GIANTS VS. YANKEES: NEAR-HYSTERIA

GIANTS VS. YANKEES: NEAR-HYSTERIA
By Dick Meister

Lots of excitement among San Francisco's baseball fans this weekend over the
first non-exhibition games locally between the hometown Giants and the New
York Yankees since the 1962 World Series that was won, alas, by the
invincible Yankees.

The excitement is understandable. The Yankees, if not the Giants, are an
exciting team. But it was more than excitement that swept the area in 1962.
It was near-hysteria. As a young reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle
in those days, I felt it up close and very personal.

It didn't matter what had happened anywhere in the world during that
summer and early fall of 1962, the main headline in the city's newspapers,
spread in screaming black type 1 1/4 inches high all across the top of page
one -- day after day -- was almost always about the Giants.

Revolutions, wars? So what? It was GIANTS BEAT DODGERS ... GIANTS LOSE TO
L.A ... GIANTS 4-2 OVER REDS ....

The city was reeling. It had been only four years since the Giants had
arrived, yet they already were on the way to the World Series. A World
Series in San Francisco!

Merchants filled the newspapers with ads that offered goods "the Giants look
up to," promised "big league values," and, of courser congratulated the
Giants and their fans.

The hype was too much for some of us at the paper, even me, a former
ballplayer. I joined 10 others to sign an anti-baseball petition prompted by
the airing at the Chronicle -- loudly and daily -- of the radio broadcasts
of Giants games.

"It is not that we have any inherent objection to the Great American
Pastime," the petitioners explained. "Our protest is against the unilateral
establishment of an electronic device which broadcasts to a captive city
room the trivia associated with the sport. Exhortations like 'Willie Mays,'
while they obviously provoke a pseudo-religious ecstasy among fans, leave a
number of us writhing in embarrassment."

We gained nothing by our petition. Worse, the city editor added insult to
injury by sending us out, transistor radios in hand, to capture the mood of
the "man on the street" during the World Series' broadcasts. I was the first
to get the assignment. I was supposed to rush up to people in the street
after particularly exciting plays, get their excited comments and weave them
into one of the fluffy page one feature stories my editors favored --
"wiggly rulers," as they called them, after the wavy lines used to set them
off.

But I stuffed the radio into a jacket pocket and wandered aimlessly around
Chinatown, where there were few Giants fans in evidence, returning later to
explain lamely that I just couldn't find any men in the street who cared
about the World Series.

The next day, the radio was turned over to another reporter, but he had no
more interest in the assignment than I. The city editor, hinting darkly that
he might fire the lot of us for insubordination, got his story on the third
try -- even though the reporter he sent out that day spent the whole time in
his favorite drinking establishment.

The reporter returned to the office barely able to walk, much less type a
story or give a coherent excuse for not doing so. We propped him up
carefully behind a desk in the far reaches of the city room, safely hidden
from the nearsighted editor, then dictated a story to another reporter at
the desk directly in front of his, using the names of friends for our men on
the street and quotes we had turns making up to go along with the names.

As he completed a page, the reporter who was typing the story would turn and
lay it on the desk of the reporter who supposedly was writing the story, one
of us would shout, "Boy!," and a copy boy would grab the page and rush it to
the city editor's desk at the front of the room.

It was a very lively story, quite possibly the best wiggly ruler the
Chronicle had run in several months.

Copyright © 2007 Dick Meister

Story ID:	2350
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Local History
Location:	San Francisco CA USA
Year:	1962