Super Week for the South Bronx

The New York Yankees went on a winning streak at their new stadium last week, and two products of the neighborhood have scored big on the political scene--Colin Powell in a challenge to save the Republican Party from Dick Cheney and today Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama's pick for the Supreme Court.

As the confirmation buzz starts, Americans will get to know much more about the new nominee, potentially the first Hispanic on the Court, but for a start, Judge Sotomayor grew up near Yankee Stadium and, in one of her first notable cases as a jurist in 1995, ended the Major League baseball strike by ruling against the owners for trying to subvert collective bargaining in labor negotiations.

In the past half century, the South Bronx has become the poster child for urban poverty and devastation but, as a product of that neighborhood, I can testify that, through generations of Eastern European refugees, African-Americans and Hispanics, it has also housed families with a burning desire to educate their children into the American Dream.

In the era of Barack Obama, efforts to improve life in such communities are part of the national agenda, and the emergence of such figures as the new Supreme Court nominee foreshadows the dividends that those investments could be paying in the future.

Update: In announcing the selection of Judge Sotomayor, President Obama praised her "rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law” and added that it is vitally important that a justice know “how the world works, and how ordinary people live.”

Sotomayor described herself as "a kid from the Bronx." She sounds like all of the above.

The Fat Lady Sings at Yankee Stadium

Soon after returning to the Bronx from World War II, I went to the Stadium to see a football game. The home team, called the New York Yankees, was inept but all through the game a stout woman sitting alone several rows away was loudly cheering her heart out.

Watching her, I thought about the emptiness of some lives that could only be filled with devotion to a team of professional losers. I was overcome with emotion over such pathos until someone told me that the woman was Kate Smith, whose business manager Ted Collins owned the team, bought no doubt with his percentage of her earnings as one of the most popular singers of the time.

During the seventh inning break at tomorrow's final game before they demolish the Stadium, there will likely be tears on and off the field as the booming sounds of Kate Smith's "God Bless America" fills the storied arena for the last time.

As it does, I will be thinking of the day I felt so sorry for the fat lady who is singing for the last time at the field of dreams that has meant so much in my life.

Yankee Stadium

It came to life only months before I did and, all through a Bronx childhood, the Stadium was my field of dreams.

Even before I was old enough to go there, it brought color and excitement into my life. A block from where I lived, there was a squat windowless structure built years earlier for making silent movies, but it was deserted, just another foul-line marker for stickball games on the street.

Then one afternoon in 1937, a crowd gathered at the entrance, two lines of policemen stretched their arms to open the way for people getting out of limos and a tall man in fitted yellow sports shirt and slacks with no expression on his tanned face got out, crossed the sidewalk and disappeared into the building.

I had never been to Yankee Stadium a mile away so I knew Joe DiMaggio only from grainy newspaper pictures, jumpy newsreels and the excited voices of radio sportscasters, but here he was. The sudden texture and color of his face and clothes shocked my senses into a sweet awareness that he actually lived in the same world I did. Beyond the baseball cards and box scores, Joe DiMaggio was suddenly real, only six feet away.

When I saw him next at the Stadium, I stepped out of a tunnel to be overwhelmed by an expanse of bright green framed by roaring white bleachers and dark stands. Suddenly, the whole world took on color, dimension and sound--thousands of people united in an overwhelming reality I had never know to exist.

From then until only a few weeks ago, my final visit to the place that will be torn down at the end of summer, Yankee Stadium and the heirs of Joe DiMaggio have been part of my life, as real as family, friends and neighbors.

One night in the early 1980s, an hour before game time, I was in George Steinbrenner’s private dining room for an evening sponsored by a Christian athletes’ association. A few days earlier, the son of Yankee pitcher Tommy John had fallen from a second-story window and was now in critical condition.

Before dinner, Norman Vincent Peale led us in prayer for little Travis John. I lowered my head and wished hard for the child’s recovery. Days later, the boy was out of danger, and the experience only confirmed what I had always known: The Stadium was a magical place where the hard realities of the world are kept out by a dream life shared by millions over the years of my lifetime.