Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 26

Just across the Hudson River from where the Indians would battle the Yankees that weekend, another Cleveland icon would also be taking his show on the road. Alan Freed, WJW disc jockey (a new term in itself), would host the Eastern Moondog Coronation Ball in Newark, New Jersey, on the first Saturday night of May. Still glowing from the praise of Billboard magazine, which had just named him the best DJ in the country, Freed would show East Coast teens what made him—and the music he played—so special. But joining these new fans would be many of his Cleveland fans. Special trains from Cleveland to Newark were scheduled that Saturday to transport any fans wishing to see their beloved Freed light up Jersey.

After making a name for himself in Akron in the late 1940s hosting a revolutionary “call-in” radio show featuring jazz and popular music, Freed arrived in Cleveland in 1951. At first, nobody knew quite what to make of him. He was one of the first white disc jockeys to play rhythm-and-blues music—still often called “race records”—and exploded onto the airwaves with relentless energy and personality, creating his own sound effects and talking in different voices on the air. He called himself “Moondog.”

His confidence stemmed from a realization pointed out by a friend who owned a record store in a black area of Cleveland. Freed saw that white teenagers were buying what was considered to be “black” music. He began receiving phone requests from white listeners in affluent areas like Shaker Heights and Lakeside. Knowing that Cleveland was already an ideal test market for new trends in music, Freed saw the future and was about to cash in.

In March of 1952, Freed organized the first “Moondog Ball” at Cleveland Arena. Before the show even began, the arena filled past capacity and police couldn’t control the masses of young people outside demanding to get in. Thousands more crashed the gates, and the ball was called off before it really got started. The event may have been a disaster, but Freed’s career had just taken flight. WJW quickly became Cleveland’s most popular radio station, and Freed’s program became the nation’s top R&B show. By the end of 1953, recordings of Freed’s show were rebroadcast in the New York listening area, and a new term Freed would later claim to have coined was being used to describe the type of music he played: “rock and roll.”

While bobbysoxers bopped to Freed’s tunes in Newark, back in Cleveland, May debuted with dramatically fluctuating weather patterns—which wasn’t at all unusual. Thermometers soared into the eighties on May 1 and flowers blossomed. Four days later, they plummeted into the twenties amidst an overnight frost that withered many of those flowers. The month began with eleven consecutive days of rain, and as voters headed to the polls for the May 4 primaries leading to November’s midterm elections, snow flurries floated through the air. Most races unfolded exactly as predicted, including victories for the two front-runners in the governor’s race: incumbent Democrat Frank Lausche and his Republican challenger, James Rhodes. Among the bland tallies was a pair of unremarkable primary victories in races for separate seats as a judge of the court of common pleas for Cuyahoga County. Few, even those who voted for him, knew the name of the lone Republican contestant, but by the time his name appeared on the ballot again in November, Edward Blythin would be familiar across the country. Likewise, John Mahon was a virtual unknown, even after winning the Democratic primary, but by the fall, he would become another central character in one of the city’s most magnetic mysteries, involving “Dr. Sam” Sheppard and his murdered wife.

When the rain finally stopped in Boston, the “Big Switch” worked once again. The Indians plated five runs in the first two innings at damp, chilly Fenway Park and cruised to a win over the Red Sox that pulled them within a game of .500. But the price was costly. Running out a bunt, Regalado strained muscles in his thigh and would be shelved for two weeks. Rather than un-switching and sending Rosen back to third, Lopez slid young outfielder Al Smith to the hot corner, though he’d only played third base twice in his brief major league career.

And for the second time in three days, a Lopez experiment paid off. In New York, before a modest crowd of just over 9,000, Cleveland jumped to a 4–0 lead in the third inning and delivered a symbolic blow. After a Larry Doby homer put the Indians on the board, Dave Philley rifled a line drive that landed in deep center field and pinballed among the monuments honoring Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Miller Huggins—which many young fans believed were tombstones marking the final resting place of those legendary Yankees. The result was a triple, and Philley scored on a sacrifice fly. But perhaps more importantly, it also seemed to deliver a subtle message to the mighty New Yorkers: history means nothing. This is 1954.

The Yankees rallied to tie it with three unearned runs in the sixth. Perhaps rethinking his decision to start Tom Morgan, Stengel brought on Whitey Ford in relief, and the “Chairman of the Board” held Cleveland scoreless for three innings. Bob Lemon did the same with the Yankees, and the game plunged into extra innings, where the Indians finally pulled away. They loaded the bases with one out in the tenth, and Larry Doby brought two runs home with a single. A Dave Philley RBI made it 7–4, then George Strickland put the nail in the coffin with a two-run triple that sealed a 9–4 Cleveland win. And while Stengel may have regretted his choice in pitchers, it was Ford whom the Indians tapped for the winning rally.

