I wore light cloth suits to Horace Mann and awaited the new baseball season with the ardor of childhood. It was the year of American League expansion—there were two new teams, the Los Angeles Angels and a second Washington Senators (the first one now in Minnesota), which gave the pennant race an air of magic. Since the number of teams had always been fixed, it was as if two new planets had just been discovered in the Solar System. How would they play and look in the standings? From the first exhibition game I was clipping Yankee box scores from papers and pasting them in a datebook with clear Magic Mending Tape, the piny smell of which still reminds me of spring 1961. Soon after the regular season started I stumbled on a gold mine: Grossinger’s shared a box at Yankee Stadium with Eddie Fisher’s company, Ramrod Productions. Not only was it rarely used, but the strips of tickets were kept in a binder in the Hotel’s New York office, currency for the taking.
