BOSTON GLOBE
July 31, 1997
As soon as everyone had gathered in St. Ignatius Church at Chestnut Hill yesterday for the funeral Mass, a full company of Jesuits marched silently down the center aisle of the handsome stone edifice to bury a brother, Rev. Ray Callahan, SJ, who fell dead at his desk last week at 59. Until his death, Father Callahan had been president of Nativity Prep in Roxbury, a miracle of the city where children are given the gift of a future.
It was 10 a.m. when the Jesuits took their seats directly across the aisle from Marie Callahan, the deceased priest’s mother, who sat sadly with her daughters. She wore a black dress and held a single white rose Outside the church, the sun stood sentry in a cloudless sky and a wonderful breeze danced across the day. Inside, people stood shoulder to shoulder singing “Here I am, Lord” as five Jesuits began the beautiful ceremony.
There were no TV cameras or any reporters clamoring for participants to discuss the quiet, noble life of Ray Callahan, who never sought a headline. He was born in Framingham, son of a newspaperman, and he went to Fairfield University until God tapped him on the chest with such ferocity that he chose the Marine Corps of Catholicism — the Jesuits — as a life.
He taught at Boston College as well as at BC High, but for the past several years he had run Nativity Prep. It is a small, private school — 15 students in 4 grades, 5 through 8 — where boys from places like Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester get just about the finest free education around.
“Anybody can learn math,” Ray Callahan used to say, “but our job is to help these boys gain pride and dignity, too. They are wonderful, strong children.”
All this week, the town has witnessed a flood of publicity concerning the future of William Weld. And as the funeral began, a new governor, Paul Cellucci, was in the State House discussing tax cuts and judgeships. All of it is considered news because these people and their policies affect so many.
However, Ray Callahan was a single man who touched a thousand lives. He was a Jesuit priest who had a hand on someone’s shoulder every single day, pushing or prodding them toward heights once thought to be unattainable.
As Rev. William Russell, SJ, delivered the homily, one of the many Nativity Prep students at Mass bowed his head in grief. His name was Adrian Rosello. He is a 13-year-old from Mattapan who will be in eighth grade this September.
“I never expected him to die,” Rosello said quietly. “I loved him. He always made me laugh and told me I could do better. He believed in me. How could he die in the summer?”
Now, at Communion, Mike Burgo came from the sacristy holding a guitar. He began to sing the infectious hymn “Be Not Afraid” and soon the huge congregation joined Burgo, the sound of their grateful voices filling the church and spilling out toward the trolley tracks and the campus of Boston College.
“You shall cross the barren desert, but you shall not die of thirst. You shall wander far in safety, though you do not know the way. You shall speak your words in foreign lands, and all will understand. You shall see the face of God and live.
“Be not afraid. I go before you always.”
Both song and service are part of the constant comfort of Catholicism, a religion that blankets the start and conclusion of life with splendid ritual. But Ray Callahan represented the finest aspects of his faith every single day. He led by example, a humble man dedicated to God and to education.
And yesterday his legacy filled St. Ignatius: Former students; young people like Amy Shields, who went straight from Duke to teaching at Nativity Prep because providing a child with the excitement of ideas is far more rewarding than making money; hundreds of friends; and his fellow priests.
Then the Mass ended and the Jesuits filed out to the front of the church where they stood in a circle on the sidewalk, resplendent in white cassocks, as six Nativity Prep boys carried a black casket down gray cement steps. They were followed by Marie Callahan, who walked slowly out of the church into the bright sun of a day, comforted by the knowledge that while others elsewhere celebrated temporal rewards of prosperity or politics, the crowd around her had gathered to celebrate the rich and marvelous life of Raymond J. Callahan, SJ.
“Thank you for your son,” Rev. William Leahy, the president of Boston College, said to Marie Callahan.
“Thank God for my son,” his mother replied.
BOSTON GLOBE
June 15, 1997
So here she came the other day, walking through the haze of a humid afternoon, walking proudly up Adams Street in Dorchester past a line of red brick rowhouses where children sat on stoops seeking relief from the heat, walking right into a future filled now with potential due to her own diligence.
Her name is Phong Tran and she is 17 and she has only been in the United States since 1991 — time enough, though, to finish at the top of her Cathedral High class and win a four-year scholarship to UMass-Amherst, where she will be one more Vietnamese student representing the constant American spirit of renewal “It is like a dream,” Phong Tran pointed out. “I am so grateful. I am so happy.”
“With no scholarship, where would you go?” she was asked.
“To work,” Phong Tran replied.
“What do you want to be?”
“A doctor,” she said right away. “So I can help others. So I can repay people for my good fortune.”
The young woman earned her fortune all by herself. And she is only one of 83 premier students from across the state who have been granted a gift worth $8,000 a year simply because they were smart enough to be smart.
The University Scholars program is a new benefit provided by the state’s university system. This year, four-year scholarships were offered to those seniors who finished first or second in their classes at each of Massachusetts’ 400 public and private high schools. Tomorrow, many of the 83 who accepted the scholarships will be honored at a State House reception.
For decades, the UMass system has been smeared by elitists and relegated to second-class status in a commonwealth that boasts a long line of more famous and more expensive private institutions. But, whether at Harvard or UMass-Lowell, nobody is ever given an education, only the opportunity to get one — grab one, really — and that chance is not lost on those students and families going now for free.
“My daughter is very ambitious,” the Rev. Earl McDowell was saying Friday. “We teach all our children to be ambitious, to have goals and go after them. She did, too.”
Rev. McDowell was sitting in the second-floor parlor of his Roxbury apartment along with his wife, Patricia. The two parents were crazy with pride over their daughter Valerie, who topped the ticket at Madison Park High and will be going to UMass-Boston in September. Both young women — Phong Tran from Vietnam and Valerie McDowell from Guild Street — take a splendiferous spirit off to their amazing new world.
“She just graduated last night,” Patricia McDowell explained. “She was the valedictorian. The ceremony was at Matthews Arena, and she walked in with all the dignitaries.”
“I had tears in my eyes,” her husband added.
“She’s the first in our family to ever go to a four-year college,” the mother said.
“She worked hard for it,” Rev. McDowell said. “She had three part-time jobs all year, too. This scholarship is a true blessing because, as you can see, I took a vow of poverty.”
“He took it seriously, too,” his wife laughed.
“Valerie has always been a straight-A student,” the proud father continued. “At the Nathan Hale. At the Wheatley and all through Madison Park. We are firm believers in public education, but it’s a matter of determination and parental involvement whether your children do well.
