Nine Months at Ground Zero

Note: Five years ago, with Charlie Vitchers and Bobby Gray, I wrote Nine Months at Ground Zero, an oral history of the response of the construction workers to the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center. As this anniversary apporaches, their story remains one of honor and resiliance, a testimony to the strength that we draw from others. At a time when so many memories are so painful, their story remains an inspiration.

To Charlie Vitchers, Bobby Gray and other construction workers in New York, the attack on the World Trade Center and subsequent collapse of the Towers was a sucker punch to the gut.

They knew thousands of innocents had been killed, that their city and their country had been attacked. Their outrage did not stop there. Something they had built with their own hands had been taken down. Their work had been destroyed, their legacy ruined, the collective memory of their industry wiped off the map. Not only did almost everybody working in construction in New York know someone who worked at the Trade Center – a neighbor or a cousin, a co-worker or a friend – many had worked there themselves, either when the buildings were first built or later, as other buildings went up in the complex or floors of the Towers were retrofitted for tenants. They took the attacks personally.

The World Trade Center complex were not just two of the largest and best- known structures in the world, they were the signature buildings of the New York construction industry, the epitome of what it could create. Over the course of their construction, which began in 1966, thousands of union tradesmen had worked on the Towers, and their success sparked a new era in New York hi-rise construction. In a city which hadn’t seen its skyline change dramatically in years, after the Towers were built there were suddenly cranes everywhere. Over the next few decades New York’s skyline would take on an entirely new silhouette.

The Towers themselves were so enormous that their construction inspired logistical innovations never before used in New York construction. Each of the 200,000 steel columns, panel and joist was etched and stenciled with a code. None were fabricated on site. Each was a unique piece of an incredibly complicated puzzle. The steel itself was lifted in place by a method developed in Australia, what were known as “Kangaroo cranes,” or “tower cranes,” cranes attached to a tower fixed to the structure, that jacked itself up and rose with the building. Despite their novelty, New York tradesmen had easily adapted and both had since become more or less standard in high-rise construction in New York and elsewhere.

The construction workers who built the Towers carried the experience as a badge of honor – they had built the biggest and the best, succeeding spectacularly, a once in a lifetime opportunity. Since first breaching the New York skyline, the Trade Center was the touchstone against which all other jobs were compared in scale and complexity, still discussed during coffee breaks and over beers after work. As older worker passed away, it was not uncommon to find a line in a newspaper obituary that noted that the deceased had helped build the Towers.

But when the Towers were attacked and then fell, the sense of pride and accomplishment the construction workers felt was cut off at the ground. The buildings were down, and in some strange way, though through no fault of their own, they had failed because what was never meant to fall somehow had. In response, the had an instinctive reaction. Before anyone articulated the need for their skills, thousands of them knew that now another job was calling them out, one that only they knew they could do. The rough logic of their own experience as ironworkers, laborers, carpenters, electricians, crane operators and dozens of other trades told them that just as only they had once built the Towers, they were now the only people in the world equipped for the task ahead. They had the skills, and more importantly, they felt an obligation, a duty. Their response was simple and uncomplicated; anything they had built, they could take down, because before anything else could be built in its place – and they believed it would – they had to erase what had just taken place.

With that realization a new challenge began to take shape. From a pile of rubble so immense that it resisted description, they would restore order. That was the only job that mattered now.

To Read Chapter One, see: http://indiepro.com/glenn/index.php/excerpt-from-nine-months-at-ground-zero/

The Best Day

You’ve waited a long time.

For as long as you can remember you’ve always thought about what it would be like to be there, in person, not just to see it on TV like you have a hundred times before, because every time you have seen it you’ve stopped and dreamed a little bit.

What would it be like?He has told you about when he his Dad took him and your uncle when they were both kids and how it seemed like it took all day to drive there and how he can’t remember the score anymore or who they played but he remembers popping soda cups with his foot. And then later, when he was young and living in Boston, about how you could wander in almost any time you wanted for just a couple of bucks, and that he went all the time and it wasn’t anything special. Even now, when your grandmother goes, she calls you after and tells you all about it; where she sat and what she saw, what she had to eat and how many times the fat guy in the middle of the row had to get up and down and up and down and how he missed half the game but ate seven hot dogs by her count.

