Wait Till Next Year
Goodwin, Doris Kearns
Take Me Out of This Ballgame Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster / 261 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Florence King D oris Kearns Goodwin is the orange-haired lady...
...FLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...I didn't mean to hurt you," I cried, as I burst into tears...
...When she was still a child her family moved from Brooklyn to Rockville Centre, Long Island, where they settled contentedly into typical fifties suburban life...
...There was simply nothing to fear...
...She claims they helped her find her inner historian and polish her narrative powers, but that doesn't prevent her from writing passage after passage like this: The Phillies took a 6-1 lead in the third, due in part to an error by Robinson, who had struck out and hit into a double play in his first two trips at bat...
...A desperate weeklong chase ended as police helped Joanne pursue the child's kidnappers through woods, which, in the early days of live television, consisted simply of a dark area filled with a maze of music stands affixed with branches to represent trees...
...Memoirs, as opposed to autobiographies, derive their charm from the memoirist's flawed or deliberately incomplete recollections...
...Not just batters and runs, but "whether a strikeout was called or swinging, whether the double play was around the horn, whether the single that won the game was hit to left or right...
...Memories of what it was like to be a free-ranging hoyden on a bicycle in an all-white world bring her close to boastfulness...
...Growing up a devout Catholic, she thrilled to "the sounds of the Latin ritual...I developed a lasting appreciation of the role that pageantry, ritual, and symbolism play in tying together the past and the present....The Catholic world was a stable place with an unambiguous line of authority and an absolute knowledge of right and wrong...
...If we never thought of our neighborhood as safe, that was because it never occurred to us that it could be otherwise...
...But as soon as Elaine returned, I had lost interest in her...
...Other than being a baseball expert who saw some of the legendary greats play, Goodwin the memoirist does not have a very interesting story to tell...
...Listening to adults talking about President Truman and the war in Korea bored sevenyear-old Doris because "the 195o season was about to begin...
...She has trouble making graceful transitions from one subject to another and has to stick her arm out the window to signal her turns...
...The first, tilted well to the left, is a chic thirties number that identifies her as the author of No Ordinary Time, a view of the New Deal through a spotted veil that won the Pulitzer Prize and abetted Hillary Clinton's search for the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt...
...The American Spectator • April 1998 75...
...Unfortunately, Goodwin was raised on truth at its starkest: the inexorable long black lines of a filled-in baseball scorecard...
...and the son of one of the friends...
...Patti was the six-year-old daughter of Joanne Barron, a young widow whose rich inlaws had kidnapped the child after losing a custody battle...
...He sent a triple to the wall which drove in one run, and then he scored a second run himself a few minutes later...
...Finally, with a metal scoop dipped in steamy hot water to soften the hard ice cream, I added two scoops of vanilla or chocolate ice cream and a dab of fresh whipped cream...
...The baseball season starts in April...
...Better let him out" Nor does she seem to have much confidence...
...In an Acknowledgments section worthy of a small book on the War of the Spanish Succession, she reveals that she researched her own memoir and spends three pages thanking all the people she consulted: schoolmates she had not seen in forty years whom she tracked down and interviewed...
...What Eileen said was true...
...Her most abrupt switch comes when she is reading David Copperfield to her sick mother...
...What she does with it proves that the play-by-play life is not worth living...
...L ike many aging Democrats, Goodwin tends to wax nostalgic about the things that liberalism has ruined...
...her regular research assistant two old friends to help the assistant...
...It's her scorecard syndrome again, but for all the maniacal research that went into this ostensibly personal book, it contains one big mistake...
...The best practitioners heed Emily Dickinson's maxim, "Tell the truth, but tell it slant," creating the shadings, gaps, departures, telescoped time, white lies, and rationalizations that give memoirs their piquant complexity and ultimately reveal more about the writer than the stark truth ever could...
...No one in our town could remember the last time there had been a murder or even a violent crime...
...How early television affected suburban family life: For days, our parents discussed the dramatic reaction of Elaine's seventy-five-year-old grandmother, Amelia, to the kidnapping of the little girl, Patti, on Search for Tomorrow...
...the Sisters of St...
...Suddenly, out of the blue, the next paragraph begins: "As much as I loved Dickens, however, there was nothing in his vivid portrayals of nineteenth-century London to prepare my mind for the disturbing events of mid-century America...
...Finding Patti's shoes near a 74 April 1998 • The American Spectator pond, the searchers feared she had drowned, though viewers knew she was still alive in the hands of her evil grandmother...
...She claimed that, within minutes after Elaine had departed for Crescent Lake, Maine, in the Friedles' packed Hudson, with their bird in a covered cage on the back seat, I had raced over to Eileen's house and told her that she was my best friend...
...Dominic, the Rockville Centre Historical Society, the Long Island Studies Institute...
...F or all the perky good nature and freckle-faced smiles Goodwin projects on TV, Wait Till Next Year is notable for its utter lack of humor, unless we count her pubescent infraction of calling up the corner store and saying, "Do you have Prince Albert in a can...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...This is how she gets to the integration battle at Little Rock Central High in 1957, but her stretch is enough to make Willie Mays say hey...
...Goodwin's other hat, worn rakishly, is Dodger Blue with a big white B-forBrooklyn, her hometown, identifying her as the designated tomboy in Ken Burns's Baseball who regaled us with her childhood memories of da Bums in the 1940's and 50's, when each heartbreaking pennant or World Series loss prompted the devastated faithful to assure each other, "Wait till next year...
...Only a writer with brilliant insights and a dazzling command of language can successfully tackle conformity and blandness, but Goodwin brings nothing to the task except the maniacal thoroughness of her scorecard technique...
...If I had scored carefully, using the elaborate system he had taught me, I would know the answers...
...Her father taught her how to mark them and she got so good at it that she could run her finger along her penciled hieroglyphics and tell him exactly what had happened in every moment of every game she listened to on the radio while he was at work...
...Further on she repeats herself: "It never occurred to us that something might happen to the bikes we left behind, even less that anything might happen to us...
...Political considerations are only partly to blame for these sudden stops, however...
...Loath to let anything, even baseball, overshadow her liberal bona fides, she periodically skids to a stop and issues oddly flat, politically correct statements that sound like canned PR: "Only later would I come to understand the true significance of Robinson's achievement: the pioneering role he played in the struggle for civil rights, the fact that, after his breakthrough, nothing would ever be the same—in baseball, in sports, or in the country itself...
...Working in the drugstore: I pulled the long handle that drew the carbonated water, pushed the short one to add the syrup, and mixed in the cold milk...
...Simon & Schuster / 261 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Florence King D oris Kearns Goodwin is the orange-haired lady who wears two hats...
...the Korean War started on June 24, 1950...
...In the fifth inning, it was Robinson again, this time as hero...
...In the eighth, the Dodgers scored three more runs, and the ninth inning ended with the game tied...
...For two weeks, she said, we had played together every day...
...Martin's...
...the current proprietor of the Rockville Centre delicatessen, the actress who played the beset heroine in Search for Tomorrow...
...She not only scored carefully but saved all her old cards...
...Now she has recycled her baseball material, added a family story, and tossed in some political coming-of-age to produce a memoir, Wait Till Next Year —a title that, given her literary style, comes across as a threat to publish a second volume...
...She is careful never to dwell too long on the way things were...
...Inventing and playing a game called "McCarthyism" to learn first-hand about the dangers of unsubstantiated accusations: When I was on the stand, Eileen Rust charged me with pretending that she and I were best friends while Elaine was away on vacation...
Vol. 31 • April 1998 • No. 4