“It’s not up to society, to the city, or to the police to provide children with goals and ambitions. It’s up to us as her mother and father,” Rev. McDowell stated. “If a black youth is nothing, it means they chose to be nothing.”
“Basically, we have tried to be our daughter’s best friends as well as her parents,” Patricia McDowell added. “It’s good that way. We were able to guide her away from trouble, and if our children meet someone not up their standards, we let them know. And they just say `goodbye.’ “
Now, the valedictorian from the night before was ready to go to work on the morning after her triumph. Valerie McDowell, symbol of any future we might have, is a marvelous young woman who only dreamed of a university education prior to the gift of a four-year scholarship.
But sometimes dreams come true. And sometimes hard work, discipline, and dedication are rewarded, and when that happens, the grateful — like Valerie McDowell and Phong Tran — head to college, two magnificent investments in a state of mind.
BOSTON GLOBE
June 8, 1997
Orla Benson, murdered on Sept. 23, 1995, in an Allston playground, was young and alive again Friday as her biographer discussed her wonderful life in glowing terms while a Suffolk Superior Court jury was being selected to try the man charged with her killing. Benson had come from Ireland that summer to work when she was raped and stabbed to death by a degenerate who left her dead in the dark on the steps of Ringer Park.
“Orla was a nice girl,” Thomas O’Leary was saying. “She was young and pretty and totally innocent. And she had just spent the happiest night of her life in Boston when this happened. She would have graduated from college that fall “She was out with about 30 friends. They had been to South Boston, to Cambridge, to Brighton. They rented a trolley for a party to celebrate a girl’s wedding, and they were going home to Ireland in a few days. She was 50 yards from her apartment.”
O’Leary today is Orla Benson’s voice, her best friend in court. He is a sergeant of police with the Homicide Unit, and his duty since early in the day that Sept. 23 has been to bring her killer to court and help deliver some measure of justice to her horribly wounded family.
It is always an event of tremendous significance, the murder of a human being. And whether it is multiple counts, as in Oklahoma City, or a single victim, the word “closure” becomes something for glib psychiatrists or talk-show callers because the pain of survivors is of such depth and duration that it simply becomes part of their own existence.
“Plenty of sleepless nights over this one,” O’Leary said. “I can see her sometimes. I know her.”
In the courtroom, Benson’s father, Tom, an engineer from Killarney, sits daily not 10 feet behind Tony Rosario, a convicted rapist who is accused of forever silencing the sounds of Tom Benson’s only daughter’s life. The elder Benson is of slight build and has a soft spring rain of a smile and gentle blue eyes permanently dulled by this inexcusable death.
Rosario is 29 now. He was born in New York and brought up in Boston, where he was a menace. All last week, he wore a blue sweatshirt, black pants, black sneakers, leg irons and no hint of expression on a face unfamiliar with remorse as he listened to pretrial arguments of the prosecutor, James Larkin, and the objections of his own gifted appointed counsel, Roger Witkin, in the third-floor room where a panel of citizens will address the brutality of Orla Benson’s murder.
Rosario is a living advertisement for the flaws of a system where a single bureaucratic error can result in a monstrous evil being committed. In 1991, he was convicted of raping and beating a woman at the Forest Hills T station. He got 10 years but was out two years later.
Free on probation, he was arrested on April 24, 1994, for raping a 14-year-old runaway at knifepoint after she fled, naked, from his car. But the runaway kept right on running and would not testify, so Rosario went unconvicted.
He was indicted for unarmed robbery in Cambridge, but somehow never had his probation revoked. Then on July 31, 1995, seven weeks before Orla Benson died, Rosario was grabbed for the rape of a 15-year-old special needs student in Brighton. She had been working for Rosario, who had, quite amazingly, been hired by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department to boss teenagers retained for a summer of cleaning playgrounds.
“He told her unless she had sex with him, she wouldn’t get paid,” a lawyer familiar with the case of the special needs student said, adding that Rosario took her to his apartment on Glenville Avenue in Allston “and told her: No sex, no check. But, because she was retarded, he beat it.”
“He never should have been out,” Tom O’Leary said. “The system took a hit for him being on the payroll. Probation took a hit, too. But Orla took the biggest hit of all.”
Thursday, Rosario had an opportunity for minimal decency when he accepted, then reneged, on an agreement that had him pleading guilty to first-degree murder. But lunch with jailhouse lawyers, along with success in beating the system and making a sad joke of probation, caused him to change his mind.
So Tom Benson and his family will be forced to endure a trial where his daughter will die again; a trial where judge and jury will surely see in the testimony offered that this world needs people like Orla Benson as much as it needs a sunrise, because her biographer remains on the case, insistent on delivering his message.
“I know her,” said Sergeant Thomas O’Leary. “She was a wonderful girl.”
BOSTON GLOBE
May 8, 1997
In the days before curiosity died — killed by TV and a dwindling attention span — imagination and a wider world arrived in two basic forms and cost about five cents. Daily newspapers and voices over any radio walked readers and listeners through murders, wars, ballparks, different cities and foreign countries as well as intricate universes woven by electronic neighbors like Sam Spade, The Shadow, and Dick Tracy.
It was a world of bulletins and breakfast-table talk where the dated phrase “Stop the presses” actually meant something significant had just occurred. It is hard now to believe but life was so much simpler then that it could take hours, perhaps a day, to learn that MacArthur got fired, Bobby Thompson homered, Sam Sheppard was guilty, or Ike was hospitalized with a heart attack. CNN was something out of science fiction Impressions — visual as well as verbal — meant more and lasted longer. Travel was defined as leaving the block and few could measure events beyond the borders of small, proud lives bounded by the bus stop and the bedroom, so the captains of any voyage became people like Walter Winchell, Harry Wismer, Curt Gowdy, John Cameron Swayze, Bob Considine, Westbrook Pegler, Bill Cunningham, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, and Murray Kempton.
Kempton died the other day in New York. He was 79 and had been writing for newspapers for 60 years. Most of you probably never read a line he wrote because the bulk of his work was largely restricted to five boroughs of the big town with all the bright lights. And to those familiar with the man’s constant efforts, I bet there was a part, perhaps a paragraph or two, of any Kempton piece that felt like homework because it was heavy and made you pause and go, “Huh?”
That’s because Kempton was different: He was thoughtful. In a business where so many occupy the pages and airwaves of our life simply to beat the same drum loudly, over and over, Murray Kempton was a symphony all by himself. Who else could describe Walter Reuther, the late head of the United Auto Workers, as a guy “capable of reminiscing about the future?”