Then one day he tells you – you’re going. All four of you - you, your brother and your mother, too. He knows somebody, and got some good seats, third base side. He’s even taking the day off. He shows you the tickets, lets you hold them and explains what the numbers mean and shows you on a little colored map where you’ll sit. Then he put the tickets back in an envelope and says that’s enough. You tell him not to lose them and he promises he won’t.

You saw the lights from the freeway once and it didn’t seem so big, but now that you think about actually going there, it starts looking bigger and bigger and you pay more attention when you see it on TV. When the camera pans the stands you ask “Have you ever sat there?” and “What about there?” and “Did you ever get a foul ball?” or “Where are the bathrooms?” and “Did you see Babe Ruth?”

He laughs and says you have to pay attention. He never got a foul ball or a home run, but you never know, and that’s why you have to pay attention, so you don’t miss your chance or get hit with a ball. He tells you the bathrooms are under the stands, that Babe Ruth played a long, long time and that he’s old but not that old.

The night before it’s hard to sleep and you stare at the ceiling holding your glove and hear the crowd and think about popcorn and cotton candy and hope it doesn’t rain. Breakfast is ready when you wake up and run downstairs like it’s Christmas, but he doesn’t act excited at all. The sun is shining in the window but he looks outside, shakes his head and says it looks like rain then looks at you from the corner of his eye. You stop chewing but then he winks and laughs.

It’s a long ride and he tells you to try to take a nap but you can’t shut up and ask a hundred times how much longer it’s gonna be. But when you start to get close and get caught in traffic your eyes close and then the next thing you know he’s shaking your foot and asking you if you want to go to the ballgame or not. You snap awake and climb from the car, tilted cap on head, then he stops, reaches back into the car for your glove and tosses it your way saying “You might need that,” before he locks the door.

You all hold hands and with each step the sidewalk gets more crowded and you see people wearing caps and shirts that say “Pedroia” “Martinez” and “Williams.” There are carts selling hats and pennants and sunglasses and peanuts and pretzels, and when he tells you he once had a pretzel cart himself and sold pretzels on the corner you start thinking that could be the greatest job in the world, that or playing shortstop.

You turn a corner and suddenly it is Fenway Park, all red brick and green paint and crowds and sausage smoke and old guys stubbing out cigars and vendors waving programs, and music from somewhere pouring through the sky. He reaches in his pocket, then tilts his head and asks “Did you remember the tickets?” But this time you smile. He’s got them, all four, and you stand close as he fans them out and hands them to the usher and you push through the turnstile first.

You’re there.
The game hasn’t even started and it’s already the best day ever.

Glenn’s next book, Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Season, will be published in October. To order now, visit www.glennstout.net.

TIME

[Note: This is an updated version of a column that first appeared in Boston Baseball in August of 2009. I post it here because, well, it's about TIME.]

It is time.

July is the anniversary of the addition of Pumpsie Green to the Red Sox roster in 1959, a move that integrated the Red Sox and marked the end of a shameful legacy. And each year on the anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first appearance in the major leagues in 1947 Major League Baseball celebrates the end of the color line in baseball.

During these twelve years baseball played a pivotal role in American society and proved itself worthy of its status as the National Pastime. Robinson’s call-up to the Dodgers in 1947 was controversial and feared and debated, but by the time Green belatedly integrated the Red Sox, integration and the rights of African Americans not only to play major league baseball, but to participate in all facets of society, had gained wide acceptance. While the battle for equality continues to be fought, equal opportunity, as a right, can no longer be questioned.

Sometime in the future baseball will someday commemorate the moment when the first openly gay major league baseball player chooses to reveal himself both to his teammates and the general public. Although there is, thankfully, no “ban,” legal or assumed, against a gay athlete playing major league baseball, there is still considerable social pressure within the game and within society that has thus far prevented a gay major leaguer from “coming out” and, if he chooses, simply to be himself, just like any other major leaguer.

