A Review: ‘Our Bums: The Brooklyn Dodgers in History, Memory and Popular Culture’
Brooklyn BookBeat
Just in time for the holidays comes the perfect book to warm a true Brooklynite’s heart: “Our Bums: The Brooklyn Dodgers in History, Memory and Popular Culture” by Daid Krell, with a forward by Branch Rickey III. This book — published by McFarland; available only at www.mcfarlandpub.com — will be catnip to the loyal legion of global Brooklyn Dodgers fans from Bay Ridge to Beijing. Charles Ebbets, Iron Joe McGinnity, Casey Stengel (yes, before he was the Yankees’ skipper, he was a Dodger who, on the day Ebbets Field opened — April 15, 1913 — hit an inside-the-park home run to defeat, who else?, the Yankees), Preacher Roe, Leo “the Lip” Durocher, Red Barber, Dixie Walker, Sandy Koufax, Walter O’Malley (hiss…), James William “Junior” Gilliam and, of course, Jackie Robinson — they’re all here.
As are all the legendary moments: Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world”; Durocher’s alleged pummeling of an unruly fan (“With only one member that had never been to Ebbets Field, a Kings County jury took 38 minutes to acquit Durocher”); Pee Wee Reese’s display of class when, “in one of the deepest parts of the South” he put his arm on Jackie Robinson’s shoulder in a gesture of grace and inclusion (at MCU Park, home of the New York-Penn League’s Class A Brooklyn Cyclones, there is a statue that commemorates this indelible moment); Hilda Chester and her hallmark cowbell; the Sym-Phony Band in Section 8 (who played “Three Blind Mice” when the umpire blew a call); Happy Felton and his Knothole gang; Marianne Moore’s poem “Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese” appearing on the front page of the Oct. 3, 1956 New York Herald Tribune, celebrating the first game of the 1956 World Series; the ineffably sad night of Sept. 24, 1957, when the Dodgers played their last game at Ebbets Field.