A midnight man in a nine o'clock town
Last Friday would have been James Lamar Rhodes’s 95th birthday. I’m fairly certain you didn’t read about it anywhere. I didn’t realize it until I started thinking about writing this.
There’s a better chance you read about his old teammate’s 91st birthday the week before. And James Lamar Rhodes and Willie Howard Mays Jr. are forever linked both as New York Giants and heroes of Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, Willie Mays for his legendary over-the-shoulder catch of a deep fly ball off the bat of Cleveland’s Vic Wertz and James Lamar “Dusty” Rhodes for his game-winning home run that didn’t even go 300 feet but just cleared the short right-field fence at the Polo Grounds and gave the Giants the win and propelled them forward in their upset series win over Cleveland. Rhodes had important hits in Games 2 and 3 of the series as well, and it got him on Ed Sullivan with Mays and other top ballplayers on April 10, 1955, even though Ed almost forgot about him.
When I was a kid, I met both Mays and Rhodes at baseball card shows. Mays is probably my all-time favorite baseball player, and maybe my favorite athlete across all sports. I have zero recollection of meeting him. I have his autograph, so I know it happened, but that autograph and a reasonable certainty that it happened in Staten Island is as far as I can take it.
But meeting Dusty Rhodes—that was more memorable. And that’s partly because I can picture meeting him in a ballroom at the Penta Hotel (previously, and later, the Hotel Pennsylvania, and now just sitting there doing nothing) and recall him being nice to a 12-year-old me. But it’s also because of the second and third autographs I got from Rhodes. And that’s what I’ve come here to talk about today.
I spent a good part of the pandemic looking through old copies of the New York Daily News and other New Jersey and New York newspapers on Newspapers.com, trying to piece together the important historical timeline of when I got autographs from famous ballplayers. My many hours of research have placed the unofficial start of my baseball autograph collecting in early 1988. I had met a few players before that: Mookie Wilson at a local sporting goods store, Rusty Staub at a local baseball card show, and NOT Ron Darling at the Staten Island Mall in 1986 because they shut the line down before I could get his autograph and it was a terrible night and I don’t want to talk about it and why did you bring it up?!?
Ahem.
Yes, my baseball card show days really kicked into full gear in 1988 when I started going to shows at the Penta, which was right across from Madison Square Garden, where my dad worked. So, the way it usually went is my dad would drive us in on a Saturday, he’d drop me off at the Penta, and then he’d go to his office and do work until the agreed-upon meeting time back at the Penta. What a fun Saturday for Dad! And you might wonder, why didn’t your dad go with you to the baseball card show? You might wonder it. I wouldn’t. It honestly never even crossed my mind. My dad loved me, but spending hours in a hot ballroom with me lingering at every table and then waiting on lines for autographs was not part of the love deal.
In fact, at some point, the fun of working on a Saturday may have dissipated, and it became my mom who would drive me in, drop me off, and, honestly, I have no idea what she did for the hours I was at the baseball card show. My best guess would be that she went to Macy’s, which was kind of like her part-time office, though she shopped out of the Staten Island Mall branch, not the Herald Square flagship. Or she might have just sat in the lobby the whole time and watched the showgoers come in and out. My mom was an expert people-watcher, and she often told me how fun it was to watch grown men talk about baseball cards and lug around all their stuff to get signed.
The day I met Dusty Rhodes was, to the best of my recollection, one of the times my mom brought me in. My Newspapers.com research pulled up that Willie Mays was also there that day (April 22, 1989), but I’m almost certain I didn’t meet him that day, because this would’ve been too early on for my parents to give me Willie Mays-type autograph money to spend (probably $20 or $25), or maybe I’d already met him at that point? We’ll just have to wait until I do more research.
I don’t know how much Rhodes charged (still more research to be done!), but I’d guess he was in the $5-$8 range, which I could more easily pull out of my parents. And there was a nice big picture of Rhodes in my Baseball in the ‘50s book that my grandmother gave me, so it all lined up perfectly.
When I say Rhodes was nice to me, I must admit I can’t really recall anything specific he did that was nice. But I do know he made an impression. From 1988 to that day in April, I’d probably met a few dozen old ballplayers and while I don’t recall any of them being mean, I don’t know that any of them stuck out as being overly kind. Paul Blair gave me an autograph for free after I realized I’d have to buy a ticket, so I should put him in the Nice column. But he played for the Orioles (and, yuck, the Yankees), not the New York Giants. This was a New York guy who was cool to me, and he played on the team my dad had rooted for when he was my age. So it was special that he was cool to me.
A few months after the baseball card show, I discovered the Sport Americana Series Baseball Address List, a book that listed home addresses of retired ballplayers in an effort to help those who wanted to write said people and ask them for autographs. We have the web now, and it’s not all that difficult to track down people’s home addresses, or even slide into their DMs or Tweet at them to tell them they suck, but in the 1980s, the access provided by this book was wild to me. Actually, it still is. But it was more wild back then. Page after page of addresses of Hall of Famers, old Giants, old Dodgers, old Mets (and, I guess, Yankees, but who cares really?). And you could just write them a letter, include a baseball card or an index card (and a self-addressed stamped envelope, because you’re not a monster), and then, like, a week later, you’d open up a letter and there was a card with Hall of Famer Charlie Gehringer’s (meticulously written) signature on it. All those guys whose pictures were in the books my grandmother gave me might send you their autograph for the price of two stamps!
I don’t know how I managed not to just start at A and spend every day sending out letters to ballplayers, but I probably didn’t want to get greedy and so kept it to a select few, both those I liked (Bob Uecker!) and those who were known to be reliable signers through the mail and were Hall of Famers and/or had cool names (Lou Boudreau and Ewell “The Whip” Blackwell). Not everyone wrote back, but a lot of them did, and at 12 it was exciting to get anything in the mail, let alone an autograph from a ballplayer.
