Adlai Stevenson and the Brooklyn Dodgers

My mother loved Adlai Stevenson. She was a member of the League of Women Voters and she worked tirelessly to help him defeat Dwight D. Eisenhower in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. My mother hated Eisenhower and Nixon, and when they won both times, I remember her crying as she watched the election results on our black-and-white television set.

We lived in Westchester County, outside Manhattan, in a town called Irvington-on-the-Hudson. My mother worked as a freelance editor and she made sure she had lots of time available for her political passion. I was young, maybe 5 or 6, and my sister was a baby. The house we lived in was at the end of a cul-de-sac and it adjoined a protected nature preserve owned by Columbia University. Those woods were my daily playground during the years we lived in Irvington. I did not know it then, but we would be moving back to Manhattan in a year or two — and the woods would be my only exposure to nature until I got to college.

My father was a physician who made house calls. His practice was in the city, so he commuted at least twice a day. His passion was not medicine but rather the Brooklyn Dodgers. From my vantage point as a small child, he loved the Dodgers more than anything else in the world. And he detested their rival, the New York Yankees. If the Yankees won a game (which he watched on the black-and-white TV), I sometimes saw spit come out of his mouth. My father was a scary man to me for many reasons, and even at my young age, I knew our family would be happier when either the Yankees lost or the Dodgers won.

As we know, Adlai Stevenson lost in both runs for president. And the Brooklyn Dodgers betrayed my father in 1957 and relocated to Los Angeles. There are books written about the effects of parental depression on young children. And I think I could have written one. We moved back to the city later that same year. I was convinced by this time that Adlai Stevenson was a Brooklyn Dodger and that the Dodgers were all Democrats. This meant, of course, that the Yankees were Republicans and that Eisenhower and Nixon were on their team.

I don’t remember when I learned that baseball was not where politics was played out or that political candidates were not connected to particular baseball teams. But it was in Manhattan, I know that for sure. My life was airlifted from the woods behind our house in Irvington to the concrete world of the city. We were not allowed to go out without an adult until I was in the seventh grade. It was a long haul through childhood and adolescence.

I left New York when I was 18 and like a guided missile, I found the Midwest. I have lived here for well over half my life. And though 64 years have gone by since 1957, I still imagine that Adlai Stevenson was sad when he had to move to Los Angeles with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In a way, I think of him as my good father — a man my mother loved for his fairness, integrity and grace. Perhaps my father’s moods were the result of living most of his life in the shadow of the Yankees. He had to endure a Republican baseball team and was only slightly buoyed in 1961 when John F. Kennedy was elected president. I remember hearing that Kennedy came from Massachusetts, but I thought he must have come from Brooklyn, where all Democrats were from. If only life were this simple: two cities, two teams, pure good and pure evil. Adulthood is nothing if not being able to sit at the table with unfairness, ambiguity and loss. The Dodgers will betray you, as will a president or a Supreme Court or a parent. As far as I can tell, the best bet is to be flexible, stay curious, believe in change and live, if possible, somewhere close to a forest.