Wait Till Next Year

Last Christmas my mother gave me a$25 gift certificate for Barnes and Noble. After about six months a swung around there and in the discounted section found four books I really wanted to read. This is the first of those Wait Till Next Year is a short book written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Published in 1997 this historian to Lyndon Johnson has put together a memoir that encapsulates he experience growing up in Brooklyn New York, in 1949 being taught by her father the love for baseball and specifically the Dodgers.  In that period the Dodgers, led by Jackie Rodinson and Pee Wee Reese were talent laiden teal that had never won a World Series.  The team's slogan was "Wait Till Next Year", for the author it would take six years until 1955 for the Dodgers to win it all, an unbelievably long time for a teen aged girl.

After the 1957 season Jackson retired rather than play for the Giants, the author's mother passed due at 51 and the Dodgers decided to move to Los Angeles.  The author understandably shelved her enthusiasm for the game.

Later as a Boston occupant the author was introduced to Fenway Park and the Red Sox. The similarities between her new home and Flatbush were enough to make her a convert.

At the time of publishing, 1997, the Red Sox had not won a World Series since 1916, she would have to wait another seven years for the curse of the bambino to be broken.

I enjoyed this sweet rememberance of childhood love for family and baseball. Her other more famous work not so much, her being a flaming Yankee liberal and all. Luckily very little of that snuck into this work.