon Stone. This I did not know. 

When they said his name on Jeopardy I froze a bit. That Joe Raposo? I've always loved Frank Sinatra's version of 'There Used to Be a Ball Park' an elegy to the disappearance of a baseball team and stadium from a locality. I looked up the writer years ago and found it was Joe Raposo, but knew nothing else about him until the Jeopardy clue/answer put his name once again on my forehead.

Mr. Raposo was only 51 when he passed away in 1989. Retrieving his NYT obit I learn aside from the Sesame Street connection he was a co-author of the hit play "You're a Good Man Charlie Brown." Never heard of it?

Well, in 1967 "You're A Good Man Charlie Brown" was performed in a tiny East Greenwich Village theater, Theater 80. (80 might have been the capacity.) I went thee with a friend. At the time I was a BIG Peanuts fan and the play just seemed as the best way to appreciate Peanuts even more. It was.

Turns out Mr. Raposo was the musical director. I remember the production well. I think there was one person who was the 'orchestra'. Reva Rose played crabby Lucy, and Gary Burghoff played the lead, Charlie Brown. Gary Burghoff later played Radar in the TV series of M*A*S*H. Reva Rose later appeared in commercials, TV shows and the musical The Fantastiks.

But back to "There Used to Be a Ball Park." Sinatra's voice gives the song all the right nuances of a bygone era, a ball park that was so cherished for the "hot dogs and beer." I consider the song as important a song as Don McLean's American Pie, an elegy to Billy Holly and a style of music that was disappearing.

Ebbets Field disappeared into a housing project and the Brooklyn Dodgers disappeared from Brooklyn after the 1957 season when the owner Walter O'Malley didn't get approval for a domed stadium to replace Ebbets field at the confluence of Flatbush Avenue, 4th Avenue and Fulton streets in downtown Brooklyn. 

Mayor Wagner, and the perpetual parks commissioner Robert Moses, didn't like the idea, so no approval came. O'Malley, owning the balls, bats, gloves and the players decamped for Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, getting a sweetheart deal for a stadium and the chance to tap into the fastest growing market in the United States, Southern California. Goodbye Wagner. Goodbye Moses. I'll write and thank you someday.

The lyrics to "There Used to be a Ball Park" are the most poignant in describing a loss. Mr. Raposo was born in Fall River, Massachusetts of Portuguese descent. He was educated at Harvard and L'Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. His father was a pianist, violinist and flutist. Music was in his veins, and remained so.

At some point he same to live in Bronxville, NY, just north of the New York City borough of The Bronx, home of the Yankees.

When the Dodgers were yanked from Brooklyn it was like someone performed open heart surgery on the borough and its fans without anesthesia. I worked with someone whose father claimed Walter O'Malley couldn't have passed away from a heart attack because he didn't have one.

I have a friend, Johnny M., who is in his early 80s and remembers going to Ebbets field with his father who owned a bar in downtown Brooklyn on Court Street. Johnny M. did see Jackie Robinson, but said the place was really a wooden bandbox that could have gone up in flames with one match.

Fred Wilpon used to own the Mets—"the new team that hardly tries" —built a structural valentine to Ebbets Field when he had Shea Stadium replaced. 

You have to be a Mets fan of a certain age to realize Citi Field is modeled after Ebbets Field. Anytime I hear the song I wonder again what Brooklyn might have stayed like if the Dodgers had stayed as well, even with a new domed stadium.

The borough is only now emerging from a decades-long decline as it shakes off its catharsis. When Brooklyn was a city, and even after it was incorporated into Metropolitan New York, it held everything: manufacturing, ship building, amusement parks, baseball park, horse racing, beaches. parks, mansion-like private homes, apartments, colleges. museums, theaters. It was a city state. 

There used to be a ball park, right there.

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