It all began one Sunday morning, as I sat waiting for my “to go” order to be prepared in the Noah’s Bagels on Santa Monica Boulevard. Two older men were looking at a picture of the 1955 Dodgers on the wall of the bagel shop. The names of all the people in the picture were listed below it by row. There were two men in the picture listed as “unidentified”. Henry and Max, the two guys staring at the picture, were from Brooklyn. They knew one of the “unidentifieds” to be “Happy” Felton. He was an old time bandleader, who caught on with the Dodgers as the host of “The Knot Hole Gang” and “Talk to the Stars”, their pre and post game shows.
The rotund Felton, wearing his omnipresent Dodger windbreaker hosted five little leaguers before all Dodger home games. They would then throw it around with a member of the Dodgers who would ultimately judge the best player in the group. “Talk to the Stars” was on the air after each home game. “Happy”, still in his windbreaker would have one member from each team in that day’s game answering phone questions from the viewing audience. The two players would judge the best question and that caller would win tickets to a future game. Many times, after a long night game, either or both players would nod off during the show. That didn’t preclude them from judging the best question though. They were, after all, professionals. All that now having been said, “Happy” Felton was no longer “unidentified”. One down, one to go.
The guy in picture wearing the brown suit, standing next to Carl Erskine was quite another issue. Neither of them could identify him. “Looks like a gigolo”, one of them said. “Maybe he was a son-in-law of O’Malley”, the other one added, taking a swipe at the much-hated Walter O’Malley, who moved da’ Bums outta’ Brooklyn. I sat quietly for a while but then said, “That’s Andre Baruch.” “Who?” they said in unison. I told them that Andre Baruch was the announcer on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. Since Lucky Strike was a big sponsor of the Dodgers, Andre moved over to Ebbets Field to do the “Happy Joe Lucky Wrap Up Show”. He’d recap the hits, runs and errors inning by inning. Andre was a nice enough man, I guess, but he was embarrassingly out of place in the sports world. Slicked down hair, mustache, dulcet tones, all encased in a Botany 500 suit, suggested the upper east side of Manhattan, far more than it said Flatbush.
Henry and Max were amazed that I knew Andre Baruch. They also found it incredible that I knew “Shotgun” Shuba, Gino Cimolli and Don Demeter. These were lesser players, which is to say, in an eight-team league, they were head and shoulders over more than half the guys playing today. I knew them because baseball ruled New York City when I was a kid. I knew as much about the Giants and Yankees as I did the Dodgers and I didn’t root for any of them. I would go to the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, when the Cubs came to town. Max and Henry, both twenty years my senior and I became fast friends. We laughed and reminisced amid talk of Durocher, Rizzuto and Whitey Lockman. From that day on, the Santa Monica Noah’s has been my traditional stop on Sunday.
As I pull into the parking space out front, I always see Henry and Max carrying the wooden bench from in front of the jewelry store to a place under the trees. It’s all part of the Sunday morning ritual now. We sit on the bench, under the trees, drinking coffee and talking. Or, more importantly in my case , listening. They are, like myself, two transplanted New Yorkers. But beyond the hallowed ground of Bedford Avenue, Coogan’s Bluff and 161st Street they have great stories to tell.
Max was a jingle writer for radio commercials. “Most of the places I wrote jingles for are out of business now,” I don’t think it was the music he says with a smile, “But, who knows? You go and try to write something bouncy for a funeral home. See whatcha’ get!” He left Madison Avenue in the early ‘50’s and moved west. Ultimately, he became a foley artist. That was where he met Henry, who had moved out here during World War II. For those who don’t know, a foley artist is basically a sound effects man. Sounds and dialogue are rarely, if ever, recorded together. The sounds have to be exaggerated so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle. Max and Henry speak of their greatest achievements in sound effects with a pride that few men exhibit for their jobs. Unabashedly, they beam when telling how they discovered that squeezing an unopened box of cornstarch gave the most realistic sound of walking on fresh fallen snow. “We were commended by no less than Alfred Hitchcock for that discovery”, Max said, “Everyone thought he was a strange guy, I thought he was funny. He used to hang out BS’n with us.” “He was “aces””, Henry added, using a term I hadn’t heard west of the Hudson River.
