It’s not like anyone else in the family approved of this. But on September 22, 1957, two days before the very last out of the final Dodgers game at Ebbets Field, long before the hard surface of Astroturf was even the seed of a dream, my older brother, Jackie Robinson Metzger, was born, near Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn, underneath the “Hit Sign, Win Suit” advertisement of Abe Stark’s retail clothing store. And more important, it was the day of the last home run ever hit by a Brooklyn Dodger—over the right centerfield wall. And with their heads poking like prisoners from building windows across the street, waving felt pennants, kids and adults punching the pockets of their baseball gloves, standing on roofs, picnicking on fire escapes, the entire population of Flatbush—Jewish and not, white and black—because of the Dodgers, was in a state of electrified and melancholic alert. And of all these loyal fans, who do you think got a big zets right on top of her head? The ball, barely clearing the 352 foot mark, took a bad hop off the top of the right field wall. And then, shoyn! Nine-months pregnant! In labor! In the heat! Frieda Metzger: a delay of the entire game, and then the crazy screaming fans.
The New York Post from the very next day: “HEADY WOMAN FAN-ATIC: DROPS BABY AND BALL.” Some of you—maybe your grandparents—remember. I’m sure. But do you know this? My dear mother, Frieda Metzger—at the wall, like Carl Furillo or Sandy Amoros, and only because my hard-working, pragmatic, night-school attending father, Moishe “Max” Metzger, trying to save a few cents—was on the wrong side of the fence. “Even at the goddamned Met they let you stand,” was his mantra.
And of all times for her water to break! Like a fire hydrant in the dog days of summer. Immediately after the seventh-inning-stretch her insides broke open like floodgates. And believe you me, it was a day hot like hell! Even from the non-paying side of the wall, Frieda managed to delay somehow the game, and refuse anyone’s help. And, how, in the midst of this, she was with contractions and pains, and still boxing for position with a gang of shirtless, freckled, prepubescent, Irish Catholic schoolboys—nothing more serious than a few loose elbows. But still. She watched with her special-occasion-only, leather-trim opera glasses through a tear in the right centerfield metal gate, which permitted her to observe the game without legal claim to even the cheapest of seats.
At this moment, an usher, or perhaps security guard, in an employee suit—from the grainy picture on my desk, who can tell? — trying to keep all hell from breaking loose, is mopping the pavement below Frieda’s legs, scrambling like a rooster with its head cut off. Frieda,...
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