Living the Impossible Dream
Remembering the anniversary of the 1967 Red Sox and my day as a sportswriter
Fifty years after the season known as the Impossible Dream, many of the more senior citizens inhabiting Red Sox Nation can recall highlights from 1967 as if they happened yesterday.
Ask and maybe you'll hear about the high hard one to the cheek that effectively ended Tony Conigliaro's storybook career.
You might even be treated to a reenactment of Rico Petrocelli squeezing the popup that sent the Sox to the World Series for the first time in 21 years.
What stands out for me is the doubleheader the Sox swept from the California Angels 50 years ago this weekend. And not just because of the eye-popping baseball that unfolded on the field. That was the day — as it turned out, the only day — that I got to be a baseball writer.
For me, 1967 was sort of an accidental gap year. I'd thought better of my aspirations to become a priest and in February happily exited the Edmundite Novitiate then quartered at Enders Island in Mystic. Since I wouldn't start college until September, I needed work.
I called The Day, where I had worked the two previous summers as an intern, starting at age 16.
The paper welcomed me back from a path that had many people in the newsroom shaking their heads in the first place. I was returning to a place packed with the sort of experiences, including an incident that got me fired two years later, that would influence my choices for decades to come.
As the youngest reporter in the room, there was no mistaking the role I'd fill.
Along with obits, police blotter and other routine tasks, my name was usually at the top of the city editor's list for a category of assignment often dreaded by veteran reporters: obligatory anniversary stories.
Embedded in newsroom DNA is the conviction that, when the milestone of a big event rolls around, readers can't get enough of it. To be fair to the genre done well, such assignments in the right hands can dig deep enough
through the nostalgia to unearth untold stories worth hearing.
The Impossible Dream season is being recounted in a highly readable year-long project by the Boston Globe, for example. And in Detroit, where I spent many years as a reporter and editor, the Detroit Free Press produced a riveting documentary about the 1967 riots.
At The Day in 1967, city editor Bob Craigue no doubt had more modest expectations when he approached my desk on April 6. He informed me that, 50 years ago that morning, the United States had entered World War I.
I knew the drill. I dove into the microfilm for 1917 and headed out for some man-in-the-street interviews on what was not yet called Eugene O’Neill Drive. At some point, I showed Craigue the top of my story, eager for a word of encouragement. He gave me two: “Keep typing.” Along with the routine stuff, Craigue and other editors were generous about indulging coverage ideas I cooked up on my own. Like the Newport Folk Festival. Or a doubleheader at Fenway.
Midway between Boston and New York, The Day provided extensive coverage of both the Yankees and the Red Sox but was too small an operation to staff either with a regular beat reporter.
That created an opening for my pitch to Bob Nauta, the sports editor I can now picture, 50 years later, shrugging his shoulders and muttering, “Why not?”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was learning some core principles to guide my reporting (“Why not?”) and writing (“Keep typing”).
Stalled in writing this piece for The Day last week, there was only one way out: Keep typing.
Some 35 years after Nauta OK’d my trip to Fenway, an intern at the media news website I was running pitched me on flying to Vietnam to write about former war correspondents gathering to note the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
Blessed with a flexible budget that’s hard to fathom in today’s news business, it was easy for me to say the right thing: Why not?
That intern, Tran Ha, worked all the right angles — including her heritage and her language skills — to get herself to the story and deliver compelling coverage.
Although my trip to Fenway was modest by comparison, I knew I’d need a local angle to make my case. I had a couple: Jim Powers Jr., a year behind me at St. Bernard, had just signed with the Sox. And Billy Gardner, a journeyman infielder from Waterford, had just taken over as manager of Boston’s Double-A team in Pittsfield.
I’d arranged an interview before the game with farm system boss Neil Mahoney, who was unsurprisingly upbeat about both Powers and Gardner.
But the real fun started between games in the locker room, where even a one-day press credential got me full access. My excitement was diminished only slightly when I confused one of his coaches with Sox manager Dick Williams, an outrageously rookie mistake enjoyed by several of the players as I pressed on unaware.
There was no mistaking Carl Yastrzemski and Reggie Smith, though, the latter quite game to chat while devouring what I described in the story as a Dagwood sandwich.
The Sox had beaten the Angels 122 in the first game, with switch-hitter Smith becoming the first Red Sox player ever to hit a “circuit clout,” as I put it, from both sides of the plate in the same game.
The Sox fell behind 8-0 in the second game, setting the stage for a 9-8 comeback victory that, as I wrote in the next day’s Day, “had sportswriters running out of adjectives.”
Wincing at my description of Smith’s “circuit clouts” 50 years later, it became painfully clear that the clichés in my toolbox remained in full supply.
I enjoyed interviewing Elston Howard, the former Yankee catcher then recently acquired by the Sox. Re-reading my 50 year-old copy last week as a 68 year-old retiree, I was struck by my characterization of Howard as “by far the ‘old man’ of the team,” a guy who still managed a “spring in his stance” and a “go-get-’em outlook.” Howard was 38 at the time.
In his excellent history, The Day Paper, former staff writer Greg Stone tells the story of yet another anniversary story that came my way at The Day, this one a fairly obscure milestone involving the Coast Guard Academy in 1969.
Long story short, the editors were looking for a more upbeat assessment of the academy’s relationship with the city than I believed could be supported by the facts. I refused to shift the tone of the story.
Continuing The Day’s tradition of delivering important information concisely, managing editor Curt Pierson told me: “Beverly will make out your check.”
As Greg Stone reports in his book, “Beverly Prescott was the payroll clerk. Mitchell had just been fired.”
Over the years I came to appreciate how a little less fervor might have salvaged much of my reporting for that story, not to mention my job. I also learned, on the countless stories that followed, that there’s almost always more than one way to surface the truth.
These days, I live a mile and a half from Fenway and get to a game now and then. But I’ll be watching this weekend’s games on TV, hopefully for an inning or two in the company of our grandchildren, Leila and Mateo. I may take a moment to let them know what I was up to on Aug. 20, 1967.