On Saturday afternoon before a national television audience, the Cleveland offense exploded for five runs in the third and four more in the fifth to cruise to an easy 10–2 victory. With nineteen runs in two games at Yankee Stadium, the Indians’ bats had come alive. Likewise, Indian pitchers had been effective, surrendering only three earned runs to a potent lineup. The Indians had sent a message to Stengel’s boys: don’t count us out yet.

The momentum continued with a doubleheader sweep of the Senators in Washington on Sunday, and the Indians had won six straight, catapulting from eighth place to third. This was the kind of baseball Cleveland was used to. And that week, the city picked up yet another victory.

After three decades of debate and deliberation, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to grant the U.S. authority to join Canada in constructing the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway, a shipping canal covering a 115-mile stretch through Canada and the United States. The notion had been defeated on four separate occasions, but security concerns stemming from the Cold War changed the mood of both Congress and its constituents, and a new view of this liquid highway, which could connect the American Midwest to the rest of the world, was adopted. Embodying this new spirit, a handsome freshman senator from Massachusetts named John Fitzgerald Kennedy led the charge, giving an impassioned speech that propelled the bill’s eventual passage in the Senate in January, giving it the momentum it needed to pass in the House. When construction was completed, Cleveland would be accessible by each ocean-going ship on the Atlantic, opening up countless new doors of trade and commerce. Consequently, Cleveland’s export volume, already one of the highest in the world, was expected to double to nearly $1 billion per year. Accommodations would have to be made by the city, including one proposal that suggested “moving” Municipal Stadium to make room for a larger port, but Cleveland knew whatever changes were necessary would be worthwhile.

Even Mr. Cleveland saw the Seaway as yet another golden plank in the city’s burgeoning national platform. In another of his breathless speeches that week, Louis Seltzer proclaimed that “Cleveland now is poised once more on a new cycle of civic accomplishment that, when tied together with its fabulous industrial growth in recent years and its extraordinary potential … will make it one of the most prosperous cities on the American continent.” It seemed that everything Cleveland touched turned to gold—a sentiment casually reflected by Al Rosen during a workout at Connie Mack Stadium the following morning: “We’re going to win. We’ll win and without much trouble.” True, the Indians had just taken two of three from the Athletics in Philadelphia to pull within a game-and-a-half of first-place Chicago, but outside of Cleveland, people wondered if such confidence was warranted.

After splitting a pair in Baltimore, the Indians returned home to start a fourteen-game home stand with three against the Yankees, who were in fourth place during their own sluggish start. They arrived in Cleveland on Monday for the stadium’s first night game of the season and a special atmosphere filled the lakeside air. In neighborhoods around Cleveland, the sweet scent of blooming lilacs wafted through the streets. As the sun nestled into the horizon, the sky turned purple and soft. Mothers took children for walks along the sidewalks. Fathers sat on front stoops and back porches, enjoying a Chesterfield cigarette or a vodka tonic, perusing that afternoon’s Press while half-listening to the Indians on a crackling radio set up next to a nearby window. And in backyards and grassy alleys, children played with a new sense of freedom, liberated from their thick winter coats and the onset of pre-dinnertime darkness. Their playful cries and laughter, the eager conversations of mothers taking place over back fences and laundry lines, and the constant hum of the ballgame on the radio all combined to create the pulse of a city celebrating the arrival of spring, which already teetered on the edge of summer. Cleveland’s life cycle was gradually revving up once again.

The Yankees’ engine also began firing at the outset of this much-anticipated series, plating three runs in the first off Bob Lemon. But the Indians responded with a fifty-two-minute, eight-run assault in the bottom of the frame, highlighted by a grand slam by Dave Philley and the ejections of both Stengel and Yogi Berra—a crippling blow Franklin Lewis likened to “taking onions away from liver.” The Yankees continued to creep closer over the remainder of what became a marathon contest, but when the stadium lights were finally turned off just before midnight, the Indians had secured their third straight victory over the Yankees to start the season and moved to within a half-game of first place while keeping New York in fourth, just a game over .500. “Maybe we’ll get started when we get out of Cleveland,” Stengel quipped afterward.

They needn’t wait that long. On Tuesday night, Berra earned revenge for his quick exit the previous day by ripping a two-out, two-run double to break a 3–3 tie in the ninth inning and deliver a much-needed Yankee victory. More painful than surrendering the game-winning hit, the Indians once again were reminded of a glaring weakness in their infield. Al Rosen had done a more than respectable job in the games he’d played since moving to first base, but he still brought very little experience to the position—not something that a pennant contender could afford. This gap showed in the ninth when he failed to cover first after making an initial move to field a grounder between first and second by Joe Collins. Collins reached safely on what should have been the third out, and Berra followed with the game-winning hit. Rosen, who’d delivered a clutch hit in the eighth to tie the game, was still one of the most important players on the team, but in that moment it became clear that the Indians could not contend for a pennant with a makeshift infield. That incident, plus the shaky play of Al Smith, filling in at third for the injured Regalado, was beginning to become conspicuous. Smith, a career outfielder, had committed six errors in his first six games at third base, including one that cost the Tribe a game in Philadelphia. Collins’s grounder—combined with Smith’s struggles—proved that they needed help, and Hank Greenberg knew it.

