Gil

Hawthorne Street in Williamsburg is a long, long street that cuts through the heart of that section of Brooklyn. It stops abruptly when it runs into the very large campus of what was then known as Kings County Hospital but then became Downstate Medical Center in the second half of the 20th Century.

That seemed the end of Hawthorne Street but it wasn’t. It returns on the other side of the hospital center campus on Albany Avenue for a single solitary, long one-way street dead-ending for good at Troy Avenue. It was that dead-end that made the street a dream for the kids living there. Because it was a dead-end it was ignored by traffic passing through the area…and so the kids had a natural playground…and there were lots of kids.

The entrance to the street at Albany Avenue had two bare, brown empty lots symmetrical in size on both corners – perfect for boys playing cowboys and Indians or soldiers and girls playing hide and seek.

The houses on one side of the street were low two story buildings holding two separate families with short three step entryways. The other side had tall, multi step single family homes. Houses on both sides on the street were semi-attached in two by two by two patterns with narrow alleyways and backyards with garages behind them. The two family houses had side entrances between them. At that time there were also low to the ground doors covering coal shoots where big coal trucks would periodically load coal into the special basement level compartments…coal that would heat the houses. Cooking was done by gas. Match sticks lit ovens and ranges.

Those families with cars could navigate them down those narrow alleyways to park them in separate garage buildings. Between the garages were shared gardens. Some Dads would plant vegetables and Moms rose bushes or flowers. Some gardens were untended and had lots of wild greenery. If a stray ball or balloon bounced into those they were essentially lost.

Because there were few parked cars on either side of the street and no steady traffic, the gutters were ideal places for bike riding and ball-playing…all kinds of ball playing.

What was most remarkable about that little street in Brooklyn was this: the kids were bunched in perfect age groups. The oldest kids were 12 and 13. And then came nine, ten and eleven year olds…boys and girls in the same age bunches…so the play and the friends never stopped.

In sports, the oldest kids were the basketball stars, the quarterbacks in touch football, the pitchers in stickball. And the younger kids played supporting roles very easily. And it always worked perfectly. It was amazing.

Near the vacant lots, there was a pole with a basketball backboard and hoop artfully attached at legal height and plenty of room in the gutter to play three on a side.

Three man touch football was mandatory and punch ball was about getting down and running bases…using that pink Spalding ball as if it were a baseball.

There was no hardball that could be played…too dangerous…but there was that pink ball used in stickball…the game originated in Brooklyn.

There were two kinds of stickball.

One was played in the narrow alleyways on the side of the street with the tall single family homes. There were no side entrances and no gardens in the back. A rectangular box approximating the strike zone in a baseball game was painted on the garage wall. We played two or three on a side. The pitcher was key because he had to learn how to throw fast balls and curve balls to batters standing next to that rectangle swinging their stick-bats with mean intent.

The other form of stick ball was the classic. Played in the middle of the street…the pitcher simply threw the ball on a bounce to the hitter standing next to home plate which was the large, round, heavy metal sewer caps that dotted city streets across the country.

There were rules for hit balls that were fouls, for singles and doubles and triples and if you could hit the ball on a fly to the next sewer cap down the block and the ball stayed inside the gutter and didn’t fly onto the sidewalk, you had a homerun.

And it was just that kind of stick ball game that six of us 12 and 13 year old boys were playing on a sunny mild, early Spring weekend afternoon when it happened.

He came walking down the street in a nice easy strut..dressed in a sport jacket, with a sport shirt collar laid over the jacket lapels…the way guys dressed casually then when going on a date. His slacks were flapping in the breeze. He looked like an athlete…tall and strong ..his blondish hair in a wave blowing in the breeze a smile on his face when he saw us playing.

“Hey guys” he said, “Can I take a swing’?

We stopped dead as if hit by lightning –frozen in disbelief. Six kids gawking at this big smiling stranger who wanted to take a few hits in our stickball game.

But he wasn’t a stranger…there wasn’t a kid in New York City who didn’t know and love him.

He took a stick – a relatively new wooden mop handle –and stepped up to the sewer plate. He never took off his sport jacket…just stepped right up and tapped that stick on the plate.

Time steals memory and so it is impossible now to remember who pitched that ball to him and who caught the balls he didn’t swing at. But the first bouncing pitches were way off the mark as nerves struck the pitcher hard. And then he got one close enough and the big guy reached, swung and hit a hard bouncing ball foul onto the sidewalk. No good.

“OK” he said” let’s go.”

And now we were all into it. The two kids standing way off in the gutter to catch a hit …maybe…the pitcher…all of us into it.

The next pitch was perfect and Gil Hodges, All-Star first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers swung free and clear…and the pink Spalding ball soared high and deep…

The sound that swing made is still in the air…not a mop handle but a 36 ounce Louisville Slugger baseball bat sound…a crack through the afternoon air

“Good enough” He said,” that will do it” and with that big smile all over his face he handed us the stick and walked off down the block.

We would learn later that Gil was on the street for a date with a really pretty Italian girl named Josephine Lombardo…we had all seen her from time to time and even a 12 year old boy knows what a great looking girl looks like.’

They would marry later that year – 1948 – and Gil would have a great career on a team with a whole bunch of All-Stars and Hall of Famers: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Pee-Wee Reese, Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe and on and on.

Gil would eventually manage the Mets to a World Series win and then tragically die suddenly of a heart attack at 52. Many of those teammates of his also died in their 50’s.

Now Gil has at last been admitted to the Hall of Fame and his wife Joan at 95 and his four children can feel so good about an honor long overdue.

But on that early Spring day, Gil Hodges was already a Hall of Famer to us.

That hit soared high and deep right in the middle of the gutter more than two sewers away…a home run of majestic proportions.

But to us watching in awe that ball would never come down…

Going. Going. Gone.