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compete for it with my sisters.”
    Carly began piano lessons when she was eight. But even this was fraught with difficulties when her father was around. “He was an incredible pianist, but this was only well known to his friends. A famous musician like Arthur Rubinstein would come to our house and ask my father to play Chopin so he could study his technique.
    “I started to learn to play, but then I developed a phobia about the piano. If my father was around when I was practicing, he’d say, ‘No darling, you play it like
this
,’ and I would have to get up and he would sit down, and then he’d forget I was practicing and he’d play for an hour. After a year of this, when I was nine, I had to stop taking lessons.”
    Carly stayed away from the piano until she wrote the melody to“That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” on the piano, fifteen years later.
    What finally cemented the bond between Carly and her father, at least for a couple of years in the early fifties, was their shared love of the Brooklyn Dodgers. And the Simons weren’t ordinary baseball fans. Dick’s friendships with the Dodgers’ management and players ensured that when he took Carly to home games at Ebbets Field, they often sat in the Dodgers’ dugout.
    Dick Simon had long been a Dodgers fan, and this ardor increased after the team broke the color barrier by signing the brilliant shortstop Jackie Robinson in 1947. Robinson was a great athlete and a ferocious competitor, whose youthful zeal matured into righteous fury when he was subjected to racist slurs, obviously deliberate bean balls, and gratuitous spikings for being the first black player in baseball’s major leagues. By 1952, Robinson was one of the most famous sports figures in America, having helped the Dodgers win the National League pennant in 1949, and having opened the gates to other black talent, including Duke Snider and Roy Campanella on his own team.
    Dick Simon wanted Simon and Schuster to publish Robinson’s biography, and approached him through the Dodgers. Jackie brought his wife to Stamford for the weekend, and Andrea Simon bonded with Rachel Robinson immediately. Soon the Robinsons and their children, Jackie Jr., Sharon, and David, were regular guests on Newfield Avenue, for them a safe haven from the glare of sports celebrity and the occasional threats on Jackie’s life.
    In the spring of 1952, Dick Simon started bringing Carly along with him to Dodgers home games. Joey and Lucy weren’t interested in baseball, and Peter was too young, so Carly got the job of accompanying her father by default. She was thrilled by this, and by the buzz of being a guest of the Brooklyn Dodgers and a special friend of Jackie Robinson. She learned to mark her scorecard like her dad, and memorized the batting averages of superstars such as Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges. On the way to Brooklyn, Carly would quizher father on baseball statistics. She became a Dodger team mascot, with her own little uniform. Phil Rizzuto would see her and say, “Hi, Carly.” So did Don Newcombe.
    The Dodgers had narrowly lost the pennant to the rival New York Giants in 1951, so the new season was an exciting time to be a Dodger fan—and there was ecstasy in Brooklyn, and in Riverdale, when the Dodgers won the pennant that year. This immigrant-looking team of Italians and blacks mirrored its polyglot borough of Brooklyn perfectly, especially in 1952, when it went down to defeat by the arch-imperialist New York Yankees, the Bronx Bombers, in the World Series.
    “Wait Till Next Year” was the unofficial team slogan.
    The Brooklyn Dodgers won the pennant in 1953 as well, and again Dick Simon and his daughter were on hand for many home games. Carly sat on Pee Wee Reese’s lap in the Dodger dugout. Father and daughter were growing closer now, and had nicknames for each other. He was Baldy; Carly was Scarlet, or Carlotta. But now that she had partly won over her father, Carly began to lose interest in