While the media have become magnets for boasters and shameless self-promoters, Murray Kempton managed to present his audience a daily gift of modesty married to insight. In the introduction to a collection of his own essays on the 1930s, he wrote: “I have my own stake in the thirties. I was in high school when Roosevelt was inaugurated; I belonged for a little while to the Young Communist League . . .
“The thirties were a part of my life like any other; I am aware that there are things in it for which I must apologize; I am also aware that in the whole of my life there will be many things for which I must apologize, under what have to be compulsions stronger than a Congressional subpoena.”
The final time I saw him, he was standing on a street corner in the sultry dusk of a July evening last year near the federal building in lower Manhattan. A greeting quickly became a conversation that encompassed topics ranging from his respect for the honesty of Jim Kallstrom, an assistant director of the FBI, to his admiration of Bob Dole’s integrity, his disgust at Bill Clinton’s charming duplicity, and his fondness for those in his newspaper life who remained attentive and eager for each day’s developments as a chance to educate, entertain or inform a reader, rather than assassinate a subject.
The last time I spoke with him, in January, he was thrilled that Pete Hamill had taken over the New York Daily News. Hamill was an unusual pick as editor, chosen at a period when more and more media conglomerates are managed by accountants thrilled to hire those who seem incapable of curiosity and write with a trowel, their sentences totally interchangeable with the copy of a Ralph Lauren ad.
Murray Kempton was a warm and generous soul. He represented honor in an industry quaking beneath the weight of whores, in it only for ego, riches, prizes, or the kill. He would have been pleased by Hamill’s latest novel, “Snow in August,” because the book captures the magic of a childhood Kempton represented each time he tapped out a column: Simply a wonderful story and well told.
An argument can be made today that there is no more “news” in the shattering sense of decades past; there is only a constant coverage of process, procedures, and trends. And with Murray Kempton’s death, you sure can make a solid argument that there is far less elegance and genteel wisdom on our printed pages because a great man is gone.
BOSTON GLOBE
March 27, 1997
One of the babies who represents the future for these young girls pushing a carriage instead of carrying books was being wheeled down Mercer Street in South Boston yesterday by her mother, who is not quite 17. The mother was white and the infant a wonderful shade of mocha, which sure made her beautiful but appears not to have inspired much glee in the household where she is being raised.
“My boyfriend’s black,” the girl pointed out. “And my mother hates him. She don’t hate the baby, but she hates what happened, you know In projects like D Street and Old Colony, there seems to be a significant increase in the number of interracial infants born to white teenagers. Many of these girls drop out of school prior to giving birth and try to raise their own baby in the same apartment where they had been attempting to grow up when a pregnancy interrupted the process.
“There are quite a few white girls having babies with black and Hispanic guys here,” one of the police who specializes in South Boston project life was saying yesterday. “It’s a good news-bad news story: The good news is that race is not the factor in these kids’ lives that it was — and is — for a lot of their parents. Kids don’t have the same hangups as adults. Kids don’t go around talking about what busing did to their town. That was 20 years ago. They weren’t even born.
“The bad news is it means the end of the line for the girl: dropping out of school, no job, raising a kid where her mother, father, too, if he’s around, can’t stand looking at the baby because the baby’s not white.”
Yesterday, the girl pushing the stroller had a plan: She intended to walk to Rotary Variety for milk and then visit a friend on Silver Street. Her plan was built around the premise that she should try to remove herself and her child from the apartment for at least five hours. Kind of like a job.
For some, the increase in interracial children represents another assault on “The Town.” South Boston has been staggered by suicide and drugs. One — kids killing themselves — is a shock. The other — cocaine and heroin — is an old habit, narcotics having been easily available there for a long time.
At a community gathering the other evening, a suggestion was made that more police were needed to fight drugs and restore the mythic sense of “neighborhood.” But the statement was made in a section of the city no longer immune to social conditions that cause deterioration: alcoholism, addiction, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, fractured families and rampant rates of divorce or abandonment.
Yet police alone cannot do the job. Nor can schoolteachers, priests or social workers. The type of work necessary can only be accomplished by a parent, and in the projects of South Boston, like projects everywhere, too many parents are poor or ill-equipped for the task or juveniles themselves or AWOL from responsibility. To ignore this is ludicrous.
“It’s a bizarre form of equality,” the police officer was saying. “And it’s filled with irony. Many of the white kids in D Street or Old Colony are in the same position as a lot of black kids in Roxbury and Dorchester: They have no shot and they know it by the time they’re 15.
“They’re poor. For a lot of them, there isn’t a parent around. They don’t go to school, so they do whatever is free and feels good.
“Now what can 100 more cops do about that? We can patrol. We can investigate. We can arrest. We can get a warrant and go in an apartment but we cannot go inside someone’s head and force them to change their behavior.
“And it’s not just cocaine taking a toll on South Boston. Look around and you will see more bars, taverns and package stores in this community, per capita, than probably anyplace else in the city. You fall down drunk and people think it’s funny, actually kind of normal. You overdose and it’s a tragedy, but they are both addictions and there are plenty of addicts to go around in this town.”
Still, some in South Boston seem amazed at the ages of the desperate or those already dead by their own hand. And the enormity of the problem is such that others either refuse to recognize it or mistakenly feel that it is restricted to project life where a baby can face a bleak future because its very existence serves as a reminder of failure rather than a source of joy.
Phew! Good thing Ted Kennedy didn’t decide to throw his weight around the other night because then he would’ve absolutely crushed Mitt ”I’m Talking As Fast As My Nervous Little Motor Mouth Will Move” Romney. That collision would’ve looked as if an 18-wheeler loaded with dumpsters had plowed into one of those teeney-weeney old Nash Metropolitans. As it was, he slapped him silly. Kennedy slam-dunked the bragging Boy Scout from Belmont so often that The Mittster is down to a couple of options prior to tonight’s debate: Either jump-ugly at the senior Senator over, ahh, the character issue, or cut his losses and save a pile of dough for another run at another time because this one is halfway through that last revolution in the toilet. How quickly things change.
Seems like it was only days ago that all the haters and a lot of the professional thumb-sucking pundits were writing Kennedy off. He was too old, too fat, too dumb, too tongue-tied, too entrenched, too isolated, too removed, too arrogant, too elitist, too tied in to the status quo to win anything.
Listening to them, you half-expected Kennedy to walk out on stage at Faneuil Hall, peer at the crowd and holler: “This Bud’s on me.” Or maybe demand that the moderator hit him with a pinch and a couple of cubes.
