The Original Edison Field

The summer was bright and green and hot, and a relief from the cauldron of fog and dark winters that fill the Central Valley of California and, more to the point, Jimmy Fletcher’s new-found hard edges of life. He didn’t stumble on them by accident, as if slicing your finger on a rusty razor blade lurking at the bottom of a box of junk. They came down on him heavily, from out of nowhere. It was the first summer after Jimmy’s parents divorced and Norman contracted polio. Mainly, Jimmy pushed his anger inside, and he couldn’t say the word “divorce” for several years. On the outside, he appeared happy and he must have had heard somewhere about hope springing eternal, and all that dreamy stuff. He dreamed of only his mother. Well, with the exception of the other dream he had – to play for the Yankees, his favorite team, especially when they were winning, and it seemed they always were. There was no mistaking he loved baseball. Somehow it became a part of him, almost instantly, magically, when he first heard the names of Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson and Ted Williams and Bob Feller not long after the war ended. Maybe he had an inkling that they were baseball players, but their teams? He couldn’t have told you, though he soon learned.