“World Series Wisconsin” celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Milwaukee Braves' triumph over the New York Yankees in the 1957 World Series and the 25th anniversary of the year when “Harvey's Wallbangers" (a.k.a. the Milwaukee Brewers) won the American League pennant but lost the Series to the St. Louis Cardinals, 4 games to 3.
Perhaps because it was just “slightly before my time”, I found myself more interesting in viewing the 1957 exhibits instead of the more familiar 1982 artifacts.
In the fall of 1957, the Braves were in their fifth season in Milwaukee. Fan support, local and statewide, was unsurpassed, as shown by this chart. Attendance at County Stadium averaged 28,771 per game, compared to 5,936 for the perennially lowly Washington Senators.
At the same time, the Nelson family had recently moved to Warren, Pennsylvania, from Great Falls, Montana, where, in my memory, baseball did not exist. Through the first grade, I can’t recall seeing a bat, ball, or glove anywhere, though I’m sure I must have had some contact with the sport, however peripheral. (A native of Springfield, Massachusetts -- the birthplace of basketball, by the way, Mom always thought Great Falls was the most remote place she ever lived.)
Starting with the spring and summer of ‘58, however, my childhood in Warren involved countless games of wiffle ball and kickball. In Great Falls, I don’t remember these games being played in the schoolyard of Whittier (where I attended kindergarten) or Lincoln (1st grade) or any of the city parks we visited.
Sidelight: Minor-league baseball came to Great Falls in 1940, after the construction of Legion Park, a project of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The team abandoned the city in 1955. In the early 1960s, a group of 100 businessmen, known as the Great Falls Baseball Club, pledged $1,000 apiece toward the renovation of the 1940 baseball field. The Los Angeles Dodgers established a team, part of the Pioneer League, in 1965. Except for a change of ownership – the Chicago White Sox – the team has remained a part of the Great Falls’ sports scene ever since.
In 1957, major league baseball consisted of 16 teams – 8 in the National League and 8 in the American. The westernmost team was located in Kansas City, the Athletics being in just their third year of operation there after a long and storied history in Philadelphia. Great Falls was far beyond KC’s sphere of influence. The center of the baseball universe at this time, of course, was New York City, where the Yankees had dominated the sport since the 1920s. They almost always managed to outgun their municipal rivals: the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Part of my insularity might have to do with the fact that my folks didn’t buy a television until I was nearly 7 years old. And Great Falls’ two (?) TV stations didn’t start their broadcast day until 4:30 p.m. But this story is worth a separate blog post.
In baseball, “before my time” is anything that occurred prior to the 1960 season, when the success of the Pittsburgh Pirates turned me into the type of fan(atic) who pores over the box scores in the newspaper sports pages, learning the names and batting averages and other statistics of even the most obscure players. Reading the box scores of the seven games of the 1957 World Series, included as part of the museum’s exhibit, I recognized most of the names on the team rosters. Many of them had continued their careers at least into the early 1960s.
With a varied degree of clarity, I can recall a cluster of memories from my first visit to a major league ballpark. St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, where Dad served as minister from 1957 through his retirement in 1981, must have had a churchmen’s league at the time, which organized a father-son trip to Forbes Field to see a game between the Pirates and the San Francisco Giants on Saturday, July 18, 1959. (I was 9 at the time.) A chartered bus delivered us to our destination. For some odd reason, I picture a regular city bus, designed for short hauls, as opposed to a “coach” model for comfortable highway travel, but I can’t imagine that this was actually the case. I have an unusually clear image of stepping off the bus onto a busy sidewalk along the Schenley Drive side of the stadium. We sat in a section of seats down the right-field line and beneath the overhang of the upper deck. Although this was the first time I attended such a large-scale event, I don’t recall any feelings of fear or intimidation. (I was always a kid who loved to travel.) I must have experienced a few moments of boredom as Dad would occasionally direct my attention to what was happening on the field. My clearest memory of the game itself is a home run hit by Willie Mays, which provided the Giants with their 4-3 winning margin.
On the return trip, we had to make an unexpected stop as Dick Bloom, a year older than me – or was it Ronnie Bloom, his cousin, another year older – got sick and threw up.
“Too much Willie Mays,” joked Elmer Bloom, Dick’s dad – or was it Bernie Bloom, Elmer’s brother.
Here’s my favorite picture from the World Series Wisconsin exhibit.
Lew Burdette’s neighbors celebrate
the Braves’ World Series victory
in front of his decorated house.
The 1957 hero of the Milwaukee Braves lived -- he won 3 games, including the decisive Game 7 -- in a modest Cape Cod house in an obviously working-class neighborhood, just as if he were some guy who punched the clock at Allis-Chalmers every day. And fans and admirers could stand outside his house without being shooed away by the police. Even the car parked in the driveway bespeaks someone who doesn’t put on airs. Money has certainly changed this picture. Today, without a caption, who would guess this picture has anything to do with sports?
Oh, and just for good measure, here's the boxscore of the second major league baseball game I attended.
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