Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
From SoSH
Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Date Published: June, 1998
Summary: Pulitzer Prize winner and historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, a rabid Red Sox fan who ran for President of Red Sox Nation in 2006, tells the story of her love for baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when fans at the corner store were equally divided between Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees.
But Goodwin was a Dodgers fan and she details how her father taught her to root for the team of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Goodwin dispised Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra and she shows us how baseball spawns devotion and heartbreak: Bobby Thomson's home run; the story of Mickey Owen's dropped third strike; Billy Martin's heroics. She takes us to the thrill of 1955 when Dodger fans finally didn't have to say wait till next year.
Goodwin also describes how the Dodgers’ leaving Brooklyn in 1957 and the death of her mother soon after marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.
