One more last at bat

On October 6, 1985, at Shea Stadium against the Montreal Expos, Rusty Staub was the final batter of the Mets’ season.

The Mets will finish second place and with Darryl Strawberry (23 years old, 27 home runs) and Dwight Gooden (20 years old, 24-4 record), anchoring a young and talented team, the Mets are primed for promise.

Almost in anticipation of ticker-tape parades to come, the fans are shredding paper and throwing it onto the field: hot dog wrappers, pages torn from programs, newspapers, toilet paper, falling to the ground or getting swept up into a current circling the inside of Shea Stadium.

From WWOR's game broadcast, 10/6/85

Staub watches paper falling through the air and fouls off the first two pitches, then takes a ball. Indifferent ownership, the inability to get funding for a new stadium, dropping attendance and other economic pressures over the coming two decades would tip the scale in favor of a relocation, and in 2004, the Expos became the Washington Nationals.

Another pitch out of the strike zone for a ball. Staub began his major league career as a 19-year-old with the Houston Astros in 1963; Shea Stadium opened the following year as a multi-purpose stadium built for baseball and football. Aging badly and with the trend towards stadiums built expressly for baseball (while acknowledging a certain old-time vibe – archways, brick facades, distinctive angles to the outfields), Shea was demolished in 2009, replaced by Citi Field.

He calls time, distracted by more paper falling from the rightfield grandstand. The count goes to three balls and two strikes. Never a Hall of Famer, but certainly a first-ballot induction in any mythical Hall of the Nearly Great, Staub retired that winter to organize charitable programs and focus on his Manhattan restaurant, Rusty's, specializing in steaks and ribs. Nearly 30 years to the day of his final at bat, on a flight from Ireland to the U.S., he went into cardiac arrest. Two doctors on board assisted in resuscitating him. He died in 2018, three days before his 74th birthday.

The last swing of the bat is a grounder to the Montreal second baseman, who bobbles the ball but still throws the slow-running Staub out at first. Even the best batters succeed only three out of ten times. The field is littered with white paper, resembling a tentative late autumn snowfall that barely cover the grass, a reminder that winter is right around the corner.

The last at bat

For sustained brilliance in writing about baseball there is Roger Angell. But the greatest one-hit wonder is John Updike’s only venture into sports reporting. His 1960 essay about Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams’ final game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” is not just amazing writing, but a masterpiece of production against a hard deadline. While a good portion of the essay was likely thought-out in advance, Updike turned around 6000 words about a game played on September 28 in time for the October 20 edition of The New Yorker.   

Updike was a fan, offering no alibis for Williams’ behavior. Williams was a complex player, disliked by many fans and reporters alike. The product of a broken home, he was moody and quixotic in his belief that playing baseball might be much more enjoyable (for him) without those sports writers or fans watching. A view, Updike points out, that may have cost Williams not just plenty of goodwill, but two MVP trophies, which are voted on by the baseball writers. 

The author gets off a couple of wonderful and insightful lines: 

The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence. 

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. 

As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. 

(If the use of the word “color” in that last quite is a potshot at the American Leagues’ lack of urgency when it came to integration, it is subtle but well taken). 

Updike also got a storybook ending: Williams’ final plate appearance was a solo home run in the eighth inning: Williams etching in own career epitaph within the epitaph Updike had written. The Red Sox were scheduled for three final games, in New York versus the Yankees. Williams chose not to accompany the team. “So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit,” is how Updike ended the piece. 

Updike wrote frequently about sports in his fiction. His most famous character, Rabbit Angstrom, was a star high school basketball player who found everything in life sour and anti-climactic after graduation. There’s a lot of golf playing in the Rabbit books and in his novel about swinging suburbia, Couples. 

If he often found sports a useful metaphor, it’s fitting that Ted Williams hitting a home run in his final career at bat could serve as a comparison to Updike’s high-pressure delivery of “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” one of the high points in a lifetime of writing, within 30 days.

Incredibly, footage of Ted Williams' final home run exists:

Jigsaw puzzles of the damned 

One of the cultural kid crazes of the sixties was the obsession with monsters. For a few years, I got caught up in it in a big way. Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Aurora monster models. Monster wallets. Monster figures. If it had anything to do with Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon or the Mummy, I was in. 