Dating from the very beginning of the game there have always been gay players, and there are undoubtedly gay players on the field at Fenway Park each and every day of the season. The late Glenn Burke of the Dodgers – according to some, the inventor of the “high five” - and Billy Bean of the Tigers, Padres and Dodgers, both came out publicly after retiring as active players, and are perhaps the best known. It is inevitable that an active major league baseball player will one day publicly step out of the closet and into the spotlight. Yet, primarily due to fear, none has yet done so.

Acceptance of homosexuals in much of society is now rapidly becoming the norm. Several years ago a survey conducted by the Tribune newspapers revealed that fully 74% of all major league players believe that having a gay teammate would not be an issue in the clubhouse. Gay marriage is now legal in Massachusetts and in several other states. I suspect that if the players were polled today that number would be closer to 90%. Intolerance of this kind is disappearing.

Just as baseball took the lead in regard to racial integration it is time once again for major league baseball to take action and lead the way toward the acceptance of gay athletes in mainstream professional sports. In regard to its closeted, gay players, it is time for MLB – or perhaps even individual teams, such as the Red Sox, - to be proactive. The time has come for the Commissioner of Baseball and every team and club owner in baseball to prepare for that inevitability and to pronounce, clearly and openly, that baseball will not only tolerate an openly gay player, but will welcome that player – and protect his rights. The game needs to make clear that intolerance or prejudice of any kind, by any member of any major league baseball club or by any spectator in any major league ballpark, will not be tolerated.

More than twenty years after Pumpsie Green integrated the Red Sox, I heard Jim Rice and other African Americans sometimes showered with epithets in the bleachers of Fenway Park. Neither the Red Sox nor their fans did anything to prevent this. Neither, I am embarrassed to admit, did I at the time. Similar harassment of gay athletes simply must not be allowed. Think what you want, but keep your mouth shut.
This is the right thing to do, and a statement to that effect would be of immeasurable assistance to the first few players to have the courage come out. It might even give that first player the nerve to make that leap today. Maybe I am naïve, but I believe that once a player does so, in only a few short years the question of an athlete’s sexual orientation will largely cease to be an issue.

But there is also an even more compelling reason for major league baseball to do this. Every day, on a playground or on a street corner or in a backyard or in a classroom, there is a young gay person who is the object of teasing and taunts, scorn and worse. This young person - he or she – may not have a defender – or a role model – to help he or she withstand those taunts, or to answer such cruelty with the proud confidence to be one’s own self.

Baseball – if it is truly the National Pastime, a game for all people - should step up to the plate.

[Note: It is interesting to note that when this column first appeared, I did not receive withe a single complaint or any response of any kind from either a reader or anyone else. That is both a measure of progress and a measure of how much remains to be done]

Glenn’s next book, Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Season, will be published in October. To order now, visit www.glennstout.net.

What You Don't Know About Fenway Park

As a non-fiction writer, there is nothing I enjoy more than taking on a subject that everyone thinks they know everything about, and uncovering new material. In regard to my new book about Fenway Park - arguably the best known sporting venue in the country, and one of the best known in the world - this is once again the case.

Three years ago I set out to write the definitive account of the creation, design, and building of Fenway Park and to allow the reader to experience Fenway Park in its first year, the Red Sox championship season of 1912. A few weeks from now, Fenway 1912 will be published.

In the book I make use of sources that no other purported history of either Fenway Park or the 1912 season or the 1912 World Series has ever utilized. I promise that this book will prove to be a revelation for even the most hard core fan of either the Red Sox or Fenway Park. I believe it makes all previous histories of the park completely obsolete. Some of the new information includes:

-Period architectural drawings of Fenway Park dating from 1912 that have NEVER been used elsewhere or been reproduced. To my knowledge these are the only period drawings known to exist and as far as I have been able to determine I may be about the only person to look at them - and realize what I was seeing, since 1912.

-A detailed construction history of the ballpark. This includes not only a complete and detailed schedule of the construction of the park, clearly outlining what was built when, but a full explication of the construction methods used in the construction of the park, what it was like for workers, and how the way Fenway Park was built impacted not only the 1912 season and but the ballpark you see today.

- A biography of Fenway architect James E. McLaughlin and builder Charles Logue. These two men had a lasting impact on Fenway Park but previous to my book have been little more than names on a page.

