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Remembering Fabulous Frank
By: Janis Jennings, Ph.D.
For one year in the early sixties, when I was in high school, my parents bought four season tickets to see the Dodgers. Their plan was to entertain business friends, but my sister and I got to go instead if other arrangements didn't work out.
The Dodgers had moved to L.A. only a few years before and Dodger Stadium itself was new. People were still talking about how it had been built without drinking fountains - an oversight that cost a lot of money and was a scandal.
Night games had recently been introduced and fans stared with curiosity at the impressive banks of lights that bathed the field with a fluorescent blue. I remember the shuffling sounds of the excited crowd on the balmy summer nights, the paper airplanes that glided above the game and seemed to ride indefinitely on the updraft from the crowd, the organ going through its rousing rhythms, the smell of popcorn and roasted peanuts, the agile ball players chewing their chaw and adjusting their hats, as Vin Scully gave the play-by-play on the transistor radio we brought along to augment the stadium
announcer.
I knew Vin Scully from listening to Dodger games on the radio with my grandfather. Gramp was a great sports fan and lived in a tiny travel trailer behind our house. He was never invited to go to the ballgames--or anywhere else for that matter--and spent all his time listening to the radio and waiting for the two pints of port wine Mother measured out for him each afternoon at five.
Dodger Stadium sold hot dogs inexplicably far longer than the bun so the wiener stuck out three inches at either end. The concession stand called them "fabulous franks," which embarrassed me because Gramp's name was Frank. To my mind, as an opinionated fourteen-year-old, it was very wrong for a person to have the same name as a hot dog--least of all my grandfather, who needed all the dignity he could muster.
I always felt defensive about Gramp. I realize now that my parents--both ambitious Capricorns--wanted desperately to be successful and
respectable after growing up poor on the wrong side of the tracks during the Great Depression. They were ashamed of Gramp. At one time he had been a handsome cowboy, a champion roper and sharp-shooter. By the time he was living behind our house, he was a broken-down old wino. I didn't know then about the conflicted emotions of caring for an aging parent. In my little universe, Gramp was the one adult who had time for me. He had a funny sense of humor, he had taken an interest in my pet turtle, he had taught me how to read box-scores and how to play checkers.
The Dodgers that year had a mythic quality: Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax were pitchers. Maury Wills played short stop, Willie Davis and his uncle, Tommy Davis, were outfielders. There was a legendary clean-up batter whose name I have forgotten. Sandy Koufax pitched a no-hitter.
I remember a summer of great plays, a few disappointing losses, and some sensational cliff-hanging wins. After the games, we would file out with the crowds of sweaty fans, then sit surrounded by the patient throbbing of thousands of idling cars waiting to get out of the parking lot and onto the freeways. Freeways were still considered to be a triumph of urban planning, and my parents always commented favorably on their expanding network.
No matter when we got home, Gramp's light would still be on, the sound of a radio sports program drifting out of the trailer windows into the summer night. I felt guilty because we had been to see the Dodgers and he hadn't, and because my teen-age world had filled with new interests. I didn’t spend time with Gramp like I used to.
Four years later, after I had left for college, Gramp died. It was my first experience with death. The funeral was a small graveside ceremony attended by aunts and uncles, and some cousins I didn't know. The minister, who had not met any of us before, said a few platitudes. I watched the shiny, fake-wood casket being lowered into the ground. Within a few moments, Mother and the aunts had their heads together over the floral wreaths to see who had sent them. Daddy and his brothers went to stand under an oak tree and smoke. I tried to hide my tears when I realized I was the only one crying.
Janis Jennings, Ph.D. is a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist with a private practice in Santa Barbara, California.
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