Thanks for the Memories,
Now Pass Me the Dynamite

By Tom McMorrow, Jr

On April 17, 1964, I was incarcerated in Miss Doran's 3rd grade class in the institution known as PS 101. I was doing hard labor. Miss Doran was determined to instill in her young inmates the need for attentiveness in her cell block, and had decided the best course of action with yours truly was to have me write fifty times in my notebook, "I will pay attention in the class room." Normally, such arduous labor would have instilled in me, at the moment, a certain revolutionary zeal, the pulling of pigtails, the passing of conspiratorial notes to fellow inmates, but such was not the case on the morning of April 17, 1964, for I knew I had an out that day. My father had arranged to pull me out of the class at 11 AM that morning. The reasons given to the administration were vague, "a serious family matter," an official looking note, perhaps with what appeared to be a doctor's signature. The details now elude me, 40 years later, but I do remember that at 11AM, Miss Doran asked me for my notebook, checking it to assure herself that I had completed her Draconian task, and sent me on my way.

Freedom! For my true destination that day was not a doctor's office or a sick aunt, but the ball park, Shea Stadium, with my parents and my two sisters.

This was a special day, the first game ever played at Shea Stadium, the home of the New York Mets and Jets. My father had purchased a box in the mezzanine. My heroes, the woeful Mets, were taking on the Pittsburgh Pirates that day. As we went to our seats, armed with hot dogs, scorecards and Cokes, I could feel the excitement rise within my soul. Let's Go Mets!

When we got to our seats, I was struck by two things, one being that the drains of this new stadium apparently did not work (there was an inch of water below our feet, left over from a rainstorm in the distant past), and the other being the distance from our seats to home plate. We were very, very far away. And we were seated behind home plate in the front row of the mezzanine.

But such concerns mattered little to a boy on furlough from PS 101. Even the Pirates victory that day, accented by a monstrous home run off the bat of the Pirates Willie Stargell, mattered not. What was important to me was the stadium itself. Home of the Mets. And home of the Jets. And a second home to me.

I spent many hundreds of days at that ball park over the next ten years. In those days, my father had a press pass, which he bestowed upon me. The guard at the press gate used to laugh and say, "Hey, Red," and waive me in. By the late '60's, I would spend every day of the summer at that ball park. After each game, I would sneak downstairs to the runway where the Mets ballplayers would exit the locker room on their way to the parking lot located below the scoreboard.

At first, it was to get autographs. But after having filled several yearbooks with signatures, the passing conversations I had with the ballplayers became more important than any signature.

The Mets and Jets were young teams on the rise. The ballplayers on the two teams were, for the most part, incredibly personable. I remember Tom Seaver and his lovely wife Nancy. It is rare for a public person to be as "nice" in the flesh as they seem in the press, but Tom Seaver was just that. He would always stop and say, "Hey Red, how's it going?' Cleon and Angela Jones were equally warm. Jerry Koosman, from the heartland of America, became concerned at the length of my Afro (this was 1968) and paid me to get a haircut. I still have the dollar he signed for me that day.

The Jets were equally generous with their time, though it was hard to form the same personal relationships with them that you could with baseball players whom you'd see every day. However, I do remember sneaking out onto the field on game days, long after the crowds had gone home, and playing pickup football games with my fellow hooligans as the sun went down.

But despite all these warm nostalgic memories, that first youthful impression of Shea Stadium was quite accurate.

Shea Stadium is horribly designed.

The architectural firm of Praeger-Kavanagh-Waterbury designed the stadium to be the first all-purpose facility capable of hosting baseball and football games, seating 55,300 for baseball and 60,000 for football. It was a true prototype, one that city after city copied across the country. Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Oakland. It is now a relic, one of a handful of those stadiums still standing.

What went wrong?

Remember that first impression of mine. We were seated near home plate, where you want to be at a baseball game, yet we were far away. Here is a seating diagram of the stadium in its baseball configuration.

As a stadium designed for both baseball and football, it serves neither. The basic idea of the design is simple: Build a circular grandstand, then place your field boxes on a giant tracks, allowing them to slide into a right angle for baseball, or open up onto opposite sides for football. The most desirable seats in a baseball stadium are from behind home plate to first base. That is because most of the action in a baseball game happens at either home plate or first base. But, unless you are seated in the field seats of this stadium, despite being seated in what should be prime seats, you are located far away from the action, due to the perfect circle shape of the stands. Yankee Stadium, on the other hand, has been standing since the early 1920's, with one major renovation since then. It was designed for baseball, only. Yes, football can be played there (I remember an exhibition game the Jets played there after the renovation) but it is called The House that Ruth Built for a reason. The reason for that stadium's success is the design (and the most famous franchise in sports) Note that the grandstand follows the shape of the baseball diamond, meaning wherever you are seated in the stadium, you are still located along the foul lines of the field, giving a spectator the feeling of being part of the action no matter where he or she is seated.

Now, when it comes to football (or, say, the Olympics) the problem is much, much worse. Here is a picture of Shea Stadium in football mode. In football, the spectator wants to be seated as close to the fifty yard line as possible, because most of the action in football takes place between the twenty yard lines, towards the middle of the field. But in Shea Stadium, most of the seats are either in the enclosed end zone or just too far from the action, at the apex of the stadium's circle. There are are no good seats in this stadium for football, and you can apply that rule to any possible use for the Olympics. If Shea Stadium is the "fall back" position for the New York 2012 Olympic bid, as some wags have wagered, then the truth is that we do not have a fall back position, for the IOC will never sanction a stadium as horrid in design as this one for an Olympiad.

Some day in the not-too-distant future, after West Side Stadium is a reality, and after the Mets dig a little deeper into their pockets to help pay for a stadium, it'll come time to demolish Shea. As the stadium is imploded with dynamite, I will shed a tear for the memories, but not a drop for the stadium, itself.