Lee Lowenfish

I have a ticket stub somewhere for the 1964 Father's Day Mets-Phillies doubleheader which I went to with my father at newly-opened Shea Stadium. It was the day that future Hall of Famer Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game but the Mets were still so bad that I don't remember much drama. I remember more Bunning exclaiming to Ed Sullivan on his TV show that night that he told his fielders to dive for everything to aid his chance at immortality.  

Father's Day June 20, 1982 is the one I really remember. The hated Yankees are hosting the Orioles and I'm watching a nail-biter on TV with my nephew Eric in his bedroom above the kitchen in my sister Carol's house in suburban Fanwood NJ. Bespectacled backup catcher Joe Nolan comes up to pinch-hit for Rick Dempsey in top of the 11th inning against fearsome Goose Gossage.  He blasts a two-run homer into Yankee Stadium's lower right field stands to break a 3-3 tie.  I leap from the couch cheering wildly (in those pre-arthritis days when I could get up quickly.)  I hear a crash below me in Carol's kitchen - a plate must have fallen off a wall.  "Eric, grow up!" she shouts at her soon-to-enter-college only child.  It is in a voice that could be heard two suburbs away. 

I would be 40 a week later (and 6 days from now, I will be 84.)  Maybe one of these days I will grow up, but it's not really on the calendar of my twilight years.  I think back to how 1982 actually didn't turn out too well for Joe Nolan and the Orioles although my Birds made a great run at the eventual AL champion Milwaukee Brewers.  I went down to Baltimore for all 4 of the games against the Brewers that the Orioles had to sweep to win the division.  They won the first 3 convincingly. but in the Sunday afternoon matchup of future Hall of Famers Don Sutton versus Jim Palmer, the Brewers won 10-2 behind two solo HRs by future Hall of Famer Robin Yount and six late insurance runs.  It was still a close game when Joe Nolan pinch-hit for Rich Dauer around the fifth or sixth with runners on base. But Ben Oglivie made a great catch in the left field corner to stifle the rally. 

i was seated high up in the left field upper deck and actually didn't see the great catch until watching it on TV that night.  What I did see before the game was Sutton and Palmer shake hands before they went to their respective bullpens to warm up.  Some years later I met Sutton when he was broadcasting for the Atlanta Braves and I had my occasional Shea Stadium press pass.  Don remembered that handshake and asked if I had a photo of it.  Unfortunately, I didn't but the memory lingers on.  Don is gone now and so is my sister Carol Ann Lowenfish Norton who did live to see my Branch Rickey biography come out in 2007.  In fact, in one of her great acts of thoughtfulness after she had moved to California, she arranged for us to stay at a guest house on the UCLA campus where pictures were prominent of Jackie Robinson and his fellow Black football teammates from the late 1930s, Woody Strode and Kenny Washington, the latter who would integrate the NFL in 1946.

I hope Wikipedia is right that Joe Nolan is still with us at 75.  Thank you Joe for the memories of a special Father's Day in my life as a fan. I don't have any children of my own but has maintained a shared baseball love with Eric.  And here's to more special memories for fans of all 30 MLB teams and other teams of all kinds.  I will have more to say later in the summer and early fall about the seemingly unavoidable lockout of the MLB players on Dec 1. I highly recommend savoring every pitch and possible memorable moment in what is left of the 2026 season.  And never forget that baseball will always live locally and in our minds.  

As for the 2026 Orioles, I have vowed not to get too enthusiastic until they make it to .500 and stay above it.  Before games on Mon Jun 22, they are still 5 under with almost half of the season gone. The starting pitching is improving as evidenced by a gritty Father's Day win for RHP Brandon Young in a rubber game rout of the Dodgers in LA. Young has the intriguing mien of a quiet Texas gunslinger and after a rocky rookie 2025 season, the 2024 Oriole Minor League Pitcher of the Year is showing signs of maturing.  I am close to the point of writing down the 5 current starters in the rotation: Young, Kyle Bradish, Shane Baz, raw rookie Trey Gibson, and the only southpaw Trevor Rogers.  But I must remind myself of my promise to myself in first sentence of this graf!!   

Here is the one TCM baseball tip.  W Jun 24 at 5AM - "Whistling in Brooklyn" (1943). Red Skelton as the Fox enlists some of the Brooklyn Dodgers to foil a

gangster's scheme.  Also with memorable character actors Ray Collins/Sam Levene/Rags Ragland. 

That's all for now.  Always remember:  Take It Easy But Take It and Stay Positive Test Negative!  

Major League Baseball has returned, narrowly beating out the NBA and the NHL in the race to grab the attention of scores-starved sports fans. After the first weekend of the season, every one of the 30 MLB teams can claim a victory. 

 
No team has started 3-0 for the first time since 1954.  And my supposedly doomed doormat Orioles took two out of three at Fenway against the admittedly weakened Bosox whose pitching looks as questionable as Baltimore's.

 
The Birds already have two feel-good stories. Starter Alex Cobb picked up his first victory since 2018, and reliever Cole Sulser earned his first MLB save, a two-inning job that brought back warm memories of the days of Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage, Sparky Lyle, and Bruce Sutter. 

