{"id":219,"date":"2014-03-21T02:03:50","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T06:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=219"},"modified":"2015-10-17T23:30:30","modified_gmt":"2015-10-18T03:30:30","slug":"scd-bean-and-the-cod","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=219","title":{"rendered":"Sports Collectors Digest: Bean and the Cod"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel<\/span><\/p>\n

As Fenway Park approaches its 100th anniversary in 2012, I turned recently to a long forgotten book from 1947, which glorified the Red Sox franchise long before it became the darling of literary society and the focal point of a \u201cRed Sox Nation\u201d concept.<\/p>\n

The book was called \u201cThe Red Sox: The Bean and the Cod,\u201d and if you grew up in the \u201840s and \u201850s as a Red Sox fan, it was \u201cmust reading,\u201d because there wasn\u2019t much else.<\/p>\n

But about that title\u2026.<\/p>\n

The title would sound strange to those not from New England, but Cod and Bean are among the many dishes unique to the area\u2019s menus. One supposes they were intended to be \u201cfeel good\u201d things for Boston area readers, but \u201cI have no idea what it means, it\u2019s just a lousy title,\u201d notes Al Silverman, 85, who grew up in New England and became a noted sportswriter himself. It would be like a book called \u201cThe Mets: Bagels and Pastrami.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the title was conceived by the publisher, Waverly House.<\/p>\n

Written by Al Hirshberg, who later collaborated with Jimmy Piersall on \u201cFear Strikes Out,\u201d it was essentially a history of Tom Yawkey\u2019s 13 years as owner of the Sox, culminating in the team\u2019s 1946 pennant \u2013 its\u2019 first since the sale of Babe Ruth.<\/p>\n

So joyous was Boston after its long awaited triumph that Hirshberg even got Ted Williams to write a foreword.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m glad that Al Hirshberg is writing the story of the modern Red Sox,\u201d he wrote, \u201cfor the modern Red Sox are my team, and I am proud to be a member of it\u2026.I hope it is the only major league team I will ever be with.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 220-page volume essentially begins with Yawkey\u2019s 1933 purchase of the team from a group fronted by Bob Quinn, and the early pages cover Quinn\u2019s purchase ten years earlier from Harry Frazee, who is already smothered in disdain by the author, and presumably by the fans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was the club that Frazee had wrecked so thoroughly that there was nothing left but the privilege of representing Boston in the American League,\u201d he writes, \u201cplus a ball park which was groaning and grunting under the weight of the years, and thread by thread, was falling apart at the seams.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe failure was not the fault of Bob Quinn\u2026the glories of the past\u2026.would never have slipped away, except for Frazee\u2019s willingness to present the New York Yankees with the great stars of the early \u2018twenties, including a powerful young man with the face of a pixie and the legs of a ballet dancer whose name was Babe Ruth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quinn is acknowledged by Hirshberg as helping with the book\u2019s early accounts. Also getting a nod is his son John who was then the general manager of the Boston Braves.<\/p>\n

The sale to Yawkey is described by Quinn as owing to the 1932 death of Palmer Winslow of Columbus, who provided the bulk of the capital to run the team in the \u201820s. Now the risk of running a losing operation would land on Winslow\u2019s widow, and Quinn was not prepared to put her to that.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe knew he would have no trouble finding a buyer,\u201d wrote Hirshberg, (1909-73). (Boston was a magnificent baseball city. The fans there were starry-eyed and faithful. Year after year, they had lived in the same fool\u2019s paradise as had Quinn.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Eddie Collins who introduced Quinn to his friend Yawkey, described as a \u201chopeless baseball fan. He loved the game, and all his life, he had sneaked off to the ball park eery time he could. He was very young, very enthusiastic, and very wealthy\u2026..a Yale graduate\u2026not quite 30 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book features wonderful portraits of Lefty Grove and Jimmie Foxx, with details provided by Connie Mack\u2019s son Earle; of Joe Cronin and Collins and of course Williams, and of the \u201946 team that finally got to the World Series, although they couldn\u2019t get past the Cardinals and make it a world championship. Vintage ink sketches were provided by \u201cFerguson\u201d, in the quaint style of the day.<\/p>\n

Modern Boston writers have taken Yawkey to task for the slowness of integrating the team, and the current owners have certainly shown that there was a lot more potential in rehabbing Fenway than Yawkey may have realized. But \u201cBean and Cod\u201d places him at a time when he was much admired, and that esteem tended to last until his death just after the nation\u2019s bicentennial celebration of 1976.<\/p>\n

This book is a celebration of a long-awaited pennant, done in the style of post-war America when everything seemed possible. Even, at long last, a pennant for the Red Sox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel As Fenway Park approaches its 100th anniversary in 2012, I turned recently to a long forgotten book from 1947, which glorified the Red Sox franchise long before it became the darling of literary society and the focal… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":2277,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-template-full.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-219","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4s5bl-3x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2466,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219\/revisions\/2466"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}