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naturally, the price of admission to the Polo Grounds. Then I discovered a spot on Coogan’s Bluff, a high promontory behind the Polo Grounds, from which there was a clear view of the ballpark. Well, a clear view-yes, but clear only of the outside wall of the grandstand, a section of the bleachers, and one narrow, tantalizing wedge of the playing field.
    So to tell the truth, I didn’t really watch the Giants. I watched a Giant-the left fielder.
    When the ball came looping or bounding into my corner of the field, I saw real live big-league baseball. The rest of the time-which was most of the time-I watched a tiny man in a white or gray uniform standing motionless on a faraway patch of grass.
    Other kids collected pictures of Giants such as McGraw, Me- Ginnity and Matthewson. Not me. I was forever faithful to Sam Mertes, undistinguished left fielder, the only New York Giant I ever saw play baseball.
    Eventually I came to forgive Sam for all the hours he stood around, waiting for the action to come his way. It must have been just as frustrating for him down on the field as it was for me up on the bluff. It was easy for pitchers or shortstops to look flashy. They took lots of chances. My heart was with the guy who was given the fewest chances to take, the guy whose hope and patience never dimmed. Sam Mertes, I salute you! In whatever Valhalla you’re playing now, I pray that only right-handed pull-hitters come to bat, and the ball comes sailing your way three times in every inning.
    Much as I ran away from it every chance I got, the home neighborhood was not altogether a dreary slum. It had its share of giants too, men and women who belonged to the Outside World, who brought glitter and excitement into the lives of the rest of us East Siders.
    Such a luminary was Mr. Jergens, who ran the ice-cream parlor around the corner on Third Avenue. Mr. Jergens built and operated the first automobile in the neighborhood, a jaunty little electric runabout. When the runabout came cruising through our street, older kids would jump up and down and throw their caps under the car, yelling, “Get a horse!”
    If Mr. Jergens was disturbed by the jeering mobs, he never showed it. He drove straight on, leaning over the tiller, which he held with a death grip, squinting at the horizon of Lexington Avenue like Christopher Columbus sailing for the New World.
    I was one of the privileged few in the neighborhood who got to touch the runabout. Mr. Jergens had ordered a suit from Frenchie, and I went along when he delivered it. Mr. Jergens saw me admiring the car, in the alley behind the ice-cream parlor. He grinned at me and promised to take me for a ride. Boy oh boy oh boy! I had heard that the runabout could zoom down the brewery hill at a speed of fifteen miles an hour!
    But I never got my ride in the automobile. After making his promise to me, Mr. Jergens went upstairs and tried on his new suit and it was years before he ever spoke to me or my father again.
    There were two true aristocrats in our neighborhood, Mr. Ruppert and Mr. Ehret, the owners of the big breweries. Jake Ruppert’s mansion was on the corner of 93rd and Park Avenue. This was a fabulous place to me, for the principal reason that Ruppert’s garden contained a row of peach trees, which once a year bore lovely, luscious peaches.
    Ruppert’s garden also contained two huge watchdogs who ranged along the inside of the iron spiked fence, on the alert for peach poachers. It was the theory of Ruppert’s caretaker that the dogs would be more vicious if they were kept hungry. This theory backfired. I used to hustle a bag of fat and meat scraps from a butcher, feed the starving dogs through the fence until they got friendly and sleepy, then shinny over the spikes and fill my shirt with ripe peaches.
    No fruit ever tasted so sweet as stolen fruit, which was about the only kind I ever had until I became, at the age of eleven, a fulltime working man.
    There was a spectacular pageant on our