They told how they once crinkled film that had been over exposed right into a microphone that had all the levels turned up. “It was the most realistic fire you ever heard”, Henry said with a laugh. He added, “Now it’s all computer generated stuff. No imaginations just program it in, hit the button and you’ve done it. Where’s the artistry in that, I ask ya?” “Hey”, Max said, “It ain’t no different than baseball. Gloves are huge, grass is fake, and they warn a guy for pitchin’ inside. Where’s the artistry there?” Like every other Sunday, since I met these two, I said nothing. Andre Baruch has been the sum total of my input into this relationship. Why would I want to interfere with the Max and Henry Show. It doesn’t get better than this. I finished my coffee, and said “goodbye.” “Yeah, yeah, good talkin’ witcha’”, Max said, “See ya’ next week.” I smiled and move toward my truck.
September/03
Taking A Chance
I was sitting on a bench on the Manhattan Beach Pier last week. The day was perfect. Down below there were families enjoying the ocean breezes and warm sand. Kids were body surfing and riding boogie boards. There were several pick-up volley ball games in progress under the August sun. At the end of the pier, seagulls hung in the air hoping for one of several fishermen there to toss them a piece of bait. One of the fishermen was particularly obliging in that regard. There was no more idyllic setting imaginable. I was far from the cares of the world. Then Mary approached.
Mary was a woman, who appeared to be in her early seventies. She was dressed in lime green Capri pants, a "Viva Las Vegas" tee shirt and a Lakers’ “3-Peat” baseball cap. “My name’s Mary, how are you today?” she began. I responded that I was “fine” and nearly responded that I “loved the solitude”. But Mary looked like a story waiting to happen, right down to her high top, orange Converse All Star sneakers. So, I thought I’d let her have her say. She didn’t disappoint.
Mary cut right to the chase. “Are you Catholic?” she asked. I responded, as if answering a traffic summons, “I am Catholic, with an explanation”. My wise guy response didn’t deter her. “I work for the Arch Diocese of Los Angeles”, said Mary, “And we could use your help.” Oh no, I thought. The Arch Diocese is in enough trouble with Cardinal Mahoney’s mounting legal woes. Now they have 3-Peat Mary working for them and they need my help? Someone needs to notify the Vatican, this could be catastrophic. “How can I help?” I asked, feigning sincerity as few can. With that Mary reached into her Long Beach Ice Dogs knapsack and pulled out a stack of raffle books. “These are booster tickets. You buy one and you have the chance to win one half of all the money collected. It’s a 50/50 thing, you see. The church gets half and you can win the other half.” As she fanned out the raffle books in front of me, I noticed they were all from different Churches, throughout the Los Angeles area. “I represent the entire Arch Diocese,” she told me, “I sell tickets for every parish.”
I agreed to buy five tickets at a dollar each. “The best way to do it”, she suggested, “is to buy each ticket from a separate parish, that way they each get a share.” “Who does that bookkeeping, Mary?” I asked, “That has to be a nightmare.” She told me she did it all, she just considered it “part of the job.” When I asked if she got paid, she replied that they gave her “expenses”. “At my age, instead of walking around money, I consider it stumbling around money”, she said with a grin. I filled out one ticket in each of four books. The fifth book, Saint Peter’s parish was already filled out. “Here, take this one, it’s Saint Paul’s”, she said. I made a joke about “robbing Peter to pay Paul”. Mary just stared at me. She collected my five dollars and moved down the pier. She stopped to talk to a woman sitting two benches down rocking a baby back and forth in a stroller. The woman smiled and shook her head “no”. Mary moved on.
A man got up from the bench across from me and said, “So, now you’ve met “Booster Mary”. “Yes,” I said, “she’s very nice.” “Very enterprising too,” he said. He told me that Mary used to go to several local parishes and actually sell their tickets. “Back then it was all on the up and up,” he told me. “Then one month Mary was a little short of cash and used the booster money to pay her bills. No one could trace the tickets, there weren’t winning numbers involved, so it went on like that for years. We all knew it. We all knew we were just helping an old lady out. I still buy her tickets. Now, it’s even more blatant. Her neighbor prints the tickets up on his computer Mary pays him twenty cents a book. It’s the cost of doing business, ya’ know?” He continued, “Hey, it’s no harm – no foul. She isn’t hurting anybody. You can always tell her no. I see it as surviving by your wits. It is far better than going on welfare. It’s more dignified. Hell, it’s a better use of the money than having the Church use it to buy silence in lawsuits. Right?”
