[ Spring training is in full swing. Everyone has already given up on the Red Sox, me included. That doesn’t mean I won’t follow the season. After two straight last place finishes, prospects look good for a three-peat. The nice thing about baseball is that always gives you an excuse to re-visit other times in your life. You can find a comprehensive compilation of my baseball stories at:

https://thebaseballstories.wordpress.com/

But here’s an outstanding memory for me of the time I taught Hall-of-Famer Lefty Gomez the right way to throw a curve. SB SM]

 Here’s How You Throw a Curve

The cottage at Post Island, soon after my grandfather finished building it

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Rita and Charlie

During summers at Post Island I ran around obliviously, being a kid. My parents lived in a parallel world of grown-ups. They were best friends with Rita and Charlie Johnson whose house was separated from ours by a single lawn.

Fourth of July Costume Parade at Post Island, circa 1954

There was a suggestion of trouble in Charlie’s past, but he decided to straighten up and fly right when he met Rita White, a blue-eyed and dark-haired lass from a tight-knit, Boston/Irish family. She came from the same world as my father, second or third generation survivors of the Potato Famine, now bootstrapping their way up the ladder of success in America.

The couples were polar opposites. Charlie was a pressman, a union guy, who toiled, often on the night shift at the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and, in my earliest memories, the Boston Traveler. His employer changed as the newspaper world declined, but the union assured that he always had a paycheck. When he was on the night shift, there was always a morning paper waiting for us on the front porch. Dark complexioned and from mysterious circumstances, Charlie would never talk about his childhood, other than he grew up poor and from Maine. He treasured his time in the Navy during World War II, and a misty film would come over his eyes at sunset when he gazed out over the placid waters of Quincy Bay and uttered his catch-phrase “You know, there’s a lot of water in the Pacific.”

For my father, John, the Depression meant working his way through Suffolk Law School (in those days you could go to law school without having completed an undergraduate college degree. Pretty damn good-lookin’ guy!! My son Jake resembles him a lot.

To support himself he worked at a settlement house in Cambridge where he met my mother. She was a happy-go-lucky graduate of Bouve College where she majored in physical education. She chose to attend Bouve with her good friend, Dot Allard, because “we both loved to dance.”

After college my mother, Connie, had a college debt of $2000 to pay off. She got a job as a social worker at a settlement house in Cambridge.  Settlement houses were institutions providing educational, social, and recreational opportunities for under-privileged women in the inner cities, often immigrants.

She took great pride in her work and her $19/week salary was nothing to sneeze at. She was one of the few women who had jobs at the time, and she not only paid off her college loan, but was able to help John with books and other expenses. Eventually, at $2900/year, she was the highest paid girls’ social worker in Boston! And she loved to dance!

Despite differences in their backgrounds, John, Connie, Rita, and Charlie hit it off famously.  (The notable exception was when the discussion turned to politics, where Connie and Charlie held opposite and contrary world views. Over the years they had some pitched battles that lasted for weeks.)

Putting politics aside, they’d gather nightly on the brick patio beneath the oak tree in the Johnson’s back yard where Charlie would serve his renowned “Mah-toonies” from a half-gallon fruit juice jar that was kept perpetually refrigerated and perpetually full of gin. Charlie, himself, never touched martinis; he drank only the occasional beer. He was very quick to provide refills, however, on everyone else’s glass. I am now the keeper of the famed glass Mah-toonie jar. It is, alas, currently empty.

Later, when I reached legal drinking age and would occasionally join them for their evening cocktail, I discovered the secret of Charlie’s famous martinis … they were HUGE. Knock back two of them too quickly and you were gone for the night.

Rita had an aura of glamour to her, a suggestion of Elizabeth Taylor-style beauty, but without the lavender eyes. She read all the movie magazines and knew the latest Hollywood gossip. She and Charlie took exotic vacations on cruise ships and to casinos, where they occasionally had celebrity sightings, of which Rita would regale us under the backyard oak tree.

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Rita and Charlie were also personal friends with Lefty and June O’Dea Gomez, the Hall of Fame pitcher for the Yankees and his glamorous actress wife. Here’s what the New York Times had to say about Lefty upon his death at the age of 80 in 1989.

