A Book of Dreams

by

Paul Clark

         

Twenty-five years ago this week, I went to a Chicago White Sox baseball game with writer Roger Kahn in that grand old dame of a stadium, Comiskey Park. My memory for dates is not great, but remembering this date is easy. Last week I pulled from the back part of my bookshelves the Signet paperback of Kahn’s 1972 book, The Boys of Summer. Tucked into the middle of the book is a ticket stub from the game.

In 1982, I managed a bookstore in Chicago. Kahn was in town promoting his latest book. I was part of a contingent of local booksellers invited to spend an evening with Kahn at the ballpark. I bought a new copy of The Boys of Summer at my store for Kahn to autograph. After the game, I slipped the ticket stub in the middle, put the book on the shelf, and haven’t opened it since.

The reason I haven’t opened it is because for years Kahn’s book had its Dorian Gray cousin sitting next to it on my bookshelf. I first read The Boys of Summer shortly after it appeared in paperback in the early 1970s. I was in high school and I remember it as one of my main beach books that summer. My pristine, autographed version of Boys for years rested against a dog-eared, broken-spined, torn-cover, water-logged version of itself.

The Boys of Summer is the one book about baseball I would recommend to anyone, even to someone with only a slight interest in the game. Yes, the main characters are all baseball players, but the book itself is more about family, growing up, race relations in the U.S., and memory than it is about balls and strikes and home runs.

In 1952 and 1953, Kahn was a beat writer for the New York Herald Tribune, covering the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers. The previous two seasons, the Dodgers had just missed making it into the World Series, losing the pennant in the last inning of the last game of the season both years. The Dodgers were an exciting team—in part because Jackie Robinson, who had become the first black baseball player in 1947, was at the peak of his career. In each of the two years that Kahn covered the Dodgers, they made it to the World Series, losing both times to the New York Yankees. But the story of those two seasons is a relatively small part of the Kahn’s book.

The first half of the book interweaves Kahn’s boyhood in Brooklyn, where he lived near Ebbets Field (where the Dodgers played), and learned to love the Dodgers under the careful tutelage of his father. When Kahn was granted the Dodger beat at the Herald Tribune in his mid-20s, he was one of the youngest sportswriters covering a pro team.

It was a short-lived career, as it turned out, because after his second year covering the Dodgers, he was taken off the beat. Kahn writes that most beat reporters at his newspaper lasted only a couple of seasons before they were reassigned because they invariably became too emotionally involved with the team to objectively write about it. Kahn went on to a long career writing for several different magazines and writing several books. A few years after he stopped covering the Dodgers, the team moved to Los Angeles, Ebbets Field was torn down, and the New York Herald Tribune was out of business. As Kahn succinctly puts it, “I covered a team that no longer exists in a demolished ball park for a newspaper that is dead.”

The second half of the book takes place about 20 years later, when Kahn went traveling around the country, visiting with the former players who were now all in their 40s and 50s but, in the context of their sport, old men. In some cases, they had entered they fall of their lives, even when non-athletes their same age would be reveling in the summer of their own lives.

The Boys of Summer is one of the first memoirs I remember reading. It’s a bit strange that I was so attracted to this book in high school, because it’s about a baseball team I never watched, playing in a city I had never visited, set largely in a time before I was born. When I first read it, I was still in love with baseball, a passion that goes back to when my dad would take me to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs or Comiskey Park to see the White Sox (an equal number of visits to each park each year).

As a kid, I played a few years Little League. I was never very good; I never overcame my primal fear of a pitched ball aimed at my head, or a sharp groundball that could bounce in any direction, but usually a painful one against my body. My last year in uniform, when I was about 12, my team was sponsored by a local funeral home; we didn’t have a very good year.

Baseball has a rich history in American literature, more so than any other sport. Celebrated novels and stories by authors such as Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris, Robert Coover, and W.P. Kinsella take place in the world of baseball. I read all of these books, as well as dozens of baseball books written for kids by authors like Matt Christopher and Curtis Bishop. On a recent vacation, sharing a lake house with my sisters’ families, my next oldest sister brought along a copy of Bishop’s Little League Double Play, a book we found in a rented lake house when we were kids and read over and over through many summers. She has faithfully cared for the book over the ensuing decades, and I spent a day earlier this month getting familiar again with this favored story of my youth.

I’ve always associated a baseball game with the short story. A small arc of drama defines each game, with variations in characters and plot and drama in each game. Even looking at a baseball box score in the newspaper is like reading a short story. With nothing to see in the box score but last names, columns of numbers, and one- or two-letter abbreviations set in agate type, you can reconstruct a narrative of an afternoon at the ball park.

After being a passionate lover of baseball for the first 30 years of my life, my interest in watching major league baseball waned. It was no longer just the disappointment meted out by my beloved Chicago Cubs year after year. As I moved away from my childhood fantasies and into the world of work and marriage and parenting, I became less and less enamored of listening to professional athletes whine about their playing time and pay and working conditions, year after year, only to see them play poorly. At one point I realized that the worst player in the major leagues would make as much money in a year as I would make in 10 years.

When I first read The Boys of Summer, 35 summers ago, I was much younger than any of the players featured in the book—either in their playing days or in the later part of the book. Now, I’m basically the same age as the players were when Kahn revisited them in the early 1970s. As a teenager, this part of the book appealed to me because it was a stark introduction to mortality. High school kids don’t think of death too much, unless they think about it all the time. But I was one of the immortal ones for those few years in my late teens and early 20s when there was little that people older than me could teach me about life that I wasn’t learning on my own. During those years, I read Kahn’s book, getting steadily more ragged, two or three times.

Sometime in the past 25 years, I misplaced or gave away or threw away my ragged copy of The Boys of Summer. No matter. Over the past few nights, I’ve been reacquainting myself with some old friends, imagining them on a field of dreams chronicled by Roger Kahn.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it