Seeing home, p.1
Seeing Home, page 1
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In memory of my parents, Edward and Rosanna.
For my beautiful bride, Allison, who is always at my side.
For my sons, Eddie and Christopher, for their love and support, and for my grandsons: E.J., Adam, and Sean.
They have all brought me great joy.
—ED LUCAS
For E.J., Adam, Sean, Aiden, and Talon, so that you and your children will always know that love is what kept our family going, through all the peaks and valleys.
To the late and beloved Mrs. “Mickey” McCahill, who helped run the office at Saint Al’s.
You always took time to compliment my writing, to encourage me, and to boost my confidence. You also asked for the first copy of the first book I wrote. This one’s for you.
—CHRISTOPHER LUCAS
Contents
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Introduction: Everyone Should Be So Lucky
1
No Cup or Cane
2
Not a Handicap, Just an Inconvenience
3
Pick Up Your Oar and Start Rowing!
4
Baseball Took My Sight and Gave Me My Life
5
Hey, Buddy, Is That One of Those Sight-Seeing Dogs?
6
Don’t Listen to the Naysayers, Kid!
7
Cold Cuts and Hot Feet: My Life in the Clubhouse
8
Not Above You, Not Beneath You, but with You
9
I Refuse to Believe That Justice Is Blind
10
Does Home Plate Look Like a Dinner Plate?
11
Bride of the Yankees
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About Ed Lucas and Christopher Lucas
Introduction: Everyone Should Be So Lucky
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April 2015 marked my sixtieth straight appearance on Opening Day at Yankee Stadium covering the team. A career that I wasn’t sure would ever begin has now spanned the eras from Rizzuto to Jeter. It feels odd being one of the elder statesmen, but I’m always glad to give advice to any of the new reporters, broadcasters, or bloggers who ask, though as a guy raised on typewriters and twenty-four-hour lags between composing a story and having it appear in print, I’m still amazed by the speed at which blogs get posted.
When my grandchildren, E.J., Adam, and Sean, were studying Helen Keller and Louis Braille in school, their teachers would ask me to come by to speak to the class about life as a blind person. Inevitably, the kids would ask me a lot of questions that often got right to the heart of things.
“If there was an operation now that could help you see,” one of the kids would invariably ask, “would you have it?”
To their surprise, my answer would always be, “No.”
At this point, I’ve lived six times more of my life as a blind man than as a boy with sight. It would be too much of a shock now for me to return. The only thing I say I wish is for just five minutes of sight, five minutes so I could see my sons, Eddie and Chris, my wife, Allison, and my grandsons, all for the very first time with my own eyes.
One of the kids might also ask me this: “If you weren’t blind, would you still be involved in baseball?”
Surprisingly, my answer would be no to that, too.
When I put some thought into the way my life might have turned out if I didn’t get hit between the eyes with a baseball in October 1951, causing me to lose my sight, I realized that I probably would have gone into some kind of science.
Baseball was definitely my career choice at twelve years old, as it is for many kids who love sports, but then life and reality set in. Like most, I’m sure I would have eventually sought a safer, more traditional profession.
The accident actually left me frozen in time. I was scared that my life was over at twelve, and baseball became an exciting escape route out of that crippling fear. I put my full focus on that, ruling out every other option. I gave myself nothing to fall back on. Happily, it all worked out.
Though I didn’t realize it then, God graced me with a wonderful gift: When He took the use of my eyes away, He allowed me to gain an even better vision of the world than I might have ever known.
When you can’t see, you are only able to judge people by their character and integrity, not by the color of their skin, or by how they look and dress. What’s inside a person’s heart became my measuring stick. I can hear their hearts in their voices. Nobody can hide that from me.
I don’t ever feel pity for myself for being struck blind. I’ve been given an opportunity to live a life without visual prejudices and with greater empathy for the struggles of others.
This has driven me to work harder to properly honor the Good Lord, who generously chose to bless me with such an abundance of family, friends, moments, and memories. I am determined to give back, to use those same gifts and opportunities to help others overcome any obstacles in their lives, just as I learned to do.
I will cherish these gifts forever, and I am overwhelmingly grateful to God for them.
Everyone should be so lucky.
1
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No Cup or Cane
Wool uniforms are extremely uncomfortable, even in cool temperatures.
When I was twelve years old, in the spring of 1951, my mother’s brother Eugene gave me the wool uniform jersey he wore when he played semipro baseball in our New Jersey hometown. I remember the pride I felt as I put on the large, heavy gray shirt with the number 4 stitched on the back, and the words “Jersey City Eagles” on the front. I almost never took it off after that.