One Christmas, I received this: 

The box is a little rough now, something like 60 years later, but it’s complete, no missing pieces: 

The finished puzzle tells a pretty terrifying story, as the artist crammed as much as possible into a nightmarish scene: the sobbing woman, a hooded ghoul emerging from a coffin, the lizard and cat going after a corpse, a rattlesnake for some reason, prison bars and the mummy carrying some poor guy in the process of being mummified while still alive. 

The puzzle was made by the Jaymar Specialty Company of Brooklyn, started by Jacob Marx, father of famed toy manufacturer Louis Marx. Jaymar produced mostly wooden toys, including any number of puzzles based on licensed characters (Disney, Archie, Blondie). In 1963, Jaymar issued four monster puzzles: Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman and the Mummy. 

More coffins and dungeons. The guy lying on the operating table in the lower left has a hypodermic needle sticking out of his neck making a puddle of blood. Fun stuff when you're ten years old. 

According to one price guide, “parental objection to these gruesome puzzles soon led to Jaymar’s discontinuation of them.” I couldn’t find any other details, but if true, the puzzles belong in the same childhood limbo as Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” Chinese Cherry Funny Face drink mix and the Frito Bandito. Vanished, thanks to the whim of some supposedly well-meaning adults. 

The monster craze began to diminish for me with the discovery of Marvel Comics and the Beatles, and as I told myself that it was time to put childish things away, I donated the puzzle to a Cub Scout auction. A quarter burning a hole in my pocket, I realized I'd made a mistake. 

I was the only bidder. Reunited.

I don't care if I never get back 

My hometown of Hackensack is roughly ten miles from the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium. That’s a relatively easy commute if you work there and during the 1960s, before baseball players became richer than God, several Yankees rented summer residences in the area. 

Elston Howard settled year-round in Teaneck, one town over. Mickey Mantle was said to be in nearby River Edge. Tom Tresh and Andy Kosco lived in my neighborhood. Tresh a couple of blocks over; Kosco, in his only season with New York, rented a place maybe fifteen houses up from mine. 

The more famous Tresh was American League Rookie of the Year in 1962 and one of the heroes of the 1962 World Series. He played nine seasons in the infield and outfield, and played in two All-Star Games. 

In a ten-year career, Kosco played for seven teams. He is also peripherally connected to two events that helped frame 1970s baseball: he was traded from the Yankees to the Dodgers for Mike Kekich, who is best remembered for swapping families with fellow Yankee Fritz Peterson in 1973. The Dodgers later traded Kosco to Milwaukee for Al Downing, who allowed Hank Aaron’s 715^th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s record. 

I can’t say that we ever saw either ballplayer out mowing the grass or holding a garden hose to the lawn. Their days were likely spent sleeping or watching television before heading out to work. We nodded in acknowledgement as we rode our bikes past their homes, although we never went knocking on their front doors looking for autographs. Possibly we saw them for what they were: ordinary guys roughly our parents’ age (maybe a little younger) who worked weird hours at a strange job. 

What we didn’t realize was that the best time to catch Tresh or Kosco was likely late at night, when much of the neighborhood was dark except for the occasional living room cast in the light from a television screen. Home from the game, sitting on a front step or in the backyard maybe with a beer and a cigarette. Out from the heat of the day, and from under the unblinking glare of the stadium’s high-intensity lights. Listening to the same crickets and far-off police sirens I heard while lying in my bed. 

Times change and summer nights pass quickly, along with childhood and the freedoms that came with it. What we’re left with are summer evenings that will never feel quite the same again.

Get Carter 

(This post is part of the Rule, Britannia Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

In Get Carter (1970), London gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine) returns to his hometown of Newcastle to investigate the sudden and mysterious death of his brother. When he finds that his brother was murdered and his niece (who may be Carter’s daughter) was steered into making a pornographic movie, Carter relentlessly and violently tracks down everyone involved. (And without giving away too much, Carter the hunter has no idea that he’s also being hunted). 

“British gangsters were seen as silly or funny in the movies, and I knew from my background that all of the above wasn’t true,” said Caine. Carter may have a subtle sense of humor, but he’s also uncompromising, with a slow-burning temper that builds quickly into sudden violence. Immoral, as you’d expect from someone in his profession, but with a strong sense of family honor. 