A funny thing happened, though: Romney arrived with a knot the size of an official NBA basketball right where he fastens the top button of his hand-made shirt.
He is a nice fellow, a pleasant man. He is handsome, polite, glib, smiling, smart, rich, goes through life without a single hair out of place, waves at poor people one day a week and thinks a walk on the wild side means drinking a cherry Coke.
However, he has no idea how much his health plan will cost taxpayers and sure isn’t responsible for anything that occurs at some plant he helped purchase. Why should he know that? He’s only the owner.
Kennedy, on the other hand, has managed to become a somewhat sympathetic figure. Before Tuesday, many observers were convinced the night would be a disaster for the senator, whose use of language manages to make the late Frank Fontaine or Professor Irwin Corey sound like Abba Eban or Adlai Stevenson.
They were ceding the thing to Romney on appearances alone. His waist size equals the number of years Kennedy has served in the US Senate. He has never suffered so much as a pimple, never mind any personal pain and, according to his own answers, he is pretty much without a flaw.
Meanwhile, the negative build-up and dread surrounding Kennedy’s difficulty in finding verbs to go with nouns and objects, plus the added burden of putting action words in their proper place throughout a spoken English sentence, so lowered the expectations that the mere fact he didn’t fall off the stage into the audience was a victory.
And you know what? It was great. It was a victory for old guys, for out-of- shape guys, for guys who are counted out before the bell, for guys folks figured would never hit in the clutch.
Ted Kennedy won because he is stubborn in his beliefs. You may not like his views, and you may not like him, but at least he’s not running around suddenly seizing upon the electric chair or welfare cheats as the trendy ticket he needs for a return trip to the Senate.
He’s the government guy, the go-to-guy when you’re looking to have the feds pick up the cost of 16 additional weeks of unemployment compensation, get you the extra bounce in child care and Head Start appropriations, get money back from Washington to help lower astronomical MWRA water bills. Maybe you think stuff like that is a bunch of liberal horseshirt.
He doesn’t. He makes no apologies for who he is and what he believes. He has a philosophy that isn’t pushed around by pollsters. Perhaps some of it is dated, but the man is consistent.
He’s 62 and looks it. He has lived through a cargo of grief, and inflicted a lot of it upon himself. He has had some terrible difficulties and they have not been hidden. His life has been a long, public sorrowful mystery of the rosary.
Ted Kennedy is many things, but none of them is a secret. He might be in the back of his van this morning eating quarter-pounders and fries between every stop and it wouldn’t go unnoticed. (I never thought ears put on weight until I saw his on TV Tuesday.) Why, if you put Bill Parcells and Kennedy on either end of the Boston Public Library, they could serve as human bookends for a whole building.
For a long time, people were down on him, figuring he was afraid to take his turn at bat against a formidable young foe. Well, the other night Ted Kennedy gave the young guy a good old-fashioned arse-whipping because he still wants to win.
American troops land on Normandy beaches during the historic D-Day, June 6, 1944.
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The Boston Globe
June 7, 1994
By Mike Barnicle
ST. JAMES, France – On a stunning, cloudless afternoon, when the green grass of the low, rolling hills flowed like a brilliant emerald wave in the soft breeze, a long ribbon of schoolchildren marched in procession to honor 4,410 American boys buried beneath 28 acres of French soil liberated with their blood 50 summers ago.
More than 4,000 boys and girls had been summoned from this agricultural region 12 miles from the Normandy coast and they all walked in silence, each carrying a white cardboard box containing a single white dove.
It was well before the pageantry involving world politicians began yesterday at places named Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach, and there were no famous people present to give speeches. Instead, farmers and office workers, housewives and schoolteachers, young French families and frail grandparents came by foot and by car from miles around to pray, stand or simply stare at the graves of so many assembled strangers whom they never knew, never met but never forgot.
In the blue sky above the startling cemetery, a lone French paratrooper dressed in the uniform of the 82nd Airborne drifted lazily down to the sacred ground below. As he landed, a little girl took his hand and led him toward the chapel at the edge of all the marble headstones where the two of them joined the mayor of St. James several local dignitaries and a few members of the French and American military as they saluted history’s fallen legions.
A band played the national anthems of both countries. Then the children, one by one, stood alongside all the stone monuments and placed a lovely, lonesome daisy on top of every grave. All was quiet as the children opened the boxes and momentarily held the doves in innocent hands before releasing them in unison, the white birds soaring off in squadron toward England and ports all these brave dead boys sailed from at the start of their last summer, 1944. from Massachusetts. And their names represent a unique cultural tapestry. In death they blend together, all of them beyond prejudice, envy or the resentments that often weigh us down today. A few of them were: Douglas Perry, Robert Cahill, Ralph Parenteau, Robert Lamb, Vartan Panagian, James Huard, Alfred Cloutier, Herman Lindsey Jr., William LeClair, Clifford Oliver Jr., Walter Potter, Carl Savlone, James Starr, Joseph Tuohey, William Walsh, Edgar Whittaker, Daniel Esposito, Lucien La Croix, George Nawn, Thomas Duffy, Stephen Jakstis, Frank Mello, Bronis Lipskis, Michael Halprin, Nathan Gurwitz, Edward Drakopolos, William Breed, Neil Manning, Francis X. Kelly and Earnest W. Prussman from West Newton who, on Sept. 8, 1944, won the Medal of Honor when he destroyed two German machine gun bunkers before being killed by enemy gunfire.
You wonder now, all these years later, what the dead might have done: Who among them would have been doctors saving lives, teachers strengthening young minds, laborers building roads and cities, homes and highways, farmers growing crops, salesmen, police, firefighters. You wonder about the children some of them left and the families they were denied. You wonder about the parents of the 20 sets of brothers buried here, side by side, and how anyone could ever handle such great eternal grief.
These are the heroes who all died young. They missed sunsets and baptisms. They went without 50 World Series and 50 New Year’s Eves. They never stood at the door, anxiously waiting for a daughter’s first date to arrive or witnessed their kids’ junior proms and college graduations. They never saw men landing on the moon or a fax machine. They were not allowed to walk on a beach with the girls they loved or hold the hands of grandchildren who would have asked about their great crusade.
In our increasingly selfish country where everything and nearly everyone is part of some special interest, where defining any enemy or current threat to live or moral values is as difficult as peering through the murky fog that envelops this French coast, it is stunning to realize that these 4,410 and millions of others sailed to certain danger with no thought of conquest or profit. They came because they were asked and because they were needed.
And today the French here do their best to remember. The local people, far from the glamour of Paris, live in an area of centuries-old villages where nearly everyone still depends on the land. These citizens are the French equivalent of our Midwesterners, open, honest and grateful for what they have been given.