It wasn’t so bad at first, but when the warm weather came, and summer started heating up, the uniform top seemed to gain fifty extra pounds from all of the sweat my slim body was pouring into it. When school let out, a typical day would go like this: I would get up in the morning, put Uncle Eugene’s jersey on, match it with whatever pants I could find, and then head out to play ball with my friends. At noon I’d stop to have lunch, try to dry the shirt out a bit, then go back out to play again until I heard my mother calling me for dinner.
Baseball was my life back then. It still is.
My mother, Rosanna, knew how much I loved the game and how much the jersey meant to me. Each night as I went to bed she would lovingly take the shirt from my room and wash it. We lived in a small apartment in a public housing project, so washing machines were not readily available. Instead, she would use an old-fashioned washboard and spend an hour scrubbing out all of the sweat and grime by hand. Then she would hang the shirt up, either inside on the shower curtain or outside on a clothesline, so that it would be ready for me the next day.
My mother did all of this even though she really didn’t want me to play ball at all.
It wasn’t that my mother hated baseball. She regularly listened to games with me and my father, a die-hard New York Giants fan. She was just being protective of me. I was born with a medical condition that limited my sight. Even the slightest jolt might take away my vision forever. Though I could see with the help of thick glasses, I was classified as legally blind. At twelve years of age, I wasn’t concerned about such things. My parents worried that their worst fear, my losing my sight completely, could happen at any moment.
My dad, Edward Joseph Lucas, Sr., was a sports fan his whole life. As a first-generation Irish-American, he lived for Notre Dame football games on the radio in the fall. His real passion, though, was baseball. No matter what time of year it was, Dad could always be counted on to talk about his beloved Giants, at that point one of the premier teams in the National League. He fell in love with them growing up in Jersey City, because their minor league club—also called the Giants—played there. I inherited my father’s passion for the game.
Dad was self-educated. He had to drop out of school after the eighth grade to help support his family. Nevertheless, he was a voracious reader, always with a Bible, dictionary, or newspaper in hand. By the time he met my mom, he was working a bunch of odd jobs, including as a waiter and a dockworker constructing battleships for the U.S. Navy on the rough Jersey City waterfront.
My mother was also first-generation Irish-American. Her maiden name was Furey. She was a high school graduate and was working as a seamstress when she met my father. Back then, most ethnic and immigrant groups kept to the same close circles in the melting pot of Jersey City, just a stone’s throw from New York. Therefore, she would run into him quite often when she was out and about with her sisters and brothers. A romance blossomed, and they got married in 1938.
While they didn’t live in abject poverty, conditions weren’t so rosy for them in the beginning. Most people in their neighborhood couldn’t afford a car, so they walked and took the bus everywhere. My parents never bought a house of their own; they always lived in apartments.
Family was the key to happiness for them. Because they were all so close to each other, both emotionally and geographically, the Lucas and Furey families were there to help each other out when needed. Thanks to God and His providence, they never lacked for any of the necessities. Laughter usually filled every gathering. It was a good life.
On January 3, 1939, I was b
When I was two years old, knowing that my eyes were not developing right and fearing that I would go blind, my mother made an appointment with Dr. Brophy, the best ophthalmologist in the area, without telling my father. His fee was ten dollars, a fortune for her at the time, but she paid it, knowing that I would have a chance at better care. Dr. Brophy diagnosed my problem as congenital cataracts and helped fix things to the best of his ability. He saved my sight before my third birthday came along.
My father flipped out when he discovered that my mother had lied to him about Dr. Brophy and the fee. She stood her ground and told him that her baby came first. Later in life I wondered about what seemed to be an overreaction on my father’s part. Why wouldn’t he also want the best for his child? As I later came to understand, he was at the beginning of a problem with severe alcoholism. The stress of married life and supporting a child was driving him to the bottle.
While my father was certainly the disciplinarian in the family, he was not a mean drunk. He never laid a hand on my mother or on anyone else; he was the kind of drinker who would drown his sorrows in whiskey and beer until he couldn’t function anymore. My mother prayed for his salvation, but the tension of living with a drunk who wouldn’t admit that he had a serious problem was getting to her as well. She considered ending the marriage. This all came to a head shortly after that, when my dad’s boss, Mr. Riley, came to the apartment and told my mother in no uncertain terms that either Dad quit drinking, or he would be fired. She delivered the ultimatum to Dad, emphasizing her own worries and fears.
Luckily for all of us, that shocking realization brought my father back from the abyss. The possibility of losing his job and losing us was his rock bottom. He started praying and going quietly to AA meetings with my mom. They would tell family members and babysitters that they were going on “a date” for the evening.
Fifteen months after I was born, my sister Maureen came along. We moved to Marion Gardens in Jersey City, another public housing development built to assist those with meager incomes. World War II was heating up, but Dad had an exemption from service because of his two children and his age at the time. He helped on the home front by working on battleships and destroyers. To supplement his income, he also decided to take a job working as a bartender, which terrified my mother. To her, it was like letting the fox directly into the henhouse. Though my father had made a vow to her, and he was keeping up with his AA meetings, she was worried that the easy temptation of alcohol might lure him back.