- A discussion of the architectural influences that are the reason Fenway Park looks the way it does today. Before this book, the architectural style and influences exhibited in Fenway Park have been mis-identified

- Detailed discussions on how the new ballpark affected the Red Sox and the 1912 World Series, and a dramatic and lively reconstruction of both the season and the Series, including the infamous contest between Joe Wood and Walter Johnson on September 4, 1912, perhaps the greatest pitching matchup in baseball history. Fenway Park impacted every inning of every game played there during 1912, and to fully understand both the 1912 season and the World Series - as well as every subsequent season in Fenway - one must experience that way Fenway Park revealed itself during the course of its inaugural season

- I explain not only why the "Green Monster" exists, but precisely why it was built the way that it was, and why and when the name "Green Monster" came into use. And guess what? Long before the "Green Monster" seats were built, people were watching baseball from atop the wall.

- How changes made to the ballpark over the course of the 1912 season determined the future evolution of Fenway.

- A detailed analysis of the 1912 season, including Joe Wood's remarkable 34-5 pitching campaign, and how two small changes - one to his pitching windup, and one small injury to another player - resulted in one of the greatest season-long pitching performances in baseball history.

- How pitching great Walter Johnson almost became a member of the 1912 Red Sox.

- The true story of the 1912 World Series, how a Red Sox team torn apart by dissension nevertheless prevailed, all due to an assist from Fenway Park.

I tell the story of Fenway Park as a readable, lively, living biography, full of characters and action, not as an academic history. Thirty years ago I moved to Boston because of Fenway Park, and it changed my life. I wrote this book for everyone whose life has been changed by Fenway.

If you read and appreciated Red Sox Century, or if you have ever sat in Fenway Park, this book is for you. I promise that you will never look at Fenway park the same way again.

My Piece of Fenway

CHIN MUSIC

My Piece of Fenway

By Glenn Stout


I have long contended that one of the reasons Fenway Park is still with us is not because it has been “preserved” or kept static, but because it has been susceptible to change. This is how what was once the left field wall became “the Green Monster”, why we call the right field foul pole “Pesky’s pole,” and why other areas of the park – “canvas alley” for one – have become named and, in a sense, personalized. This, more than anything else, makes Fenway Park special.

It is particularly special to me, and for a reason that goes beyond the fact that the ballpark - not the ballclub - was the reason I moved to Boston in the fall of 1981, a decision that has determined the course of my life as much as any other I have made. One reason that Fenway Park remains so special to me is that each time I am at the park – or see it on television – there is a small feature that I partly claim as my own.

After the 2002 season the Red Sox, finally succumbing to a modicum of common sense under new ownership, built seats atop the Green Monster in left field. Although this was not the first time fans would be able to watch a game from that vantage point, as I have recently uncovered several references that note that fans watched games from atop the wall in 1912, the “Green Monster seats” are the first legitimate seats in this area.

Now, to place as many seats as possible in such a limited space, the Sox built those seats at a pitch far more severe than elsewhere in the park. While seats in the main grandstand are arranged at a “rising pitch” that increases from 15 degrees from the base to 20 degrees at the back of the stands, the Green Monster seats – like many seating areas in new ballparks, are at a much steeper pitch, approaching 45 degrees.

As workers rushed to finish the seats before the start of the season select VIPs were allowed to take in the view and a few photographs of the new seating area began to appear in print. I saw some of these pictures and talked with some of these people.

The first thing everyone said was how great the view was. The second thing they said was that they hoped no one fell onto the field. It was easy to imagine a fan stumbling headlong down the steep aisle stairs and flipping over the front row and then onto the field, or for a fan in the front row to lean over too far reaching for a ball and fall, or else accidently drop something on Manny Ramirez’s head. While none of these scenarios seemed likely, as the recent tragic fall at Texas’s Arlington Stadium demonstrates, such accidents are not impossible.

