Wait Till Next Year : A Memoir

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Goodwin (No Ordinary Time) turns her gaze inward, looking back on a childhood enlivened by books and baseball. In many ways Goodwin had a typical '50s girlhood. She grew up on suburban Long Island at a time when many families were relocating to such communities. Her father worked, her mother was a homemaker. Perhaps the biggest difference between Goodwin and other girls growing up in this era was her deep and abiding enthusiasm for baseball. When she was six, she recalls, her father gave her a score book and taught her how to use it, a gift that "opened [her] heart to baseball." Retelling games for her father's benefit after he came home from work was her "first lesson ...in narrative art." One can easily see how re-creating these games from the score book taught her to harness her imagination to quotidian details to re-create history. If baseball bonded her more deeply to her father, books served the same purpose in her relationship with her mother, a sickly woman with severe angina and numerous other problems. Goodwin also offers a child's-eye view of the Cold War, from the lunacy of bomb shelters and "duck and cover" drills to a particularly disturbing memory of reenacting the McCarthy hearings with other neighborhood children. Wait Till Next Year Is The Story Of A Young Girl Growing Up In The Suburbs Of New York In The 1950s. When Owning A Single-family Home On A Tree-lined Street, Meant The Realization Of Dreams. When Everyone Knew Everyone Else On The Block And The Children Gathered In The Streets To Play From Sunup To Sundown. The Neighborhood Was Equally Divided Among Dodger, Giant, And Yankee Fans. The Corner Stores Were The Scenes Of Fierce And Affectionate Rivalries. The Narrative Begins In 1949 At The Dawn Of A Glorious Era In Baseball. An Era That Saw One Of The Three New York Teams Competing In The World Series Every Year. An Era When The Lineups On Most Teams Remained Basically Intact Year After Year, Allowing Fans To Extend Loyalty And Love To Their Chosen Teams. Knowing That For The Most Part, Their Favorite Players Would Return The Following Year, Exhibiting Their Familiar Strengths, Weaknesses, Quirks, And Habits. Never Would There Be A Better Time To Be A Brooklyn Dodger Fan. But In 1957 It All Came To An Abrupt End When The Dodgers (and The Giants) Were Forcibly Uprooted From New York And Transplanted To California. Shortly After The Dodgers Left, Kearns' Mother Dies, And The Family Moved From The Old Neighborhood To An Apartment On The Other Side Of Town. This Move Coincided With The Move Of Several Other Families On The Block And With The Decline Of The Corner Store As The Supermarket Began To Take Over. It Was The End Of An Era And The Beginning Of Another Era--and For Kearns, The End Of Childhood. Doris Kearns Goodwin. By the award-winning author of Team of Rivals and The Bully Pulpit, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball.Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin's early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers'leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood. By the award-winning author of Team of Rivals and The Bully Pulpit , Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwins touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. We meet the people who most influenced Goodwins early her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. She re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.

We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin's early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers' leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.

WHEN I WAS SIX, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball.