Praying for Gil Hodges A Memoir of the 1955 World Series And One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers

Chapter One A Bridge in Indiana It happened right out of the blue. I had started early on my way through rural, southern Indiana to spend some time in the university town of Bloomington. After maybe thirty uneventful, placid miles on State Highway 57, I passed a sign announcing the nearby town of Princeton. It set off an indistinct bell in my head, one of those moments when you react to something before your memory tells you why. I had not quite resolved the question when the next sign several miles north answered it for me with jarring finality: The Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. I slammed on the brakes, skidding a bit on loose gravel and coming to a halt just on the far side. It wasn't much, a simple, concrete structure spanning the not-mighty White River in an area where coal had once ruled. The bridge was puny compared to the other one named after Gil Hodgeswhich connects the western chunk of New York's Rockaway peninsula to Brooklyn. His name was added to its more familiar Marine Parkway title in 1978, six years after he died of a heart attack on a Florida golf course, just shy of his forty-eighth birthday. But this bridge was Gil Hodgesquiet, simple, strong, unadorned. It was in the middle of nowherea pine forest framed the two-lane road with no signs of nearby life beyond the birds. It was a crisp, clear, windy October day, not unlike another October day decades earlier that began coming back to me in a rush. It had already been a lovely morning. State Highway 57 shoots straight north out of Evansville. It quickly clears what pass for the suburbs of the small city and then becomes this quiet road, guiding a traveler by fertile fields of soybeans and corn, thick woods, and little else. It was the right road for someone on the wrong roads a bit too much, the perfect respite from the homogenized sameness of interstate-airport-hotel "life." As a newspaper columnist with a yen for politics, this is familiar, favored territory because of its proximity to one of the most revealing stretches of real estate in Americathe land on either side of the Ohio River. From Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, where it meets the Mississippi, the Ohio defines what is called Middle America; every two years, the six states that touch it provide many of my best clues to where the country is headed. I am a New Yorker by birth, childhood, and disposition still. Gil Hodges was my father's hero and he became my hero. At first, I assumed it was because he and my father were both from rural Indiana. Only later did I understand that my fatherand eventually Ilooked up to his enormous character, his abiding concern for others, his stoic response to adversity. It was very personal. Gil Hodges was one of the stars on the Brooklyn Dodgers, a baseball team that after World War II personified the hard-luck struggler's lot; blazed amazing trails in race relations long before the rest of the country caught up; represented a huge chunk of New York with deep ties to the entire country; and then migrated west. In addition to being one of the premier first basemen of his time, Hodges was also one of the stars on what for a great many years I had no difficulty identifying as the happiest day of my lifeOctober 4, 1955, the only day in the seventy-odd years of the fabled and cursed franchise when the Dodgers ruled the world. I don't have to close my eyes; I can still see the solid single he hit cleanly into Yankee Stadium's left field that drove in Roy Campanella with the first Dodger run of the afternoon. I can still see the long fly ball that he hit near the warning track in right-center field two inninOliphant, Thomas is the author of 'Praying for Gil Hodges A Memoir of the 1955 World Series And One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers' with ISBN 9780312317621 and ISBN 031231762X.