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square jaw of a guy who would know how to punch back. Which he certainly does. He was an end and a basketball player at Georgetown in the late twenties and today, at 6 feet and 195 pounds, he is still in shape.
    His business is law, and his business is not small. The firm of Manning, Hollinger, and Shea takes up the entire twenty-first floor of their building on 42nd Street, and as you sit in his carpeted office and wait to talk to him, he is taking calls from City Hall, then from a Florida fruit-juice company he represents, then from a man in Nashville, Tennessee. On this one he brings up the mysteries of high financing. He is all big business. But Shea is anything but one of those stuffy, pipe-smoking corporation attorneys. This is a guy who knows. He is married to the former Maynora Shaw, whose father, Tom Shaw, was the biggest bookmaker on the New York race tracks back in the twenties. Bookmaking was legal then. Shea himself operated a minor-league football team for a couple of years in the forties and was associated with Ted Collins in a National Football League franchise in Boston.
    Shea is one of those people you find, but not too often, who is willing to do something for his own and knows how to do it. His own in this case is people who live and work in New York. It is Shea’s town, and nobody fits into the town better than he does.
    So, one afternoon in November of 1957, his secretary buzzed him and said the Mayor of New York, Mr. Robert Wagner, was calling. Shea picked up the phone and, whether anybody knew it or not, the New York Mets were now on their way.
    â€œI want to get a National League team into the city as quickly as possible,” Wagner told him. “I want to start by getting a New York sports committee formed, and I’d like you to take it over.”
    Shea said of course he would. There would be no problem to it at all, he said. “We’ll just have to steal a team from another city, the same way Los Angeles and San Francisco moved in on us,” he said. “Either that, or get some sort of expansion in which we would figure. I don’t think it will be hard.”
    He certainly did not. If Shea had had any idea of what he was getting into, he might have thought twice. For before he was through it would mean three and a half years of traveling, phoning, working, and selling, and all of it at his own personal expense. None of this is very important to Shea now. The big thing, as far as he is concerned, is that he got the job done.
    â€œI’d feel a lot better about the whole thing if the Mets can get a decent relief pitcher,” he was saying one day last December. “People claim the club is my responsibility. They’re getting nasty about it, too.”
    Shea was wearing the kind of snap-brim brown hat that is quite popular with older New York City detectives, and a big camel’s-hair coat. He was sitting with his wife in a box seat at Yankee Stadium, watching a football game. As the game went on, he talked about how the Mets began.
    â€œI started out to get a team,” he was saying, “and it looked easy. We made up a presentation for Powel Crosley at Cincinnati, and it looked like we were going to have the Reds in here. We could offer him rental on the new stadium which we were going to build at Flushing Meadows. We showed him that tax-wise it would be an advantageous move for him. But, in the end, he turned us down.
    â€œThen we went to John Galbreath in Pittsburgh, but he said he was going to stay where he was. Finally I sat down with Bob Carpenter in Philadelphia. He is stuck in an old stadium with no parking. We had the perfect offer for him. But in talking to Carpenter, I began to realize one thing. This fellow is just like me. He doesn’t want to move. Philadelphia is his town and he is going to stay there. He’s not going to pick up and leave the place just for money. There are other things which are more important to him. Civic pride?