For the past few weekends, they have come in droves to the American cemetery. While D-Day has become a television spectacle in the United States, these simple folks who manage to get by without 100 cable channels, CNN, MTV, microwaves and ATM machines on every block recall their history and those who helped them. Unlike so many of us at home, geography never insulated them from sacrifice.
Now, as the sun began to set, the people began to leave the cemetery in groups of twos and threes, quietly, with respect, the way you would leave a church or temple after prayer. And as they headed toward their cars and homes and their rural lives, the only sounds in the gathering dusk were the bark of a single dog, the crowing of a rooster somewhere in the distance and the rustle of the wind that provides these boys eternal companionship
US soldiers gather around trucks disembarking from landing crafts shortly after Allied forces stormed the Normandy beaches, June 6, 1944.
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The Boston Globe
June 5, 1994
By Mike Barnicle
STE. MERE-EGLISE, France – “Where is Robert Murphy?” the old trooper asked.
“He will be here soon,” the woman in the shop told him. “He comes all the time. He is like one of us. Wait, you’ll see.”
The man’s name was William Lundquist. He is 71 and he stood straight as a sentry in the raw drizzle yesterday at the end of a narrow alley between two homes directly across the village square from where American paratroopers of the 82d Airborne Division dropped from the sky just after midnight, June 6, 1944, to liberate first a town and, inevitably, a whole continent.
Lundquist, originally from Hartford, was with the airborne, but yesterday he stood beneath a street sign halfway up the cement wall that read: “Rue Robert Murphy.” The 100-yard length of pavement is named after Bob Murphy who, at 18 on that dark night half a century back, had come all the way from Boston to tumble out of the darkness and into the rescuing limbs of a huge, sprawling chestnut tree within the walled courtyard of Madame Angele Levrault’s backyard. She was the town teacher, and when Murphy hit the ground, Madame Levrault ran frightened from the outhouse that is still here, next to a basketball court where children clad in Nike sneakers and sweatshirts play.
Murphy is a 68-year-old Cape Cod lawyer. He is famous throughout this peaceful village. And Bill Lundquist, whose life after war took him all the way to California and decades of steady employment in the aircraft industry, had been waiting patiently to meet him. Both men and thousands of others – American, British, Canadian and French – were all over the Normandy coast yesterday, saying hello and saying goodbye. They had come to recall and reflect upon that great and awful moment when freedom was purchased at a huge cost on D-Day. All of them are old and somewhat gray now, some limp, some wrestle with the emotion of the moment as they stare at a remarkable scene through history’s wounded eyes. They are not here for any speeches or applause. They have, instead, come to stand on the stage one final time and take their generation’s last bow. For those who suffered, struggled and sacrificed here, the anniversary at Normandy is their curtain call.
“I was 19 years old,” Morley Piper remembered. “I was a platoon leader with Charlie Company, 3d Battalion, 29th Infantry Division. We landed on Omaha Beach and I still remember the noise and the light from the ship’s batteries behind us as we came in. It was something to see.”
Piper lives on the North Shore and is an executive with the New England Newspaper Association. He grew up in Canton, Ill., a place of 10,000 people where the bitter hand of the Depression still clung to the economy like a strangler’s claw when Piper enlisted in the United States Army.
“It was a different, a different country,” he pointed out. “As a matter of fact, when I signed up, so did my father. They were taking them as old as 40 and he joined right along with me. He served stateside. That’s the way it was.”
You would need the skills of archeology to find the lost land all those young boys left voluntarily to sail to their fate in battlefields like Normandy, Anzio, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, all in pursuit of an ideal called freedom. Then, they left a nation commonly known for opportunity. Today, we have been invaded with a false sense of entitlement – a shabby replacement for individual attainment – and litigation outweighs liberty.
But the generation that crawled on their stomachs through a shower of steel and shrapnel on these beaches, the boys who climbed a 10-story tall, straight-up cliff called Pointe du Hoc, all of it in the face of withering German gunfire, were not philosophers or politicians. They were simply Americans: Catholic, Jewish and Protestant; Greek, French, Irish, Italian and Polish. The sons of wealth as well as poverty, sons of doctors, engineers, poets, farmers and street sweepers, they came because they were called to a higher duty by their government.
“I left a life,” Leonard Weintraub was saying. “I was a lawyer in New York City. I had a life all worked out and all of a sudden I was a soldier.”
Weintraub, in his late 70s now, stood in the sun alongside Utah Beach where he came ashore at 9:30 in the morning on June 6, 1944, with the 9th Infantry. There was a souvenir shop 50 yards from where he stood, looking up and down the caramel-colored sand, whipped by a 30-mile-an-hour gale off the English Channel.
“There is nothing you could ever write that could describe what I saw and what took place here 50 years ago. The death, the destruction, the incredible desecration. It was enormous. Nothing would ever prepare you for a scene like that.
“I wasn’t supposed to be a soldier, yet here I was carrying a rifle, willing and ready to shoot people. I never wanted to kill anybody but I had to. That’s what we had to do and we did it.
“My parents were immigrants. They came to New York in 1903,” Weintraub said. “I remember the Depression with all its difficulties and I certainly remember the Army and fighting here on D-Day. Where we are standing right now,” he said, “they called it Liberty Road that morning because we came off the beach here. And if you asked if I think this generation could do what we did 50 years ago, the answer is no. No, I do not think they could – or would – because unfortunately the country has changed too much and so have we… . It is all kind of sad.”
Those who came – and those who stayed, in cemeteries and unmarked graves carved in the lush countryside – carried many of the same dreams young people lug today. However, the old soldiers were part of a remarkable, uncomplaining age of Americans, who bore the brunt of economic chaos and world disaster and responded heroically to both. There simply was no quit in them.
To them, this was a great crusade, a cause complete with symbols of good and evil. There were clearly stated objectives and a set of defined goals. And all of it was all so long ago that people unashamedly had respect and affection for their president, Franklin Roosevelt.
“My father was a doctor just like me,” Thomas Macdonnell, of Marshfield, Mo., was saying outside the stone cathedral in the square of Ste. Mere-Eglise where Bill Lundquist looked for Bob Murphy. “During the Depression, I chopped cotton for 75 cents a day. My dad charged $1 for house calls and 50 cents for office visits. He charged $15 for the delivery of a healthy baby.
“That was my world. It was small, simple and peaceful and it was filled with love despite the struggles. I joined the Army at 19 to help keep that world. My Army serial number is 17132441. A man never forgets something like that.
