A Football Classic
Nomura and Kurusu. Does anyone remember these names? We'll get back to them later. Anyway it was a cold but pleasant Sunday and the football New York Giants were scheduled to play the football Brooklyn Dodgers before 55,000 roaring fans at the Polo Grounds in New York. Did I say the "football" Brooklyn Dodgers? You betcha. Those were the years that Brooklyn had a football as well as a baseball team.The football Dodgers were mighty good too.They had All-American Ace Parker as quarterback and Bruiser Kinard an All-American lineman among others. And for good measure they beat the Giants that day 21-7 in spite of the fact that the Giants had some great pros such as Tuffy Leamans, Ward Cuff, Hank Soar, Mel Hein and Al Blozis. These names should be familiar to old sports fans like me.
So there we were sitting in chilly comfort on the 50 yard line - my father, one of his buddies and I who was fourteen at the time. I had been an avid newspaper reader from the age of seven; we always had five daily papers in our house and I was acutely aware of world news constantly. I knew that the aforementioned two gentlemen from Japan were in discussion with our Secretary of State Cordell Hull concerning the Indo-China crisis. It was learned later that those two envoys were not aware of what their navy was doing at the time. Incredible but true. Announcements started to come across the loudspeaker system during halftime - will Colonel So snd So, will General So and So etc etc please call your office immediately. I said to my father, ever the doubting Thomas,that something was peculiar about all the announcements but he shrugged it off as only procedure. Nothing was announced to the crowd as to prevent a stampede to the exits.
When we left the park we were besieged by boys hawking the New York Inquirer with the headlines "Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor". My father's reaction was typical of a tried and true New York advertising executive that one couldn't believe anything in that paper because it was, at best, a scandal sheet and they were trying to trick people into buying the paper. So off we went on the subway to the George Washington bridge, on a bus to New Jersey where our car was parked (people had to go to great lengths to see a ball game in those days). In all this time we never heard one word about the raid either on the bus or the subway. We didn't have a radio in our car (few people had one in those bygone days) and it wasn't until we reached home when I rushed into the house, turned on the radio and finally knew what had happened. It was December 7, 1941.
