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Why (as in yaverbaum)
believe that his favorites were strategy and rules, which are often inter- twined. (I can still recite the infield-fly rule without missing a beat.)
There was next to no talk in the house of basketball or football. (Hockey, it seems, had not been invented.) Oddly, the only basketball and football talk that comes to mind had to do with Jewish participants: Red Auerbach, Sonny Hertzberg, and Sid Luckman, to name three, but they got far less attention than was given to Al Rosen, Jake Pitler, Sid Gordon, Moe Berg, and, most important of them all, Sandy Koufax. My mother might very well have been the generator of those conversa- tions, however.
I also recall that my father, not my mother, did virtually all of the letter and postcard writing when I would be away at summer camp. So why do I have this lingering feeling that he and I were not as close as I would have wanted? It may be, as I said, that he was not a great commu- nicator, at least orally, but I’m sad to say that it may also have been that when I was young, I was afraid of him, afraid of his temper. It probably started when I was three or four years old. As I mentioned, we visited Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Aaron frequently, and Aunt Rose had moved to Manhattan Beach to be near them. She and Uncle Harold had taken an apartment on Oriental Boulevard, which ran parallel to Hampton Ave- nue. Getting there from 414 Hampton involved crossing both Amherst and Beaumont Streets, and, as the story goes, at the age of three or four, I decided that it was a great idea to see my cousins, Peter and Johnny. So, without expressing my laudable desire to bond with another part of the family, and without so much as leaving a note, I apparently disappeared from Aunt Beatrice’s, determined to make a surprise visit, and under- took my three-block journey without accompaniment. For some reason, this did not result in profuse compliments for my initiative and bravery. Rather, after my disappearance was detected and my location discov- ered, I received my first “licking,” as my father called it, a spanking that was delivered with considerable force by a very angry dad at the corner of Oriental Boulevard and Amherst Street.
Now, I don’t argue that that response was not called for in the circumstance. The problem, however, is that corporal punishment,
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