“I landed on Omaha Beach with the 1st Division at 07:15. My sergeant’s name was Charlie Jutkiewicz. He was from Massachusetts. It was a horrible, horrible scene out there.
“I can recall a boy next to me in the landing craft who was so convinced that he was going to die that he had all his hair cut off and he sent it home to his mother in an envelope along with a letter to Joliet, Ill., which was his home. We hit the beach and sure enough that boy got killed. I always felt badly that I did not know his name.”
Tom Macdonnell is a scrappy, wiry little man who walks with a trace of injuries suffered on Omaha and at The Bulge in December 1944. Today, he has eight children and “a backyard a mile long.”
“I would like to think my children, or their children, could and would do what we did here, but the answer is I don’t know. Nobody does. And God forbid we should ever be confronted with a situation where such action might be called for.
“I don’t want anybody to celebrate what took place here because an awful lot of people were killed. That’s one reason why I became a doctor. I had been involved in taking enough lives. I went home to save a few. But I think the world should remember. I think that’s important.”
Down the road from where old paratroopers gathered in Ste. Mere-Eglise, preparing to jump this afternoon in a recreation of their feat of 50 years ago, there is a dark graveyard at La Cambe where the remains of more than 5,000 German soldiers are buried beneath an umbrella of elms. Yesterday, a 72-year-old man from Berlin, Walter Scheel, stood, shoulders hunched, looking down at the grave of his brother Gunther, who died at 20 years of age on June 6, unsuccessfully defending Pointe du Hoc as Rangers scaled the cliffs.
“I was with a Panzer division near Paris,” Walter Scheel said. “It was three months before I found that my brother had been killed. It is all so sad, even all these years later.
“I feel awkward coming here, but I wanted to come. My brother and I were soldiers, not Nazis, and we were not much different from your soldiers. I can see that today. I have met many of them and they and I are not different. We are sad but happy to be alive.”
Inside the Cathedral of Ste. Mere-Eglise, Pierre Feuf, 82, played the organ donated by paratroopers who fought here. The old man remembers the strangers who came to save his country.
“They were a miracle from the sky,” he said. “We should never, ever forget.”
Above him, there was a stained-glass window, a mixture of reds, blues and yellows, assembled in the form of a winged crusader wearing an airborne patch, the phrase, “Ils Sont Revenus” stenciled in the panes, the phrase meaning, “They have come back.”
Outside the square was a blur of tourist buses, TV crews, concessionaires and gendarmes. And, always, there were the proud old men with their families and friends, returning to a spot where so many became forever young while the survivors defined an entire generation: They beat back a Depression, fought a world war on two global fronts, returned home, went to work, raised families, educated themselves through the GI Bill, purchased homes with VA mortgages, exploded into the suburbs, lived by the law, prayed and dreamed their children would be better off than they had been. It was the simple wish of a strong group.
Now, as a squadron of C-130s suddenly darkened the sky, William Lundquist, who earned $28 a month as a paratrooper in 1944, came across the street, still looking for Robert Murphy.
“I always wanted to meet the guy,” Bill Lundquist said. “I jumped with him. I’ve read about him. I’ve been here before and seen the street sign with his name on it. I just want to meet the guy.”
Another veteran told Lundquist that Murphy would be here late today. He was supposed to jump with 37 other old men in a tribute to the past, outside this village.
“Well, I guess it’ll have to wait,” Bill Lundquist was saying. “All I wanted to do was shake his hand and tell him – one old trooper to another – `Hey fella, you got the job done.’ “
WE DIED FOR THE 4TH OF JULY
THE BOSTON GLOBE
July 5, 1987
It’s the Fourth of July weekend. A time when much of America marches and sings and stops to do all sorts of different things for all kinds of reasons.
Where are you today? At the beach? On the front step? Down the Cape? Up in Vermont? Just sitting around the house hoping the sun will clear that clutter of clouds and provide you with the gift of a fine summer’s day? What are you doing? Making plans to have a cookout? Looking for your bathing suit? Cranking up a lawn mower? Sleeping late? Working maybe? Still talking about the parade or the fireworks that shattered the night sky? Monitoring kids as they move through the kitchen like troops on maneuver, all the while ignoring your questions about what they’re going to do and where they’re going to go?
Maybe you’re alone? Maybe you’re far from that particular place you might call home? Maybe you’re simply looking for a quiet spot where the breeze blows for you alone and the heat can never wound or stifle?
That’s where I live, in a sanctuary of private peace. A place that proves what life merely hints at: Death is the ultimate democracy, and all of those who are here with me this morning died, in a sense, for the Fourth of July.
Make no mistake, there are all kinds of people here with me. And they come from every part of the land you walk today: From the hill country of Tennessee, from the big industrial cities of the Midwest, from Boston, from Valdosta, Ga., and Culpepper, Texas, and Bellflower, Calif., Brooklyn, N. Y., too.
We are black and white and brown, and mostly young forever. That’s because we died during the permanent season of youth. We fell at places such as Okinawa and Anzio, by the Bay of Masan in Korea, along rocket-scarred ridges at Hill 881 South, looking through the mist toward the Laotian border, and in Grenada and Beirut as well.
We died for the Fourth of July!
It’s funny, but more than Memorial Day, more than November 11th, we always hope that who we were and what we did will be recalled at this time of year. Perhaps that’s because it is the lush edge of summer, a time when wounds seem remote and the concept of death is a stranger.
Shut your eyes for just a second and you’ll be able to see us, to hear us, too. We come from your hometown. You knew us. And, if you think about it for a minute, you can easily remember.
See that fellow over there? Well, on the Fourth of July, 1943, he was playing sandlot baseball in Clinton, Massachusetts. One year later, he took up residence with us because he had been claimed by a sniper’s bullet as he walked a hedgerow in Normandy.
Do you recall the fat kid who always made you laugh by turning on the hydrants and getting the cops mad during that hot summer of 1950 when the temperature was an unyielding adversary? He’s here. Been with us since Inchon.
And those boys who graduated from high school with you? Those kids with long hair and dreams of a decent future lived in a land that asked where Joe DiMaggio had gone and turned its lonely eyes to him? All those young men? They’re here, too.
They came over the course of a tortured decade, in a long proud parade — in numbers that never seemed to quit — from the A Shau valley, from Con Thien, from Camp Carroll and other miserable places that were quickly shuttled off to the shadows of history because America had chosen to become a land of living amnesiacs. But we remember.
We remember the hopes and dreams we had. We remember the families we left behind and the families we hoped to have someday.
