APRIL 2025
THE RITES OF SPRING
AND COMING OF AGE
By Rev Protodeacon George A. Haloulakos
In the early 1990s, filmmaker Ken Burns included extensive interviews with Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for his documentary on the history of baseball. Ms. Goodwin shared her childhood love for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the ensuing public interest provided the impetus for her 1997 memoir Wait Till Next Year. In this unusually poignant and moving book, Goodwin harnesses her research and writing skills as a historian to recreate the post World War II era of New York City as she recounts growing up in love with her family and baseball. Baby Boomers will recall this as a time when the neighborhood establishments (e.g., drug store, butcher shop, soda fountain, churches plus various other public venues) were the places to share stories while neighborhoods were equally divided between fans of the Dodgers, Giants and Yankees. Children would gather in the neighborhood streets to play from daybreak to dusk. What makes this a compelling read is how Goodwin's personal history is woven into the tapestry of her family, friends, neighbors and fellow church goers with the major events of the 1950s along with the decade-long dominance by the three New York MLB teams (1947-1956) as a backdrop to mark the passage of time.
Goodwin found that sharing her experience as a baseball fan could not be shared without telling about her life as a young girl reaching adolescence during the decade popularly remembered as the "Fabulous Fifties." In this first person narrative Goodwin enables the reader to meet her wonderful parents: her mother who instilled in her a lifetime love for reading but was largely housebound due to a debilitating illness, and her father who taught her the joy of baseball (including how to keep a written record of fandom with score books) while encouraging her to be self-reliant while respectfully bringing her voice to any conversation anywhere at anytime! The reader also gets to know Goodwin's two sisters, schoolmates, friends, neighbors, teachers and storekeepers. Wait Till Next Year definitely evokes a "you are there" feeling but without being overly nostalgic. What emerges is that Goodwin's childhood paralleled the ten-year career of her favorite player, Jackie Robinson, spanning 1947-1956. Goodwin observed that the news of Jackie Robinson's retirement in January 1957 left her feeling empty as his career had been her childhood. But this feeling of emptiness would soon give way to deep personal grief. The passing of Goodwin's mother shortly after Robinson's retirement marked not the only end of her own childhood but occurred at the closure of a classic baseball era as the Dodgers (along with the Giants) left New York to relocate to the West Coast that very same year.
Like every Baby Boomer, there are moments of joy, sadness, wonderment, frustration and all the feelings connected with coming of age that are all recounted in a personal but respectful tone. For Goodwin, it was a time when neighbors formed an extended family, television was young and the street a common playground while the great festivals of the Roman Catholic Church and the seasonal imperatives of baseball combined to produce in her a lifelong passion for history, ceremony and ritual. There is much more, but hopefully this may inspire you to read Wait Till Next Year as a way to celebrate Springtime along with yet another new season of baseball. Goodwin's memoir is a unique time capsule that provides context for her childhood adventures at a very special time and circumstance in our nation's history. In a sense, her story becomes our story, and we are all the better for having experienced it through her masterful narrative.
NOTE: Photos are from the public domain.