The Cap

Abstract

The Cap Robert A. Moss (bio) It is a blue baseball cap with a white script B, immediately known to Brooklyn expats of a certain age as representing the Brooklyn (i.e., the authentic) Dodgers. Many of us wore the cap as children, signaling our heritage and loyalty and thinking nothing more of it until 1957, when greed impelled Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner, to desert Brooklyn for the sunnier and more lucrative climes of Los Angeles. I wear the cap regularly, and what is notable today is that this relic of half a century ago evokes epiphanies of recognition by (mostly) men too young to have known the team in its post–World War II heyday. Hardly a week passes without someone stopping me to talk about the Dodgers. Surprisingly, it’s not just members of my own generation who recognize the cap but their children too. Invariably, the latter, now in their thirties or forties, will tell me that their dads or moms were great Dodger fans who recalled for them the fervent rooting of their youth. Some parents went even further, catechizing their children with the names and numbers of the great Boys of Summer Dodgers teams. Twice in the last month at the airport, tsa inspectors were as interested in my cap as in my carry-on. One informed me that he had two Sandy Koufax rookie cards. On my return from Japan, the customs agent commented favorably on my cap and waved me through with a smile. At the Doubletree Hotel in Deerfield Beach, Florida, Marcel paused during the check-in procedure to tell me that he had lived in Flatbush and remembered Jackie Robinson. In Austin, Texas, at a Thanksgiving Day parade, a youngish professor of public health, newly moved from Yale to the University of Texas, told me of his father’s undying love for the Dodgers and how he had steeped his son in the lore of Brooklyn. At a bagel joint in Connecticut, owned by two brothers from Brooklyn, the cap elicited streams of memories. While paying my tab at the cashier’s station, another customer was moved to reminisce. In a Norfolk restaurant, a young black waiter knew all about a team that had left the field before he was born. And outside Montifiore Cemetery in Queens, two elderly men stopped to tell me about their love for the team, a sort of Mourner’s Kaddish for the Dodgers. [End Page 153] Why this particular persistence of memory? Why do Brooklyn’s Dodgers exert such a hold on our collective remembrance? Surely rooting for the Yankees or the Red Sox exerts a similar power over fans in New York or New England. But those teams still exist, their histories and legacies continue to evolve. In contrast, the Brooklyn Dodgers are extinct; their triumphs and failures have faded into history. Indeed, even Roger Kahn’s happy choice of title, The Boys of Summer, elides the full impact of Dylan Thomas’s doleful lines in which the phrase originates: I see the boys of summer in their ruinLay the gold tithings barren,Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils In large part, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ transmutation into America’s team can be traced to the now-iconic status of Jackie Robinson. Reviled and abused by many when he broke “organized” baseball’s color line, first in Montreal in 1946 and then in Brooklyn in 1947, Robinson is now recognized as a pioneer of the civil rights movement that gathered momentum in the decades after World War II and led to the judicial and legislative victories of the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr. explicitly recognized Robinson’s importance in paving his own path forward, and baseball has enshrined Robinson by retiring his number 42 throughout the major leagues. Every April 15, all major-league players wear the number 42 in honor of Robinson and in memory of his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but there is also an unintentional and ironic reminder of a darker residue from that rookie season. In response to anonymous death threats directed at Robinson before a series in Cincinnati, a teammate suggested...