In my May column in Boston Baseball that year, I wrote that if the Sox didn’t put up a railing the Green Monster could become a gravestone. When I mentioned this to an attorney friend he stated that once the issue had been raised it put the Sox were on notice in regard to a danger “they know of, or should know of.” If they didn’t take action any of these accidents ever took place they were leaving themselves wide open to a lawsuit.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. At about the same time Jack Curry wrote in the New York Times that there was only “an 18-inch ledge separating you from leaning too far for a baseball and becoming a flying object,” and in the same article Larry Lucchino mentioned there was “the possibility of a protective railing being added to the front row.”

Now it could just be a coincidence, but all I know is that lo and behold, a short time after my column was published a solid barricade about eight inches high appeared atop the Green Monster, making it much less likely that any kind of accident would occur.

Call it the “Writer’s Rail, ” but every time I see that barricade on the top of the Green Monster, I feel the same way Johnny Pesky does when he sees the right field foul pole.

A piece of that sucker is mine.

Glenn’s next book, Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Season, will be published in October. To order now, visit www.glennstout.net.



from Boston Baseball August 2011

There She Goes

On this day in 1926, Trudy Ederle not only became the first woman to swim the English Channel, but only the sixth person to do so. And oh yeah - she beat the existing men's record by nearly two hours. My book about her, Young Woman and the Sea, is my best to this point in my career, and I've also written about her for the juvenile/YA market in Yes She Can! Women's Sports Pioneers.

Celebrate with a swim, then a good book on the beach.

My Breakfasts with George

I knew George Kimball through his work for more than thirty years but I met him only three times. It is perhaps some measure of the man that each was unforgettable.

The first time was in the early 1980s, shortly after I moved to Boston after graduating from Bard College. I wasn’t a writer yet – at least I wasn’t published. But I knew I liked poetry and I knew I liked baseball, so each Opening Day I donned an old baseball uniform, parked myself on the sidewalk beneath Fenway Park’s Green Monster and read baseball poetry for two or three hours to the drunks standing in line for the bleachers. The first year a few newspaper reporters looking for local color stumbled upon me so the second year I sent out press releases. George Kimball called me and asked to meet him late one morning at the Eliot Lounge, the legendary Boston marathon bar. I didn’t know what he looked like. “Just ask for me,’ he said. “They know me there.”

I knew Kimball as a writer, both from the Boston Herald and from a story he’d written in 1971 while working for the Boston Phoenix called “Opening Day at Fenway,” which had been re-printed in the fine baseball literary anthology, Baseball I Gave You all the Best Years of My Life, edited by Richard Grossinger and Kevin Kerrane, a source I mined for baseball poetry. The story is more a sketch of characters, about Fat Howie and three cab drivers from Chelsea, and not a game story at all. I figured Kimball might be a kindred spirit.

I walked into the Eliot Lounge for the first time early the next afternoon, a day or two before opening day. I was the only customer and asked the bartender, who I now know was the legendary Tommy Leonard, if he had seen George Kimball. “Not yet,” he said, ‘But he’ll be around.”

As I nursed a beer a figure suddenly loomed nearby, all shoulders and shadow and spoke: “Hi Glenn, I’m George Kimball.”

He was wearing a ratty Army fatigue jacket, boots and a pair of blue jeans, his hair was uncombed and wild. He squinted at me with his one good eye and his face wore something approaching a beard. In short, he looked the way I was trying look. I knew of only two other one-eyed writers and they were both personal; heroes, the poets Robert Creeley and Jim Harrison. I figured I was in good hands.

I was. We talked for the next hour, half an interview and half just a conversation, and Kimball learned I had attended Bard and studied with the prolific poet Robert Kelly. He not only knew Bard, but he knew Kelly. A lifetime before they had both been part of the post-Beat literary scene in New York. As we talked it rapidly became obvious that Kimball had read everything I had and a whole lot more, that he had already lived the kind of life I had only read about, a life full of writing, and writers.

And now he was a sports writer. I couldn’t believe it. After getting out of school with a degree in writing poetry I was unemployable, a security guard and a library aide, but, rather remarkably, I had actually been interviewed twice for jobs as a sportswriter, once at a county weekly in Ohio, and by the Poughkeepsie Journal. Neither had hired me. Yet here was a living example that perhaps those efforts weren’t in vain. Here was someone who, like me, loved sports and literature and, I could tell, was exactly who he was and no one else. It was good to know there was a place for that. And maybe there was a place for me.