Filmed on location, Newcastle’s rowhouses, outdoor plumbing and beach blackened with coal waste provide a grim setting. As Carter travels there by train, director Mike Hodges shows fleeting glimpses of the countryside, including several nuclear power plants, signaling that the glory days of Newcastle, once the center of a huge coal mining area, are vanishing. 

Back in Newcastle, Carter throws money around to smooth over any problems and shows off his slick metropolitan ways at the local pub when he orders a pint of bitter, then hesitates, adding “in a thin glass.” When his niece tells him she’s left school for a job at Woolworths, his deadpan, “That must be very interesting,” says it all about his contempt for his past life. 

Caine’s strong supporting cast included several actors with pedigree status in British popular culture. John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, launched the British social realism with his play, Look Back in Anger (1956). Ian Hendry, who was under consideration to play Carter, starred in the first version of The Avengers (1961). Britt Ekland, maybe best known for her active social life, was in The Wicker Man (1973). 

Roy Budd’s soundtrack in jazzy and groovy with occasional Indian tabla percussion, and director Hodges allows some ambient noise, a ship’s horn, wind, to filter into some scenes, adding to the realism.

One moment in Get Carter easily overlooked is one of product placement: a copy of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed album in a scene that also triggers the film’s bloody final act (see below). Released in late 1969, the record – like Carter – feels like it has a lit fuse burning through it, about to blow up what was left of the Swinging Sixties. To echo the final song on the record, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Carter will get what he needs, but ultimately not what he wants. 

Get Carter was released in the U.S. on a double bill with Frank Sinatra’s awful Dirty Dingus Magee. “We were in the toilet in two weeks,” Caine later said, crediting cable TV with introducing Carter to a larger audience. 

If gritty realism, urban settings, a true anti-hero and intricate plotting all count for something, Get Carter owes as much to the British kitchen sink social realism movement as it does film noir, making it the quintessential British crime film. 

As Caine said when marking the 50^th anniversary of Get Carter: “If you’d told me (then) that I’d still be talking about it now, I might not have believed you. Some films are special.”

A Jersey City lunchtime moment shared 

It’s probably true of all major metropolitan regions, but New York City TV weathermen differentiated themselves with their own, often quirky, brands and approach. 

Tex Antoine on ABC had a David Niven mustache and drew cartoons illustrating the current or forecasted weather. One got the sense that his first drafts were done on a cocktail napkin that afternoon. NBC’s Dr. Frank Field had head of the high school science department gravitas. Mr. G on CBS was the nice Jewish bachelor all the older women were trying to fix up on dates with their unmarried daughters. Roberto Tirado on PIX was smooth and stylish; you pictured him dancing the Latin Hustle with the top buttons of his shirt undone. 

WOR’s Lloyd Lindsay Young’s appeal was his corny, everyman exuberance. He had a booming voice and began each of his spots by loudly acknowledging a local city or town with his trademark “Hellooooo (insert name here)!” 

Young: “That all started by accident. I was working in Idaho Falls in television, and one day—and I don’t know what possessed me—but I knew there were viewers up in Wyoming, so I just blurted out “Hello Jackson Hole!” A bunch of people called the station. I thought, wait a minute, I might be on to something. The next day: “Hello Pocatello!” and a bunch of people called in again. The rest is history.” 

He carried it over to WOR, and it became something that people tuned into and talked about. What town would it be today? Greenwich? Farmingdale? Bushwick? Edison? Maybe your hometown! 

Dad comes home from work and the kids greet him. “Daddy, Lloyd Lindsay Young said Piscataway today – that’s where we live!” “That’s great. Is dinner ready yet?”

I was reading the electric and gas meters in a Jersey City bar. It was noontime and the place was packed with construction workers, guys in hardhats working on the office towers and apartment houses going up along the Hudson River waterfront at the time. 

The meters were accessed through a trapdoor behind the bar, and while I waited to get the bartender’s attention – the hardhat horde stood three deep, and he was kind of busy – Young’s weather segment came on the big TV mounted to the wall. 

The room became suddenly quiet. No doubt there were guys there from all over New Jersey and the five boroughs. One of our hometowns was surely going to be selected in the day’s Lloyd Lindsay Young lottery. 