In his 14 major league seasons, Gomez won 189 games, lost 102 and was nearly flawless in the World Series, winning 6 games without losing in his 7 starts. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

Back in the days when baseball games were being played on lazy summer afternoons and the Yankees were winning more games than anybody else, few persons symbolized the sport more joyously or successfully than Vernon (Lefty) Gomez, who was known to let a batter wait while he watched an airplane go by.

The light-hearted left-hander reflected the mood of the business by breezing through 13 seasons as one of the happier, more colorful souls on the landscape: the Singular Senor and El Goofy of the Yankee pitching staff, and a wit and raconteur of the front rank.

But he also reflected the Yankees’ dominance of the business in the middle years of the empire, starting in 1931, when Babe Ruth was king, and ending in 1942, when Joe DiMaggio reigned.

New York Times

I had heard Rita and Charlie reference Lefty, June, and their daughter, Vernona, many times, but since neither were baseball fans, the references with about family life, homes, good times they had shared … in short, things of little interest to a nine year old boy.

I don’t know how the couples met … on a cruise? There was an air of unreality to this supposed friendship a baseball legend.  I knew of Lefty’s baseball career, which Rita and Charlie cared and knew little.  Rita, in fact, was much more impressed with June O’Dea’s Hollywood credentials than Lefty’s baseball stats. He was basically the guy who bridged Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, maintaining Yankee dominance in the post-Depression and pre-war era.

He was likable and colorful, but he was a Yankee, and even at nine I was old enough to know that the Yankees were our enemies. His record, especially his winning percentage, were among the best in baseball history, placing him inarguably among the greats of the game.

We made a summer road trip to Connecticut to visit my mother’s dancing friend, Dot Allard, now Prevost, who lived in Southington, Connecticut. It was a trip the Morris family made annually, but on this occasion the Johnsons came with us.  Trips like these were always on the tedious side for me. The Prevosts had daughters who were more my sister’s age, and the girls were all off at summer camp, so the fringe benefit for me was that I could snoop through their 45 records and Archie comics while the adults did their adult thing … you know, smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis.

Upon leaving, however, I learned of a change in plans … we were going to visit the home of the Gomezes, and I was going to sleep in Lefty’s trophy room. I was thunderstruck by this news. I was going to meet a big leaguer. I was going to meet a baseball legend. I was going to be sleeping in Lefty Gomez’s trophy room!

Charlie told me that one of Lefty’s quirks was that he liked to steal interesting road signs, and that other people liked to steal them for him, too. Before long we were snaking our way up the secluded drive where the woods were filled with colorful road signs that Lefty had collected. “Slow Children,” “Bump,” and “Bangor …  19 miles.” No wonder he was nicknamed “Goofy.”

I wish I could tell more about the visit. Sure enough, Lefty and June treated Rita and Charlie like best friends. They were great with the Morrises, too. There was little baseball talk, although the trophy room was like having Cooperstown all to myself. Unfortunately, despite Lefty’s affability, I retreated into a world of bashful intimidation. This was crazy … my normal-people parents were being friends with a REAL, LIVE BASEBALL PLAYER!

The next morning we packing things into the car and saying our good-byes in the driveway when Lefty appeared, holding a baseball and two gloves, one of which he offered to me. We soon fell into the easy rhythm of playing catch, a ritual that instantly relaxed me and made me feel at home. Finally, Lefty, holding the ball making a twisting motion with his wrist and announced “Curve ball.” He threw a lollipop curve at about 30 miles per hour. Then he threw another and another.

After the third or fourth, I had had enough. Tucking my glove under my arm, I … Steppy Morris, age nine … walked over to where Lefty was standing and made the pronouncement that made me a legend on the brick patio under the oak tree in the Johnson’s back yard on Post Island. “No,” I said taking the ball from him with complete confidence, ” … here’s how you throw a curve.” And, I showed him.

Poor Lefty Gomez. For all these years he had been doing it wrong, but, luckily, I set him straight.