In, I believe, 2001, the 60th anniversary of the day that will live in infamy, the Daily News asked me to write a column about my recollections of that day. This turned out to be the only column or anything else I ever wrote for the Daily News. I went looking for it today to scan and send to you but the copy I had made on fax paper had pretty much faded out. I could read it more or less because I remembered writing it, but you never would have been able to. So call it lost. I wish I could have sent it to you because I wrote it from Nice (on a computer since thrown away) and no one ever commented on it that I heard from here.
As Kevin will remember, we sat in the Upper Deck, fifty yard line, row B, section 12 possibly still wearing the matching Eton suits my mother favored for “her boys”, directly under the Press Box which in the Polo Grounds hung off the lip of the roof high over our heads. A rather scary Press Box I always thought, once I got much older and began to frequent it. At one end of this Press Box sat the telegraph operators, their machines clicking, their fingers tapping out copy dot-dash-dot, letter by letter, as it was handed to them. They were, of course, in constant contact with their fellow telegraph operators in the Sports Departments of eight NY newspapers. That’s how the news was transmitted in 1941.
The public address announcer at Giant games was my father, friend of the Maras who owned the whole team then, not just half like now, particularly Jack Mara, his best friend. He was earning from the Times then $67.50 a week, down ten percent a few years back because of the depression. Or perhaps by then he had been reinstated to his full $75. He was not the columnist, only a sports writer, which is what he always called himself. He got, I think, $15. a game, which helped at home.
My father had a great voice for that stadium, I thought then and now, a great manner too, nothing fancy, just who carried the ball and who tackled him, and soon, every five minutes or so, he began calling out also the name of an Admiral or General, telling the man to report to his command at once. That was all. His voice was everywhere in that stadium: Admiral So-and-So is ordered to return to his base immediately. The crowd began to stir after a while, but no one knew what was going on. In section 12 where all the free tickets sat, players’ wives and reporters’ families (my father got six tickets to every game, and Kevin and I saw every game from 1937 on) we did know, for word came via some reporter kneeling in the aisle reporting to his wife sitting near us, he having got the news from his telegraph operator.
No one else would know what had happened until they got home.
In my column for the Daily News I recounted all this 60 years after the fact, and also (showing off a bit) I put in many of the numbers on the players’ backs, not just the Giant players, but Dodger players too, Not an act of genius but something entirely normal as I explained with a line I have always been proud of, though no one else ever noticed: When you’re 11 years old with an empty head, everything that goes in there sticks, and it sticks forever. The Giant players were easy. Mel Hein No. 7, Ward Cuff No. 14, Jim Lee Howell No. 21, and so on. The Dodgers were led by Ace Parker, a triple threat tailback, No. 7, and I looked him up as I was writing the piece, 90 years old and still alive. One of the Dodger players was an end named Perry Schwartz, No. 98, who that day tried the old sleeper play – he lay down close to the sidelines imagining no one would notice, leaving him uncovered for a possible touchdown pass.
I remember sitting there in Section 12 trying to puzzle out what the momentous news signified and asking my mother if we would win this war. She soothed all my conerns, and assured me it would be easy, and with that quote from her I closed my Daily News column.
On the way home, as Kevin says, we never got to hear the latest adventure of “The Shadow“, whose name was Lamont Cranston. That program always started with a dark voice intoning: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.” It would have started that way that day too. The Shadow was a helluva guy and my principal regret on December 7, 1941 was not getting to hear the show.
Bob
(Robert and Kevin Daley are brothers, and the father they speak of, Arthur Daley, won a Pulitzer Prize for a Sports of The Times column in 1956. John Robben is their long-time friend from Fordham Prep and University. Robert now lives in Bronxville and Nice, France and formerly lived in Greenwich and New Canaan. Kevin presently lives in Greenwich. John Robben formerly lived in Greenwich now lives in Stamford and works in Old Greenwich) The three men, along with many other friends from the Bronx and other places correspond regularly.)