He wrote a nice column on me and I read poetry on Opening Day for another seven or eight years. By the time I stopped I had, improbably, become a sports writer for Boston Magazine, and was just beginning my tour of duty as series editor for The Best American Sport Writing and was working on my first book, while working at the Boston Public Library. In a funny way, none of that might have happened had I not started reading baseball poetry outside Fenway Park and been interviewed by George; people remembered the story, and I remembered his example.

I don’t remember meeting George again but we did speak a few times when he called the library for some research help, where I was the defacto go-to-guy for sports reference questions. And on a visit back to Bard once I had run into Robert Kelly and mentioned that I had met Kimball. He had just responded with a smile that told me the memory of their friendship was still real and treasured and told me “Give my love to Brother George.” The next time we spoke, I did.

I met George for the second time a couple years ago. Out of nowhere he sent me an e-mail that he was going to be passing through close to where I live in northwestern Vermont and he wanted to have lunch. I wasn’t going to be around so I had to pass, but a few weeks later he contacted me again. He was on his way to visit his kids, Teddy and Darcy, both of who lived and worked around the Jay Peak ski hill.

I waited for George at a small diner and when he lumbered out of the car, still smoking a cigarette, and I was both happy and sad to see him. Happy to see that he was the same unkempt, distracted wreck of a guy and sad to see that he was so sick. I had known he was ill but it was still a shock to see the shrunken figure of his face and his clothes hanging so loosely.

He just started talking, like we’d talked a hundred times before, and we ordered breakfast. Actually, George ordered twice, a massive pile of pancakes, extra butter, double butter, double toast, and I got it; he knew he was going to die, but damned if he was going to act like he was dying. This was a not a man who was going to go quietly.

Nominally, he wanted to talk about this boxing collection he and John Schulian were putting together, and wanted to know if I thought my editor at Houghton Mifflin might be interested. I gave him her information, but told him it was unlikely, as the book business was bad and anthologies a hard sell even in good times. But mostly I think he just wanted to talk, and as sick as he was he probably needed to take a break from the long drive, and he gave me a copy of Four Kings, his fine book on Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler, and I gave him a copy of the latest edition of The Best American Sports Writing, and we talked about books and writing and writers until the coffee was cold and the last of the melted butter had congealed on his plate. I didn’t expect to see him again.

A few months later, however, I heard from him once more, this time an invitation to meet for breakfast again at a Bistro in Burlington. I walked in and didn’t see George, so I asked a staff person if they had a table for “Kimball” and then I heard a familiar voice say “Are you here to meet George?”

Beer in hand, it was Bill Lee, the former Red Sox pitcher and his wife. I knew Bill a little and we started talking about George and how sick he was, but before we got too far, in he came, with several friends and his son and daughter and their partners and before I knew it I was swept up in the entourage sitting at huge table with about twelve other people all talking at once.

I hardly talked to George at all, but that didn’t really matter. He hadn’t wanted anything but was just being nice and wanted me in the mix. I spent most of the next two hours and two Bloody Marys talking to Bill Lee, not about baseball and not as a writer, but like a neighbor about the kind of things people our age who live in Vermont talk about; cutting wood, making syrup, crossing the border, aging parents and dying friends.

I didn’t see George after that, but I heard from him once in a while on Facebook, and I was thrilled when At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing was picked up by the Library of America, and some friends who knew him better than I kept telling me how he was doing, which was not well, physically, but fabulously otherwise. For as his former colleague at the Boston Herald wrote in his terrific appreciation for that paper yesterday * , “George didn’t ‘fight’ cancer, as is the meaningless cliché. He did something better. He ignored it.”

That he did, writing and writing and writing, to the last second of the last round. I’m just happy to have witnessed a small part of that, which was much more than a legacy, but a lasting lesson.

So today I think I’ll read “Opening Day at Fenway” and all about Fat Howie and three cab drivers from Chelsea one more time. And then get to work. There's alot of things I still have to say.


* http://bostonherald.com/sports/other_sports/general/view.bg?articleid=1350253&position=1