At that point, Mary had begun her swing back up the pier. She passed me and winked. “See ya’ in Church,” she said with a smile.
Win Some - Lose Some August/03
I was walking out of 7-Eleven with my traditional cup of coffee and bag of “Mini-Muffins”, heading for my truck. The guy who had been on line three people behind me stuck his head out the door of the store and said, “Hey Mike, you don’t say hello?” I responded with "I would say hello, if my name was Mike.” Almost instantaneously, he snapped his fingers and said, “Al!” I smiled and said, “Oh my God, Eddie Holmes.” Eddie and I grew up on the same block in New York City. He and his brother Preston were always in the middle of things in the old neighborhood. They’d organize the stick ball games and the trips to the movies or Shea Stadium, the rest of us just went along. All our thinking had been done for us.
I asked what Eddie was doing in California. “I work as an investigator for the SEC. We’re here looking into a couple of oil company issues”, he said. An investigator for the SEC, now that is job security. Chasing down insider trading and bogus IPO’s is a never ending task. Everytime I see a CEO belted into the back seat of a squad car,which is becoming an entertainingly regular event, I’ll think of Eddie Holmes.
I could not believe that Eddie and I were standing in a convenience store parking lot together in Torrance, California. “What odds do you think Preston would have given this, you and I meeting up here?”, I asked him. He smiled and said, “C’mon, you know Pres, he woulda’ made it “6 to 5 pick-‘em”. Preston always knew what was going to happen.”
In later years, after the stick ball games and trips were faint memories, Preston became a successful bookmaker. That’s a pretty impressive addition to the resume of the son of a homicide detective and a university chancellor. The unique thing about Preston was that, in the highly scientific world of bookmaking, where statistics have reduced gaming to all the excitement of insurance actuarial tables, he put fun into wagering. He was the guy who set the point spread on a touch football game between Thirstees Tavern and the Catholic War Veterans Club 182. In fact, he set the line at 8 points (all ties lose) and the final score was Thirstees – 24, CWV- 16. Preston collected from both sides. The man clearly knew his stuff.
It didn’t end with touch football. I was in Thirstees one afternoon, while the phone continually rang for Preston. It was basketball season and he was handling thousands of dollars in action. Thirstees had a bus stop right outside its front door. During a lull in his phone calls, a bus pulled up and Preston shouted, “Ten bucks says five people get off that bus.” We all laughed. No one took that bet. However, we were all impressed when five people disembarked. That led to an ongoing game at Thirstees. We would all throw five dollars each in the pot and make a guess as to how many people would get off the next bus. Winner take all. That game went on for weeks until Scotty Kerr decided to put the fix in. Once a week Scotty would have his wife and six kids get on the bus three stops before the bar. He would then wager that a high number of people, nine or ten, would get off the bus. As the bus would pull in, Scotty’s wife Betty would add the sufficient number of Kerrs to the passengers getting off the bus to coincide with her husband’s predetermined "prediction". The Kerr clan lived on the same block as the bar so all these kids getting off the bus never raised any suspicion. In fact, it wasn’t until Betty and Scotty had a huge argument in the bar, that she spilled the whole story.
There were no repercussions. We all had a sort of perverted admiration for a man who could put such a plan together, and be patient enough to only make the move once a week and also be smart enough to occasionally lose a bet or two. When the bus game ended, we went back to more mundane gambling. Of course, mixed in with the baseball, football and basketball bets were the always interesting, “how far can you throw a piece of bread”? and “how many pretzels can you eat in two minutes”? Eventually, Preston went straight. He took his earnings and bought two beauty parlors and a car wash in West Palm Beach, Florida. Eddie told me that Preston was married with three daughters and two granddaughters. “In fact”, he added, “he is on the school board of West Palm Beach”.
I honestly hope he has nothing to do with interscholastic sports. I'll keep watching "60 Minutes" just in case.