On this afternoon, Young held the note, stretching out his hello seemingly forever, while everyone in the bar was suspended in mid-air holding our collective breath. 

When he finished with “Jersey City,” it was as if we’d all chipped in on a lotto ticket and won. The place erupted with a liquid lunch roar. It may have been my imagination, but I’m sure there were guys hoisting their beer mugs saluting Young, while others hugged and clapped each other on the back. It was Bastille Day, V-E Day and V-J Day all at once. 

For all I know, some of them may have filed out into the street to kiss the first stranger they came across. 

Construction worker home from the job. “Honey, Lloyd Lindsay Young said Jersey City today.” “That’s great. Dinner’s ready.”

 Honey West

(This post is part of the Aaron Spellingverse blogathon hosted by Reelweegiemidget)

The way Aaron Spelling told it, he commissioned an artist to come up with a few concepts for an idea Spelling had about a TV show featuring a femme fatale private investigator. When ABC showed interest, he bought the rights to G.G. Fickling’s series of Honey West novels.

Honey and Bruce

G.G. Fickling was a husband and wife writing team, Gloria and Skip Fickling, whose Honey West paperback potboilers were published between 1957 and 1971. Honey, the authors said, was a “beautiful, brainy and a very much determined, sensual female.”

What Spelling seemed to have in mind was for Honey West was an American version of The Avengers; his first choice for the lead was Honor Blackman, who played Cathy Gale in The Avengers and was fresh off the blockbuster Goldfinger film.

The role went instead to Blackman lookalike Anne Francis, whose most prolific film work included Forbidden Planet (1956), Bad Day at Black Rock and Blackboard Jungle (both 1955) before she moved on to a long string of television guest shots.

Honey was introduced in a back-door pilot episode of Burke’s Law in April 1965. She wore slinky evening wear, drove a Jaguar convertible and is referred to twice as a “private eyeful.” Clearly Burke’s equal, they circled each other warily before teaming to solve a murder. Five months later, Honey West was on ABC’s fall schedule.

Smart, confident and sexy, Honey inherited her father’s private eye business and with partner Sam Bolt (played by John Ericson; he and Honey had a wisecracking, do-they-or-don’t-they relationship), they often rely on high-tech (for 1965) gimmickry: a microphone disguised as a martini olive on a toothpick, lipstick radio transmitter, two-way communication devices wired into sunglasses. A disguised TV repair truck serves as a roving surveillance nerve center (an idea borrowed from notorious real-life L.A. private investigator Fred Otash).

Also on the scene was Honey’s pet ocelot Bruce, whose “playful” behavior got a little rough at times. If Honey or Sam needed the occasional tetanus shot, they also spent a lot of time in concussion protocol. No episode was complete without one – or both – of them getting clunked on the back of the head with a pistol butt, despite Honey’s proficiency in judo and karate (which Francis studied prior to shooting).

Sharp and chic, the show started strongly, as Honey and Sam bust a cocaine ring, take on industrial spies, gem smugglers and arsonists, and match wits with Don Draper-style smoothies like Ray Danton and Lloyd Bochner. Every episode seemingly guaranteed a slugfest in the final minutes and a reason for Honey to wear her form-fitting black jumpsuit.

But with the debut of Batman in January 1966, the plots grew sillier and camp: robots, a Robin Hood imposter, “kooky” pop artists, Honey’s evil double (Anne Francis in a dark wig, of course). A random POW! superimposed over a fight scene clearly signaled the show’s death knell.

Francis soldiered on, winning a Golden Globe and being nominated for an Emmy. TV Guide reported that she was pulling in a $5000 weekly salary and owned 20 percent of the show.

Despite all the trappings we’ve come to expect in an Aaron Spelling production: attractive leads, glamour and adventure, Honey was a one-season wonder, a victim of scheduling (going up against Gomer Pyle) and the less-expensive availability of, ironically, the syndicated The Avengers.

Coming full circle, Anne Francis’ last appearance as Honey was in the 1994-95 revival of Burke’s Law, this time as Honey “Best.”

Honey West crashed the all-male adventure series party, paving the way for Charlie’s Angels. While Aaron Spelling’s success suggests that he was never in need of an elevator pitch, he likely had the perfect four-word proposal for his series about the crime-fighting adventures of three women working at a private detective agency in Los Angeles: Honey West times three.