Book excerpt: Unforgettable baseball memories (from ‘Going 15 Rounds With Jerry Izenberg’)
By: Ed Odeven
Tags: Sports Journalists, Sports History, Sports Features, Writers Life, Authors

Sports columnist Jerry Izenberg

Chapter 4: Unforgettable Baseball Memories

From “Going 15 Rounds With Jerry Izenberg: A Collection of Interviews With The Legendary Columnist”

By Ed Odeven

While the New York Yankees were collecting World Series titles year after year, Jerry Izenberg was developing a lifelong passion for baseball following his beloved Newark Bears in his New Jersey hometown in the 1930s.

Decades later, Izenberg vividly recalls the sights and sounds and personalities that made the Newark Bears an institution and a great International League team in that era.

Owned by the New York Yankees, the Bears featured a number of players who became stars for the Yankees. They played their home games at Ruppert Stadium, named for Yankees owner Colonel Jacob “Jake” Ruppert, a beer mogul, who also owned the Newark farm club.

“When you would hear the Bears, growing up there, on the radio station … (they had) an announce named Earl Harper,” Izenberg recalled decades later. “And a guy hit a home run, and he (Harper) would throw a box of Wheaties (cereal) down the street behind home plate for the guy. It was a community. It’s wholly different than it is now. It was a great community. It was a community thing where if you hit a home run at the right time … you got a free hat from Adam’s Hats. They had a booster club that met on Wednesdays, but I was too young to go to any of that…”

Looking back at the Great Depression-era baseball in Newark, Izenberg talks of the days when the ushers didn’t follow a by-the-book set of rules.

“It was an unwritten rule. If you were a kid, you got to sneak into the ballpark without paying somehow,” he explained. “If you stayed in the bleachers, they left you alone, unless it was a big weekend game or a big night game. But if you got into the grandstand, they’d kick you out of the park.

“So I get into the grandstand one day, I think I was 8 or 9 years old, and there was a pitcher walking down toward the bullpen,” he went on, “and I’m asking him for an autograph, I’m leaning over the side. And I probably had three of them already, but I’m asking for another one.

“And when you are 9 years old, or 10, to you they’re ballplayers, they’re not people; they’re not people who didn’t get laid last night, or (have) stomach distress, or whose kid is sick. That’s what happens with human beings…

“So I was a snide kid. I had found a scorecard on the ground and he picked it up and threw it in the air and kept walking.”

Izenberg would never forget it.

“Well, I was devastated,” Izenberg, the longtime columnist says now. “I mean, if this had been the Toronto Maples Leafs or the Jersey City Giants, I could understand but this is bigger — one of my guys. And I’m fighting back tears and a woman comes and takes me by the arm and says, ‘Come with me.’

“And I figure, ‘Oh, god, she works for the ballclub, and I’m going to get kicked out.’

“And she walks me down the third-base line, which was where the Bears dugout was, and there’s a group of women sitting and she says, ‘Sit with these women. I’ll be right back.’

“And so I’m sitting there and I don’t know what the hell’s happening, and she walks down the steps and leans into the Bears dugout. She comes back with the baseball. And she’s got it in her hand and she puts it in my hand. And she says, ‘This is an autographed baseball with every member of the team on it.’

“And I looked at her like she came from outer space.”

Then the woman proceeded to ask Izenberg a question: “Have you ever heard of (George) Stirnweiss?”

His response?

“Oh yeah, I come to watch him all the time.”

“Well, I’m Mrs. George Stirnweiss.”

From 1943–50, Stirnweiss, a second baseman nicknamed “Snuffy,” played for the New York Yankees. He was an American League batting champion (1945, batting .309), which was lowest recorded top average in either the AL or NL since Elmer Flick of the Cleveland Naps (now called the Indians) led the Junior Circuit with a .308 average in 1905.

But back to their time in Newark and despite their age difference, Izenberg, not yet a teenager, and the ballplayer’s wife became friends.

“I was just enthralled. I’d see her in the ballpark and I’d wave, and she’d wave back,” Izenberg revealed.

He found a loyal supporter in her, too.

Or as Izenberg put it: “She’d tell the ladies (via an introduction), ‘This is Jerry, and he’s a friend of mine.

So if he has any trouble with the ushers, you bring him over and let him sit with you.’ So it was a good summer.”

Fast forward to Sept. 16, 1958, when there was a train disaster in New Jersey that killed a reported 48 passengers, including Stirnweiss, who was en route to New York for work.

“So I wrote a column about it and about her,” he said.

“About two weeks later, I got this neatly typed envelope. I opened it up … and I cannot read one word, and there’s a little typed note that says, ‘I am Mrs. Stirnweiss’s nurse, but she wanted to write this herself. If you can’t understand this, she’s really saying that she’ll never forget you.

“That’s a wonderful postscript but it’s not the end of the story.”

What happened next?

“Years later,” he went on, “when I was writing this autobiography (“Through My Eyes: A Sports Writer’s 58-Year Journey,” published in 2009), I had some confusion about where she was from, or whether she was from Newark or whatever, and I knew that her husband had coached football at Red Bank Catholic High School at one time.

“I called down there and they had no records of anything, but the guy said, ‘We know who he is and his daughter tended bar down here. So I called the bar and the guy said, ‘She doesn’t work here anymore, but she comes in a lot on weekends. I’ll tell her you’re looking for her,’ because he knew who I was because of The Ledger.

“So about a week later the phone rings and it’s a woman on the phone and she says, ‘Is this Jerry Izenberg?’

“Yes.”

And what was her response? “At last we meet. The little boy with the baseball. My mother told me that story a thousand times.”