We were poets and shortstops, schoolteachers and longshoremen, storekeepers and firemen, husbands, fathers, sons, lovers. Some of us were born rich. Some poor. Some knew glory before our last zip code was carved in stone. Some knew abuse and prejudice and the strictures of class.
Yet none of that matters now because there is no hate here. No unreasoning racism. No fits of temper, outrage or revenge. Not even much memory. Here, summer is forever.
Don’t feel badly for us, though, because we are the lucky ones. We don’t worry about the world ending in a single flash of agony caused by ignorance and unreason. We don’t have to be concerned about the steady tide of poverty, the ocean of drugs, all the lost sense of history or the victory of money over the elements of compassion and justice.
We are beyond all of that. Above it really. Because we are all dead now. And we died for the Fourth of July.
BOSTON GLOBE
April 13, 1986
Baseball is a game of memory, and it returns tomorrow to a place where grass has not yet given way to a carpet. It comes home to a green haven filled with reminders of both heartbreak and happiness, a ballyard called Fenway Park where the cargo of past athletic time refuses to yield to sports’ current themes of greed and arrogance.
Baseball is a mood, a suggestion of sunshine and subway stops that all seemed to lead to Section 16. Once, it was truly the city game, truly America’s pastime and certainly the one sport that bound generations together. Fathers sat with sons and daughters and shared the mellow remembrances of other Opening Days played in earlier, easier afternoons before night stole the game. Then, the shadows of history and reality could be shuffled effortlessly around like so many boxes filled with relics of youth on moving day.
And the stories never had to be anchored in fact. As the calendar moved forward, hits, runs and errors became less important. Mood and memory prevailed.
There, right over there behind the dugout, is where Teddy Ballgame’s bat landed after he threw it in disgust and it hit Joe Cronin’s housekeeper. And do you see the first-base coach’s box? That’s where Dick Stuart bent down to pick up a hot dog wrapper and got a standing ovation because it was the only thing he ever picked out of the dirt with his glove.
The park still rumbles with the aftershock of visions long since gone: Shut your eyes and Joe DiMaggio is still making his last appearance in Fenway. Jimmy Piersall is still squirting home plate with a water pistol. Tony C. is down in the dust, and the crowd’s deathly silence still makes a noise in your mind.
Don Buddin can reappear at any moment. Within your own personal game, Rudy Minarcin, Matt Batts, Jim Mahoney, George Kell, Billy Klaus, Jerry Adair, Clyde “The Clutch” Vollmer, Rip Repulski, Mickey McDermott and Gene Stephens can be the components of your bench.
Baseball is part of history’s menu. It is filled with small slices of youth, adolescence and adulthood, and anybody can order a la carte.
Baseball is not the present ugliness, where rich men called players argue with richer men who are owners over decimal points and deferrred payments. Baseball is not agents or options or no-trade clauses.
It is not whining athletes who play only for themselves and their bank accounts. It is not the corporate set interested in owning franchises merely because of the benefits accrued under the tax code.
Baseball is a passport to the country of the young. It is Willie Mays chasing down Vic Wertz’s long fly ball in the Polo Grounds. It is Lou Gehrig considering himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. It is the Brothers DiMaggio. It is Jackie Robinson and Number 9. It is the magic of Koufax, the consistency of Seaver, the toughness of Catfish Hunter and the grace of Jim Palmer.
It is a double play turned over in a cloud of dust and metal spikes. It is Captain Carl fouling off the last pitch of a play-off game that started on a splendid October afternoon and ended in a long, cold winter as soon as the ball was firmly nestled in Graig Nettles’ glove.
And Opening Day is a time for all those trophies of the mind to be taken out and dusted off. Opening Day, especially the home opener, means the newspapers once again provide box scores, and life contains one sure sanctuary from the grimness and terror of daily headlines.
It does not matter that this present collection of 24 men in a Red Sox uniform are not truly a team. It does not matter that they lack chemistry, consistency, speed and a fundamental ability to hit the cut-off man or get a runner in from second base without depending on the thunder of a 34-ounce Louisville Slugger.
The moaning of crybabies and players who perform with salary arbitration first in their minds can not drown out the collective noise of generations of fans who love the sport while despising its present state. After all, it is still the best game ever played by men anywhere.
What other sport has planted itself so firmly in the nation’s psyche? What other sport draws people to the radio — one more relic of yesterday — to sit and listen to the long innings of slow summer nights? What other sport plays itself out in front of a fan as clearly as baseball?
You can see who made the error. You can see who got the hit. You can marvel at the clothesline throw the right fielder makes to the catcher, and watch the runner dueling with the pitcher for a slight lead off first.
Football is as predictable as roller derby and as anonymous as a gang fight. Basketball is a spectacle of tall men on a court in a contest where only the last five minutes seem to count. Hockey is brawling on skates. And all of them are played at the absolute mercy of the clock.
But baseball is timeless, and so, too, are its memories. Like the players themselves, scattered about the diamond in position, the memories of baseball can be isolated and called up on a mental Instant-Replay whenever the mood or moment summons: Do it today. Do it tomorrow. Do it 10 years from now, and all the detail, drama, symmetry and scores will tumble out.
Each new start to baseball’s timeless seasons, each Opening Day, provide a fresh chapter in life. The first pitch, the first hit, the first double play or home run become another page in a volume kept by the generations.
So, years from now, long after the disappointment of having no strikeout pitcher in 1986’s bullpen has faded, when all the home runs and dents in The Wall have been rendered meaningless by a lack of base-running ability and an incredibly poor defense, the sad failures of this year’s edition of our Red Sox will not matter.
BOSTON GLOBE
September 4, 1985
AN HOA, Vietnam – Liberty Bridge straddles a bend of the Phu Bon river where the flat, brown water ends at the edge of shoulder-high grass that stretches toward the distant horizon and the tall black mountains that run all the way to Laos. The bridge, in the heart of Quang Nam province about 25 miles southwest of DaNang, was built by the Americans in 1968 and destroyed by bombing in 1970.
Seventeen years ago, fierce fighting turned the area into a free-fire zone, causing people to flee the land and the rice fields that sit under a brutal sun. Now, the relics of our might rest under a swift current that swirls over chunks of concrete and the rusted steel shell of a Tiger Tank buried in 10 feet of water by time and war. “Many men died here,” Pham Dinh Dan was saying. “When I come here now, I can still hear the noise of the planes and the guns and the screams of the men who died.”
Today, Pham Dinh Dan is 44 years old. When he was a younger man, he served with the 91st Sapper Battalion, regular Viet Cong forces who fought the Marines near the narrow corridors of orange sand that weave in and out of the tall, yellow grass that borders the river banks.