But Dad’s newfound deep faith ensured that would never happen.
Before the crisis, my father had been a “Christmas/Easter” churchgoer. As a wise pastor I met later in life put it, Dad was the sort of person who visits church only three times in life, when they are “hatched, matched, and dispatched.”
After he hit that rock bottom, my father dedicated himself to the Church, to Jesus, to the Virgin Mary, and to his special patron and middle namesake, Saint Joseph. Prayers became an important part of his life, and of ours. Sunday services were never missed. We are Catholic, so each night we would make time to say the family Rosary, putting off any other events to pray, quietly meditate on the Gospels, and spend quality time with the Lord.
With the love, strength, and compassion of the Holy Spirit filling his heart and soul, my father was able to curb his desire to consume any more alcohol.
My father never touched another drop of alcohol for the rest of his life.
WHEN I WAS about five or six, we moved to another Jersey City housing project, Lafayette Gardens. My mother insisted on the relocation because this put us in the proper district for PS 22, a school that offered special classes for children with vision problems.
There were about eight to ten children in the special vision classes, many of whom—like Gene Mehl and Margie Boasci—became lifelong friends. Our books were all written in large print. We would travel from class to class, learning alongside other students. My eyes were probably the worst of all the children, so each time my desk was placed as close to the blackboard as possible.
My sister Maureen went to Assumption Catholic School, which was near PS 22. I desperately wanted to go there, too. I wanted to be like Maureen and all of the other kids, who didn’t have to worry about special books or classes.
They did try letting me attend Assumption for a bit, an experiment that ended with almost comical results. I had to use a large magnifying glass to read the books that were part of the required religious education, which were not printed with large type like the state-funded books at PS 22. One day, I was sitting by the window, intently studying one of my textbooks with the magnifying glass held up above the book. It was a bright, sunny day. The angle was just high enough for the blazing solar rays to pour through the focused glass on to the dry paper and . . .
Well, I’m sure if you’ve seen enough old-time comedies, you can figure out what happened next. Thank God there was an extinguisher nearby to put out the resulting fire. Nobody was harmed, but that put an end to my days at Assumption.
We had a pretty normal family life. I never felt like an outcast or that there was something wrong with me. Along with Uncle Eugene, we had my father’s other brothers, Uncle George and Uncle Chris, and his sisters, Aunt Marge, Aunt Jo, and Aunt Anne, as well as my mother’s family, Aunt Gerry, Uncle Vinnie, Uncle Billy, Aunt Marian, and my godmother, Aunt Jeanne, to watch us, take care of us, and to go out with us when my parents were occupied.
We couldn’t afford big family vacations, so we spent summers swimming in public pools, playing in parks, and going to movies with our cousins and extended family members, like the five Dunphy kids. Their father, who was totally blind, befriended my Aunt Jeanne and her husband, Arthur, so the Dunphys spent lots of time around us. There were no fewer than three movie theaters in my neighborhood at that time. For an exotic treat, my parents would take us to the Canton Tea Gardens in Journal Square. I always felt like we were in China or on some distant Polynesian island while consuming the pu-pu pork platters and grilled shrimp served there.
My biggest thrills, of course, were always visits to the ballpark. My dad and other neighborhood parents would take a bunch of boys on the bus down to Roosevelt Stadium on the Hackensack River to watch the Jersey City Giants play. This happened at least once a week. My pals, Joe Walsh and Eugene Turner, were Yankee fans, but our buddy Benny Darvalics supported the Dodgers—the Giants’ and Yankees’ biggest rivals—so we razzed him quite often. No matter what team we rooted for, the love of baseball was our bonding ritual and common ground.
I was fortunate enough, in April 1946, to witness American history in Jersey City when Jackie Robinson made his professional baseball debut at Roosevelt Stadium, breaking the color barrier in sports and paving the way for the civil rights movement. My dad, despite his flaws, was always a fair man who gave people the benefit of the doubt. He did not make assumptions based solely on skin color. Recognizing that this would be a special moment, Dad kept me out of school that day to go to the game. I’m eternally grateful that he did.
Years later, I shared with Jackie my story of seeing him play in his first professional game. He expressed his deep appreciation for the way the fans in my hometown treated him that day. Robinson remembered the fifty-two thousand Jersey City rooters giving him a standing ovation, even though he was a member of the opposing team and actually went four for five with a home run to help beat our home team.
In 1947, I paid my first visit to Yankee Stadium. I don’t remember who took us or how we got there—all I vividly recall is the explosion of color that greeted me when I entered the Cathedral of Baseball: From the bright green grass, the sepia-tinged dirt, and the green-gray of the signature copper awning framed by the clear blue skies, this was definitely a special place.