One day, I guess I got the notion to see where Dusty Rhodes lived and was stunned to find out he lived in the very same city that I did. The Staten Island address was an unfamiliar street to me, but—wow!—Dusty Rhodes was here! I have since learned a little more about his Staten Island days, courtesy of the Staten Island Advance (both this article after he passed on and this one in which someone remembers him as a “plain, simple, great guy who loved life and the cocktails”), but at that point I had no idea a legend lived among us. I did know that another of his teammates, Bobby Thomson, was known as “the Staten Island Scot” and had gone to the same high school as my dad, but the Address List said he lived in New Jersey now.
A brief digression here to share a fascinating story about what Thomson did after hitting his famous “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” off the Dodgers’ Ralph Branca. I only found this out recently after purchasing a wire photo of Thomson at his Staten Island home off Ebay and doing some online research (so much free time in the pandemic!) on Thomson’s Staten Island roots. It’s from Kevin Baker and is part of the book The Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947–1957 (Collins, 2007):
He went home. After the obligatory champagne romp, and the press interviews. After he was called out on the top step of the Giants’ center-field clubhouse for a raucous curtain call before thousands of adoring, grasping fans still in the stands and massed on the field below; after stopping down at 52nd Street, to sing a Chesterfield cigarettes jingle on Perry Como’s TV show for $1,000 — more money than any ballplayer of the day could resist — Bobby Thomson went back to the home he shared with his widowed mother on Staten Island.
Usually he took the subway down to the ferry, but this evening he treated
himself to a cab down the West Side Highway. Then he paid his nickel like anyone else, and sat unnoticed and alone on the ferry’s upper deck, for the 23-minute ride (matching the number on his Giants jersey) across New York Harbor. Once over in Staten Island, he went with his brother — again unrecognized — to meet their mother at a tavern in New Dorp. A crowd of friends and neighbors was already gathered there, and Thomson indulged in a plate of steak and fries and a glass of wine, and was home before eleven o’clock.
Man, that is something.
Anyway, back to the Giant who was living on Staten Island in 1989.
I’m sure I must have toyed with the idea of just pulling up to Dusty Rhodes’ house, but I probably realized that would be a tough sell with the parents. So I decided instead to write him a letter. And here, fair reader, is that letter:
A lot of things to digest here. First, yes, my handwriting at 12 could have been better, and I was not good at straight lines. I am still not the best at it.
Next, I don’t waste a lot of time beating around the bush. No unnecessary pleasantries at the top, no “Hello!” or “I hope you are well.” In the 1980s and, quite frankly, now, I was not really interested in telling anyone about my aspirations regarding their wellness.
Then, boom, hit him hard with the compliment in Sentence 2. He has to sign that index card now. You can’t read about someone calling you the nicest person he ever met at a card show and then just throw the kid’s card in the garbage. Also note that I don’t take it too far. Could I have called him the nicest person I ever met, period? Sure, but that’s a bit much.
Next comes a little shaky section. “I felt like I had to write you” sounds a little stalker-ish. Not my best choice. And then I ask for an autograph. Mind you, I’ve already established that I met him at a place where he signed autographs, so he could probably infer that I got his autograph at said place. But, dear sir, this was not enough! I require another! And this one I want free!
I recover by establishing my dad’s bona fides as a Giants fan, though the decision to include my mom’s leanings was probably a poor one (at least I refrained from telling him my sister liked the Yankees). And then I engage in some questionable asskissery by qualifying my own fanhood by saying I would happily cast the Mets aside for a team I’ve only read about in books (never mind the fact that if the Giants were still a team, there wouldn’t be the Mets, so it’s all a wash anyway).
Then things go off the rails, as I tell him about a “dream league that I conducted.” No further explanation of what that means, what that is, or if I am living in an alternate universe. Just here’s how you and Musial did and then thanks for your time and cooperation. It is too late to explain this to Mr. Rhodes, but this dream league of which I wrote was conducted on a Coleco Head-to-Head Baseball game where I set up teams exclusively composed of retired players, kept copious scoring notes in a spiral notebook, and conducted a sizable season. Why a 62-year-old man would want to know about how he made out in a league conducted on a machine with a bunch of red dots running on a 9-volt battery, I do not know. All I can say for sure is it’s only a matter of time before I buy a Head-to-Head Baseball game on eBay and start this dream league up again. For now, let’s just look at a picture of this fantastic game and recall that glorious summer when Dusty Rhodes ripped off a .733 average.
So, the final question here: Why do I have this letter? Did I preserve my letters in duplicate for my future biographers?
No. But I should have, and I apologize to them.
I have the letter because not only did Dusty Rhodes sign the index card I sent him, but he also signed the back of the letter, and it’s why I will forever love the midnight man in a nine o’clock town (and that phrase, so kudos to Arnold Hano).
Let’s assess what happened here. Not only did this nice man from the team my Dad loved (and, hence, I loved) send me a second autograph on the index card, but he also wrote me a little response and then signed it with his real first name, which, unbeknownst to me, was the same as my name. And then he underlined “James” to point out we’re in the same club! Twelve-year-old me was blown away. Forty-five-year-old me is similarly impressed. It’s why I read as much about Dusty Rhodes as I can find. It’s why I have two of his baseball cards (I’ll get the other two). It’s why I was happy to recently find an old issue of Sport with an article about him in it. All because he was nice to me when I was 12. Twice.
I have a lot of autographs, and I really do treasure a great many of them, because they capture a little shared moment in a life. But this one, on the back of a letter I wrote, from a World Series hero who lived a couple of neighborhoods away, this one is a shot to straightaway center at the Polo Grounds, a no-doubter that I’ll never forget.