4.2.12 WC: 191694 and Ralph Branca (whose mother, it now turns out, was Jewish!). Jackie Robinson, who was our real hero, generally was driven to the stadium for safety reasons. I will never forget Jackie Robinson’s first game with the Dodgers. We persuaded our European-born rabbi to make a special blessing for him, without his knowing whom he was blessing, since he never would have approved blessing a baseball player. We made up a Hebrew name for Jackie Robinson, calling him Yakov (Jacob) Gnov (Rob) buh (in) Ben (son). When he got his first hit, we were convinced the blessing had worked. I had a spiral notebook in which I had collected autographs of every single Brooklyn Dodger who played during my high school years. As soon as I moved out of the house my mother tossed it in the garbage pail, along with my signed baseball cards and comic book collection. I could’ve been a millionaire.... When the Dodgers were not at home, we would play softball in the parking lot adjacent to Ebbets Field. One day we made headlines when one of my classmates hit a homerun from the parking lot over the Ebbets Field wall. The Brooklyn Eagle reported that it was the first time anyone had hit a home run into rather than out of the ballpark. It’s not surprising that my high school memories are long on sports and short on academics, because my academic performance was abysmal. In my senior semester my first half grades were as follows (I still have the report card): English 80; Math 60 (F); Hebrew 65; History 65; Physics 60 (F). With two failing grades, I couldn’t graduate, and so by the end of the last semester, I raised my physics grade to the minimum passing number of 65; my math grade to 75; and my history grade to 70 (the others remained the same). Yet despite my poor grades, I still remember much of what the teachers taught, often quite poorly. Other, more useful, information from Yeshiva has also stayed with me, especially from the Torah, the Talmud and Jewish history. Half a centur