 
'Twas quite a weekend for the Big Green of Hanover, NH. Sulser is a Dartmouth alum. So is Kyle Hendricks who pitched the Cubs' first complete game opening day shutout since 1974. With no walks, only three hits, and almost 10 K's, his Opening Day line was evidently the best since 1888.  

The glow from this good news faded when it was learned that over the weekend in Philadelphia, more than ten of the Miami Marlins had tested positive or shown symptoms of coronavirus.  

 
The first home games of the Marlins have now been postponed and so has at least the first game of the Yankees' visit to Philadelphia.  The clubhouse that the Marlins occupied all weekend has to be thoroughly disinfected. 

 
Who knows if this tenuous 60-game MLB season will be completed, let alone the expanded playoffs in which 16 of the 30 teams will qualify. 

The public health of the nation should override considerations of commercialized sports.  

 Sadly, I fear that decades ago we lost in this country any concept of what "public" and "health" really mean.

I just found a poem by Carl Sandburg written in 1918, around the time that World War One was ending and the flu epidemic was raging, that speaks so vitally to our current situation.  

 
It's called "I Am The People, the Mob" and one line goes: 

"Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. 

Then - I forget."    

 
I think the search for a time when sacrifice meant something attracts me to movies of the 1940s, several of which I've seen recently on TCM.  Until the virus hit, I was supposed to teach at Chautauqua next week a class on baseball and American culture in the 1940s.

Please allow me a little historical reflection.

The 1940s are such an important decade in our history because even the most liberal historians admit that FDR's New Deal didn't get us out of the Great Depression but arming for World War II was the main reason. 

 
During the war, sacrifice was understood by almost the entire country.   Future Hall of Famers Bob Feller and Ted Williams willingly gave us their baseball careers to serve their country in World War II. 

 
Just as importantly, tens of millions of ordinary citizens, white and Black, risked and lost their lives in combat. And those at home, men and women and boys and girls, planted victory gardens and donated basic supplies to the war effort. 

 
Though wartime MLB was a diluted product, love of baseball remained a national glue. The opening scene from the early noir classic, "Laura" (1944), has Dana Andrews toying with a hand-held ball-bearing game called "Baseball" as he begns to tackle a mysterious murder case. That gesture has always symbolized for me the spell of the game on this country when it truly was the only national sport of any significance. 

 
But once the war ended after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the national mood changed.  The best movies really caught that change. 

In William Wyler's "Best Years of Their Lives" (1946), being a war hero means nothing to Lieutenant Dana Andrews when he returns looking for something better than a soda jerker's job in his Midwestern town. 

 
The subtleties abound in Robert E. Sherwood's script based on Mackinlay Kantor's novel.  Frederic March's sergeant - a lower rank in war than Andrews but a bank officer in civilian life - brings back a captured Japanese sword for his son who tells him his professor at school opposed the dropping of the A-bombs.

 
Two John Garfield films seen on TCM in past weeks have also really stayed with me.

"Pride of the Marines" (1945) was made when the war was not yet over. Salt-of-the-earth soldier Garfield can't come to grips with being blinded in battle, but nurse Rosemary DeCamp leads him towards acceptance.

(To modern ears, the use of the derogatory term "Jap" may jar in both movies, but given that the war was still going on, the language is understandable.) 

 
In Garfield's last Warner Brothers film, "The Breaking Point" (1950, directed by Michael Curtiz)), his character Harry Morgan has become a small boat captain because the post-war period hasn't been good to him.  "Every time since I took off my uniform, I'm not so great," he tells his wife (Phyllis Thaxter). He plunges almost inexorably into crime. 

Based on Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not," the film is more gritty and superior to the Howard Hawks' 1944 version with Bogart and 19-year-old Lauren Bacall.  "Breaking Point" was written by Ranald McDougall who got the main writing credit for "Mildred Pierce" (1945) and went on to create for Harry Belafonte that haunting vision of a post-nuclear war world, "The World, The Flesh, and The Devil" (1959). 

 
"The Breaking Point" was the last Eddie Muller Noir Alley TCM selection until after Labor Day and will give me plenty to think about over the summer. Writer McDougall created the memorable character of a son for Garfield's fellow sea worker Juano Hernan

dez, an excellent vastly underappreciated actor.  Patricia Neal as a femme fatale is rather unforgetable. too.

Two tips for TCM for end of July:  

Thurs July 30 11:15A - "Easy Living" (1949) directed by Jacques Tourneur based on a story by Irwin Shaw.  A football player with a bad heart (Victor Mature) is warned about his life-threatening illness by a cardiologist (Jim Backus in pre "Mr. Magoo" days.)

Victor's wife wants him to keep playing (Lisabeth Scott).  Owner of the team is played by Lloyn Nolan.  Sonny Tufts plays a teammate of Mature as does Kenny Washington who was the Jackie Robinson of the NFL in 1946 (and also played with JR at UCLA).  

Other Rams are in the film including Tom Fears, Fred Gehrke, and Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch..  Memorable touch guys Paul Stewart and Richard Erdman appear, Lucille Ball plays the team secretary and I kid you not - Jack Paar is the team PR man.

Then Fri July 31 at Noon -  a TV "Director's Cut" from 1955 - "Rookie of the Year". A sportswriter recognizes a baseball player as the son of a banned player from an earlier time.  

Well, that's all for now.  Be well and stay well and obey social distancing and mask wearing rules.  But still always remember:  Take it easy but take it!