“There was compassion on both sides of the battle,” he was saying. “We had a bitter hatred for the American government that sent men here, but there were times when we would see a soldier killed and his friend would be crying over his body and I would stop firing.”
Pham Dinh Dan was standing by the skeleton of the bridge and talking to a group of American veterans who had been invited back to Vietnam in August. He has a strong face and warm, brown eyes that give a life to his words beyond any interpreter’s translation.
“How old were you when you became a soldier?” Ernie Washington, an American who fought in 1967, asked him.
“I was 17,” he answered.
“Do you have any children?” Tom Vallely, another veteran, who served in 1969, wanted to know.
“I have a son who is 16,” said Pham Dinh Dan.
“I bet he’s smart, just like his father,” Vallely added.
“No,” Pham Dinh Dan said in a soft voice. “He is not so smart. He is not smart at all, really.
“You see, 16 days after he was born, my wife and my baby had to flee this area when the Americans raided our village near Que Son. They had to go into the jungles to live and it was very hard on them.”
“They were sprayed by the chemicals many times while they were in the jungles. He was very young then, and the chemicals had an effect on him. So he is not so smart now,” he said, pausing for a moment. “But he is a good boy.”
To his right, on the north bank of the river, there is a small open shack covered with a tin roof where once there had been a Marine bunker. Three women and two small children sat in the shade provided by the roof and asked the vistors for cigarettes.
“Our job was to destroy the fire base because there were so many big guns here directed at the area. Big guns. Eight-inch guns that we did not have,” he was saying. “We lost many men, but we kept on with our jobs because we were fighting for our own land.
“Many years ago we fought the Chinese here. Then we fought the French. Then the Americans came and we fought them, too. We would have fought forever.
“But when the Chinese and the French and the Americans left, they left behind all the machinery of war. They left many weapons and guns. And they left long-lasting poverty, too.
“I think that without all those wars and all the battles we would have been able to build an economy here. Now it is very poor and many people still die because of all the unexploded mines left behind.”
“Since 1975, we have lost 1,500 people in this province alone from bombs and mines, ” Pham Dinh Dam said. “After the war, we had a clearing operation and we were able to put away 65,000 bombs and mines and booby traps, but from time to time they still explode and kill people out in the fields. Like you, it will be a long, long time before we can finally overcome the consequences of war.”
At the jagged edge of the bombed-out bridge, a few initials and a date had been scratched into the cement when it was poured 17 summers ago. Both the Vietnamese and the Americans bent down to look at what had been written:”MCB, Charley Company, 6-14-68.”
“That seems like a long, long time ago,” said Ernie Washington.
“Yes,” Pham Dinh Dam agreed. “I wish we could have talked like this before we started the war.
Boston Globe
September 30, 1983
Once, it was a simple game played on grass under the sun and fans deceived themselves into thinking that men played it only for fun. Over the years, the night took it from warm afternoons and there are green carpets now instead of lush lawns and the explosion of dollars has turned the music of the sport into the sound of an adding machine.
Kids no longer pose in playground shadows pretending to be DiMaggio, Mays or Mantle. The ballet involved in chasing long fly balls or the visual poetry of a double play is still there, but free agency and labor disputes have resulted in loyalty that has turned to rust.
Lawyers and owners speak in Wall Street tones; players mutter in some dead language that always has a clause for cash; and all three parties are part of a deceit that has robbed the game of its magic and the fans of a piece of their youth.
Yet through it all, across all the years, you can always find a handful of athletes who act and perform as if they are the custodians of the game’s reputation, as if their every time at bat is going to help restore a piece of the dream that every child once held in his heart whenever baseball was played.
Carl Yastrzemski is such a man.
He never had the power of a Jackson or a Schmidt. He never had the speed of a Clemente. He does not have the size or strength of someone like Winfield or Rice.
He approached the game the way a carpenter frames a house. His foundation was desire; the walls were made of intensity; the roof was nailed down with heart.
His career has stretched across the terms of six presidents, a couple of mayors and two decades that have changed the face of this country forever. There are people just one year out of college whose entire memory of the Red Sox is book-ended by the name Yastrzemski.
He played on some awful teams, some good ones and, perhaps, one great one. He was stacked in batting orders with players who were pathetic and a few others who had better natural ability and physical gifts than No. 8 did.
Through it all, the first- and last-place finishes, the embarrassment and the applause, it was always Carl Yastrzemski’s pride that bound those teams together and carried them through the long season. From March to October, he ran everything out.
He was “The Captain,” but his speeches were given in the batter’s box and out along the cinder track in left field. He was an all-star but the glitter in his game came from his consistency. He was a steady light in the sky, not some shooting star that faded in a haze of adhesive tape, whirlpools and excuses.
His talent was always disguised within a body better suited for a journeyman infielder. And there were years when he was hurt nearly all the time and the numbers from those seasons libel his career when looked at separately.
But he played. He altered his stance or favored his back. He limped a bit and took a little off the throw in to the cutoff man but, always, he played.
And all the games across all the years do not encompass one third the effort that Carl Yastrzemski poured into his sport. Box scores don’t show callouses picked up from hours in a batting cage and statistical totals don’t compute the sweat, pain and sacrifice of a life devoted to a game.
In September of l967, he became a legend. No man has ever had a month, a season, like Yastrzemski did sixteen summers ago. Day in and day out, he lugged a marginal collection of baseball players toward the dream of a first- place finish.
In the fall of l975, he was an aging left fielder on a team of considerable talent. But it was Yastrzemski who took a ball off the left field wall, turned and fired to throw out Reggie Jackson, who had thought he could take second on an old man’s arm, and when the umpire called him out, the Oakland A’s died right there in the copper-colored dust of the infield.
By l978, there was a touch of gray at his temples and the lines around his eyes were not from laughing. And it is in a scene from a crisp, clear October afternoon of that year that Carl Yastrzemski will live forever in my mind.
His Red Sox had bled themselves into a tie for first place with the Yankees of New York. Now it was the ninth inning of a playoff game and 32,295 fans stood in silence for the duel: “The Captain” against “The Goose.”
They say the ball finally came down in Graig Nettles’ glove. They say there was a final score, and that the Yankees won. But they are wrong because legends live forever and there are dreams that never die.
In places beyond New England, there are people who claim that “The Captain” never played on a team that won a World Series. Yet on that autumn day, and on every day he wore the uniform, Carl Yastrzemski, No. 8, was always a world champion.
