Wait Till Next Year

 

Doris Kearns Goodwin, “Wait Till Next Year: a memoir”  Compass Press (Large Print), 1997, 276 pp.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent memoir recounts her growing up in Brooklyn in the 50’s in a Brooklyn neighborhood that contained a butcher, grocery store, and all the small businesses, schools, and churches that, at the time, went with small neighborhoods. The neighborhood loyalties were divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans; Doris was an obsessed Dodger fan. 

Through Doris, born in 1943, we meet the people who most influenced her early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin 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.

I was most impressed with the sense of community the book describes so well.  A sense of community I grew up with in a small town but is now gone for both myself and Doris and those that live in those areas now.