In the midst of this final chase to the playoffs, I want to recount a different story. One that happened 50 years ago on September 30, 1971, continuing into the next day, October 1, 1971.
The place was Washington, D.C. I had been a Summer intern at the office of the Hon. Edward J. Patten in what was the 15th Legislative District in New Jersey. Representative Patten was a lifelong resident of Perth Amboy, a garrulous man of size and warmth. He laughed hard and he worked hard, always carrying a cigar in his mouth, mostly unlit.
Edward Patten was a loyal Democrat, a product of the Middlesex County Democratic machine. That machine was run by the General, David J. Wilentz, the former N.J. Attorney General. Wilentz prosecuted the Lindbergh baby murder trial in Flemington, which garnered him fame and power in N.J. and the Democratic Party.
If you wanted to be anybody in N.J. political circles, you had to pay homage to Perth Amboy. An example of this was how John F. Kennedy made a stop in New Brunswick during the 1960 Presidential campaign, which brought out the largest crowd in Middlesex County history at that time. That stop was requested by Wilentz with the promise that the New York media would come and see the huge crowd which would assemble.
My entree into the Middlesex Democratic machine came through my father. My father was a dentist in Edison. In 1959 he astutely purchased property on Route 27, not far from the major intersection with Plainfield Avenue. He had established his practice in the Township, and it had outgrown the second floor of a house just down the road, so this was a logical move.
He built his own brick-faced office on the lot, but kept the small cape house that originally was there. First he rented it to a gynecologist, and when that doctor purchased his own house and moved his practice, my father needed a new tenant.
Fortuitously, a young attorney named R. Joseph Ferenczi, top of his class at William & Mary and then at Georgetown Law School, wanted to have more room for his practice. Mr. Ferenczi, as I always called him, was tied to Edison politics and thus to the Middlesex machine.
My father and Mr. Ferenczi developed a friendship beyond lessor-lessee. They talked every morning before my father started seeing patients. They knew everything about each other’s families.
So when his son came to him about possibly attending the Washington Semester Government Honors Program at American University in the Fall of 1971, Dr. Michael Sperber mentioned it to Mr. Ferenczi. Suddenly, a summer internship which would also run continuously with my time at American, was a done deal.
I lived in a ramshackle George Washington University dorm on H Street, across from the glaring lights of the World Bank building, which glowed brightly all night long. I shared my second floor perch with a young man who was from a Christian college in Vermont—a nice and shy fellow. We suffered through the intense nighttime heat of the inner city, augmented by the choking exhaust of the busses which ran on a schedule that provided relief only from 2:00-5:00 in the morning. The rusty shower provided little relief from the sweaty nights which I endured, my small fan minimally cooling me enough to permit sleep for the 3 to 4 hours each night I could get.
Don’t feel badly for me. The time I spent in D.C. was cherished time. I worked in the Congressional office, doing a myriad of things, from typing client letters to answering the phone calls from constituents and those who wanted to provide Mr. Patten with an earful on a myriad of topics.
Food was subsidized, so I had breakfast and lunch in the basement cafeteria of the Rayburn House Office Building. I found so much to do—sit in on the House and Senate sessions, go to committee meetings, find the best places to get free food—watermelon from Georgia, corn form Iowa—and there was an unlimited supply of Coca Cola everywhere.
I rode the underground subway system, which connected the buildings to the Capitol. By riding in these cars, I was near people like Senator Edward Kennedy, or in an elevator with the bodacious Rep. Bella Abzug from New York, who taught me new swear words.
Congressman Patten took me many places because he was fond of how I tried to get him to National Airport (now Reagan National), ignoring traffic lights and speeding through the semi-deserted streets of the District under the guise of “Congressional immunity”—something which I look back at dubiously. That was the night that House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford entered my car as I awaited my boss underneath the House steps. It was a surreal moment—like the Chevy Chase skits on Saturday Night Live once Mr. Ford became President.
I met so many famous people wherever Mr. Patten took me. I shook hands with Speaker Carl Albert in his office, the same one plundered on January 6th. I was hugged by Tip O’Neill. I met Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. A couple of the N.J. Representatives knew my name from the frequent interactions I had with them in the company of Mr. Patten. And the U.S. Government paid me for this!
As much as my experience was incredible in that regard, word got around quickly that I had played baseball in college. I had recovered from my injured shoulder so I could throw again. Suddenly, I received a call from Michael Corbett, the Legislative Assistant to Congressman John Barrett, a Democrat from the First District in Philadelphia. He invited me to his office and asked me if I wanted to join his team. It took only a second for me to say yes.
Michael Corbett was a dashing, fast-talking Irishman who had a great smile and a quickness to him. He said his father, Gene Corbett, had played in the big leagues and worked in the Cleveland Indians organization. His team was a collection of friends and people who knew the core group, all of the central people having lived in Salisbury, Maryland and were fans of the Yankees and Baltimore Colts.
They called themselves “The Balotiniks.” It was a take off on the Li’l Abner character Joe Btfsplk, They were a rowdy bunch, drinking their way through games and continuing afterwards at the famous congressional watering hole on Pennsylvania Avenue, “The Hawk and Dove.”
While I was under age for consuming alcohol in D.C., I drank with them without being carded and learned about hard liquor. They started me one game at catcher then saw my arm and had me patrolling the outfield for the remainder of the season.
And what a season it was. We played for Congressman Robert Bergland, a Democratic-Farm Labor member in his first term from the 7th District in Minnesota. He was a graduate of the University of Minnesota and a farmer. And a very nice man who occasionally appeared at our games and he knew my name, too. Congressman Bergland became the 20th Secretary of Agriculture in the Carter Administration.
To say that I was integral in the success of the team is an understatement. We won the regular season House championship. We lost only three games while we were winners of 23.
