DODGERS 'R' US

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN'S MEMOIR RECALLS THE YEARS WHEN BASEBALL WAS OUR COMMON GROUND

Author: By Jodi Daynard

Date: SUNDAY, October 12, 1997

Page: E1

Section: Books

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of ``Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,'' ``The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga,'' and, most recently, ``No Ordinary Time,'' about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, possesses an unerring sense of story. Arguably, the greatest achievement of her books has been to synchronize the rhythms of some of America's most vivid eras and the leaders who navigated them, making public and private stories seem one and the same.

``Wait Till Next Year,'' Goodwin's memoir of a childhood in Brooklyn, is a microcosmic example of her narrative art. [CORRECTION - DATE: Sunday, October 19, 1997: CORRECTION: Because of an editing error, last week's review of ``Wait Till Next Year'' misidentified Doris Kearns Goodwin's hometown in one reference. The author grew up in Rockville Centre, on Long Island.] Lively, tender, and sometimes hilarious, it tells three stories simultaneously: the life and death of her own childhood, of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and of postwar America itself.

The tale begins in a time of innocence. It is 1949, Goodwin's first year as a Dodger fan. In the New York suburb of Rockville Centre, on Long Island, mothers stay home to tend their children and fathers leave en masse for their daily trek into Manhattan. Children cruise in and out of each other's homes as if they were ``a single home,'' and neighborhood shopkeepers speak to customers on a first-name basis.

In her little house on Southard Avenue, 6-year-old Doris listens to the voice of Dodgers announcer Red Barber on the radio, noting every play on a red scorecard, just as her beloved father taught her. At night, she recaps the games for him, play by play. Anyone who has watched Ken Burns's epic documentary ``Baseball'' already knows that Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the game's biggest fans. So it comes as no surprise that much of ``Wait Till Next Year'' is devoted to astonishingly detailed accounts of particular games, some of them now as famous as any game can be -- like the 1951 National League playoff in which Bobby Thomson's ninth-inning home run for the Giants snatched the pennant from their Brooklyn rivals.

But even for the non-fanatical among us, these accounts are never tedious, because we see them through the eyes of a hopeful young girl. And as Goodwin recalls, baseball in her time galvanized not just her life but the lives of many Americans, uniting whole communites in a kind of collective passion and, whatever one's loyalty, a collective hope.

Nowhere is this sense of collective participation more evident than in a riotously funny scene between a 7-year-old Goodwin and her priest:

``I talked in church twenty times, I disobeyed my mother five times, I wished harm to others several times, I told a fib three times, I talked back to my teacher twice.''

Goodwin had attempted to ``camouflage'' her evil baseball thoughts in a multitude of lesser sins. But the priest, being no dummy, asks:

``And to whom did you wish harm?''

And so she must confess: She wished that Yankees pitcher Allie Reynolds would break his arm, ``that Robin Roberts of the Phillies would fall down the steps of his stoop, . . . that Enos Slaughter of the Cards would break his ankle, that Phil Rizzuto of the Yanks would fracture a rib . . .'' Her only redemption is that she also wished ``that all these injuries would go away once the baseball season ended.''

For penance, the priest tells Doris to `` `say two Hail Marys, three Our Fathers, and,' he added with a chuckle, `say a special prayer for the Dodgers.' ''

In some ways, Goodwin's loving, tender portrait of 1950s America confirms the cliches that those of us born to ``Leave It to Beaver'' and ``Father Knows Best'' reruns already know. But ``Wait Till Next Year'' is written with a delicacy and freshness that makes it all seem new. It also conveys the sense that this period in time is smouldering with the heat of imminent change. Goodwin describes the events she hears about over the radio between games. The Rosenbergs, tried and executed for espionage. The Russians, suddenly holding the formula to the atom bomb. Joe McCarthy, making public mockery of democracy. And an evil crowd surrounding young black students in Little Rock as they try to attend their first day of what was once an all-white school.

There are signs of change at home as well. Goodwin's mother, chronically ill from rheumatic fever, begins to weaken and will soon die. Goodwin's favorite Dodgers -- three of whom will be immortalized in the Hall of Fame -- show signs of their own athletic mortality. Jackie Robinson, traded to the Giants, retires rather than put on that hated uniform. And close friends and neighbors begin to move wholesale out of Rockville Centre, in search of larger homes, tonier neighborhoods. ``The ties which had held our block together began to loosen,'' Goodwin writes. ``The street was no longer our common ground. Television, once a source of community, had become an isolating force.'' Nor could baseball tie them any longer: Walter O'Malley, the team's owner, would move the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957, and Ebbets Field would go quiet, except in memory.

``Wait Till Next Year,'' like her other books, displays Goodwin's profound sensitivity to the elegiac quality of American life, with its meteoric rises and cataclysmic falls, its small-town boys turned presidents and heroes turned villains. Her memoir captures the sadness of many losses, turns disparate griefs into one grief.

But while Goodwin will leave the golden country of her youth, she will not leave it empty-handed. She takes away the skills to become the writer she became -- in a way, its own American Dream story. And she takes away a more subtle gift as well: an exuberant capacity for hope. After O'Malley's betrayal, Goodwin shuns baseball for years. But then she is lured back -- to Fenway Park and to that other perennial underdog team, the Boston Red Sox.

And so the story of ``Wait Till Next Year'' comes full circle. When it does, one realizes that Goodwin's memoir is not simply about a charmed girlhood, or the making of a historian, or baseball, or even about the loss of an era's innocence. It is about the best part of America: our unique brand of optimism, which might be defined as an irrational, stubborn willingness to hang in there for lost causes, underdogs, newcomers, and has-beens of every stripe. One might argue as well that the greatest defining metaphor for this optimism is the game of baseball.

``Wait Till Next Year'' is a good book to give foreign friends who have a hard time understanding our passion for baseball. It will delight Americans as well, both fans and soon-to-be fans. Much about America, as Goodwin learned growing up, is unbeautiful. But her memoir is uplifting evidence that the American Dream still exists -- not so much in the content of the dream as in the tireless, dauntless dreaming.