As the Indians and Yankees continued their mid-week battle on the lakefront, area housewives were introduced to a bold new era. Outside of Bedford, just south of Libby Road, the dynamic of grocery shopping was turned upside down with the arrival of what was proclaimed as a true “supermarket.” With its grand opening that afternoon, Fazio’s became the largest retail self-serve food store in Ohio, and one step inside made it clear that the days of the neighborhood grocer were numbered. Though it resembled an airplane hangar from the outside, inside was an environment never seen before. The shiny white floors and walls reflected the chrome and stainless steel surfaces that seemed to stretch over every inch of the 22,000-square-foot facility. But it wasn’t just for show—the wide-open spaces were used wisely, giving shoppers more variety and selection than they’d thought possible. It had taken employees three weeks to stock the shelves, which combined to cover more than a mile. The produce counter and dairy case were both forty-six feet long, while the meat case was a whopping seventy-seven feet. Eleven separate frozen food cases were stacked together to form a massive wall. Hanging above this grocery Valhalla were thirteen rows of eight-foot-long fluorescent lights, illuminating the ocean of products below with an efficient, balanced glow.

Anticipating large crowds, Fazio’s marked off a massive parking lot that could hold up to 3,000 cars and inside boasted an unheard-of seven checkout lines to eliminate long waits at the register. And unlike most corner grocers, Fazio’s encouraged mothers to bring the whole family, since they remained open long after most of the competitors had locked up. Closed Sunday, of course, the store was open until nine p.m. during the week and a startling ten p.m. on Friday and Saturday. In ways that shoppers of 1954 couldn’t possibly understand, Fazio’s Supermarket marked the arrival of the future.

Yet Fazio’s was just the observation deck of a much larger vessel known as Meadowbrook Merchandise Mart, which opened its multiple doors the following week. Just as Fazio’s, located within, signaled a change in the dynamic of food purchasing, Meadowbrook displayed the early evolution of what would one day become the modern shopping mall. Cleveland residents were already being drawn to the suburbs to marvel at the spectacle of conveniently located “shopping centers” in which various stores were lined up in long strips at the altar of ample parking. But Meadowbrook was something else again. Inside its 100,000-square-foot emporium, guests entered a new dimension of shopping. Visitors could peruse more than seventy vendors laid out in a county-fair format—a “city of stores” it was called, one that provided “a new kind of shopping!”—separated only by short partitions no higher than eight feet. Between those partitions, they could purchase anything they could imagine: baked goods, poultry, flowers, housewares, or furniture. They could even grab a bite to eat or get their hair cut. “Buy a car or a carrot,” Meadowbrook’s ads proclaimed. “Buy a diaper or a door. Buy a lock or a lobster. Buy a ham or a house.”

Such bold promises certainly caught the attention of Clevelanders, who now didn’t have to waste a day hopping from specialty shops to department stores through snarled traffic and miniscule parking lots. For the first time, residents had been provided with a viable option to a trip downtown, a place that was “as friendly as a cracker barrel, as modern as a streamliner.”

While the future of retail shopping in Cleveland looked incredibly bright, by the time the Yankees left town, the Indians’ future once again looked cloudy. With just over 7,000 in the stands amidst raw and wet weather on Wednesday afternoon, Mike Garcia and Ed Lopat matched one another with five scoreless frames. The Yankees broke through in the sixth and marched to a 5–0 lead, and then held off a furious Indian rally in the eighth to win by one. New York, which had utilized its top three pitchers for this series, left Cleveland holding the same record as the Yankees, 13–10, both two back of the White Sox.

On yet another unseasonably frosty afternoon on Thursday, the Indians were equally cold, trailing the lowly Senators 7–1 in the ninth and only managing one hit over the first eight innings. But everything changed in the ninth as the Tribe rallied to tie, then won on an RBI double by Rosen in the eleventh. It marked Cleveland’s eighth late-inning victory of the young season, and Lopez admitted he couldn’t remember a team that pulled off more come-from-behind wins to start the year. “They’re hard on the nerves,” he said, “but I’m not complaining.”

The Tribe won easily the next day and then completed the sweep of the Senators on Saturday by scoring two runs in the eighth for a 5–4 triumph. The Indians then took two from Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon as Mike Garcia pitched what he believed was the finest game of his career, allowing just one hit in a complete-game shutout in the nightcap.

The Indians, now tied for first with Chicago, were on a roll.