I won a game by hitting a walk off grand slam with the promise from a girlfriend of one of the players, who worked in Admissions at American, that I would get a date with a Jewish cheerleader from New Jersey. And it really happened.
I threw a keg and pizza party for the team in our dorm room. I was flat out drunk and awoke making out with Lorlee Bartos, Congressman Bergland’s Legislative Assistant. She would go on to some national recognition as the 1989 campaign manager for Harriet Miers for Dallas City Council; Miers was unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President George H. Bush. Bartos advised Miers on abortion and it rankled the pro-choice and pro-abortion groups, scuttling the nomination.
Our team lost in the playoff semi-finals. I went home in August but returned to D.C. for school. My association with Corbett and the group continued.
There was something new on television. ABC had started Monday Night Football and the group liked to meet for pizza and beer and to watch the game. It was expected that I would attend. Sometimes I would bring my textbook to read; that was not a very good idea. But it was great fun. One time while I was down in SE D.C., my fellow Semester buddies voted me floor representative to the American University Student Government. Because no one wanted to do it.
Corbett had me to his office. He said that he had tickets to the last game of the season at R.F.K. Stadium, a metal mausoleum in NE D.C., home to the Senators and the Redskins. He said we’re going.
What made this such a unique game was that it was the last Senators game ever in D.C. Owner Robert Short had decided that he was not making money there (it was stifling to be in the stadium at night and even worse in the afternoon) and the team was moving to richer pastures in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Naturally there had been tremendous outrage in the city. This was the second time a team fled D.C. Longtime Washington Senators owner Calvin Griffith had enough of playing in dilapidated Griffith Stadium and the politicians weren’t giving him a new ballpark. So he took his team to the Twin Cities where they became the Minnesota Twins.
The airwaves and The Washington Post was replete with vitriol directed at Short. Warner Wolf was doing sports back then at WTOP-TV and was a harsh critic of Short—he had a vested interest because he was losing his side gig with televised Senators broadcasts. Attendance lagged at the ballpark. The team was a lame duck squad, and they were mired at the bottom of the American League—even with the great Ted Williams as manager. He could not work any miracles with the group he inherited.
Despite the new stadium and the hopes for success, the fans didn’t go. There was racial tension in D.C., and the ballpark was located in a heavily African-American area, in a city which had experienced a significant amount of “white flight” to the suburbs. Those fans were not coming to D.C. at night—they supported the Redskins because they played the vast majority of home games at 1:00 on Sundays.
R.F.K. Stadium had a policy that you could bring in your own beer. Which Mike Corbett did. He was drinking these small cans at a rate of one per half inning. I was expected to follow suit. Except he was a seasoned drinker who stood 6’3” and I was an inexperienced one who was 5’5” tall.
I remember that the crowd was raucous from way before the start of the game between the Yankees and Senators. Fans were constantly running onto the field. The headline in the paper on October 1 was “Rowdy Fans Hand Senators Final Loss.”
The article described the 14,460 in attendance as having “…a jovial camaraderie for one another and their departing team..” Washington was actually leading 7-5 in the top of the ninth, in part due to a home run on a grooved pitch from Yankees pitcher Mike Kekich to Senators 6’7” slugger Frank Howard, a laser which landed in the second deck of the park.
With two outs in the books, the night ended. Youths ran onto the field in packs, taking first base with them. The team names on the scoreboard were no longer there, in the hands of some of those perpetrators. Police surrounded home plate, but the rest of the ballpark was in the hands of the mob. It was “a rowdy wake“ as the writers described the scene.
We had good seats behind the Senators dugout. I took it all in, wide-eyed and amazed at the debauchery on the field. Sure, there was some baseball played between two teams going nowhere. New York ends the season at 82-80. Washington lost 96 contests.
Baseball Reference.com shows that Bobby Murcer blasted his 25th homer for New York. Roy White hit number 19 and Rusty Torres connected for his 2nd home run, all off of the top Senators starter, Dick Bosman. Thurman Munson went 2 for 4 for the Yankees. The Yankees committed 4 errors. Jack Aker blew the save, surrendering 6 runs in the 6th and 8th innings.
The umpires declared a forfeit. New York won the game 9-0. The crowd finally was under control after pillaging the field and the stands. We left the stadium and headed to “The Hawk and Dove.” We started pitchers of beer with Congressman William Green, who would later become Mayor of Philadelphia.
I was trashed. So was Corbett. Belligerently, he sent me to my car to drive back to American. I was far from sober. I had to negotiate the roadways from SE D.C. to NW D.C. where the campus was located. This meant driving by the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial to catch the Rock Creek Parkway.
That’s when the flashing lights of the green U.S. Park Police came on behind me. I was a dead duck. The officer sad I had gone through a yellow light. I didn’t argue with him. I didn’t want to step outside of the car.
I took the ticket. I made it back to American, breathing heavily. I paid the fine the next day. My father never knew, otherwise he would have killed me. I never drove again after drinking. And I cut down my drinking to almost none. What a sobering lesson.
I stayed in touch with Patten and his embattled Chief of Staff, Steve Callas, until their deaths. I lost contact with Mike Corbett some years after I graduated from Franklin and Marshall. Same with Lorlee Bartos. The cheerleader date was the night the Knicks played the Baltimore Bullets at the Baltimore Civic Center—the day of the Earl Monroe trade to New York. I went to R.F.K. one last time on a frigid November 7th, using the Congressman’s seat, to see the Eagles and Redskins tie 7-7 on a fourth quarter TD pass from QB Billy Kilmer. The stadium had survived the onslaught of 39 days prior.
September 30, 1971 and the following day, October 1, 1971 are forever vividly etched in my mind. 50 years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment