Sometimes, even after 31 years of telling stories, you can still be surprised by the things that hit readers in just the right way. I wrote a column, which ran in Sunday’s Post, about my father’s failure to win an argument with my mother back in the day about buying a chair from the old Yankee Stadium, when they were available for the princely sum of $7.50 (plus five empty Winston cigarette packs) from Korvette’s stores all over the New York and New Jersey.
For me, it was a nice opportunity to remember both of my late parents with a tale that’s always been one of my favorites from childhood. But for so many of you, it also evoked something. The responses have been overwhelming, and more than a little emotional, and I wanted to share some of them with you. Apologies for not including every one; I fear we might have run out of bandwidth if we tried.
And thank you, all of you, for sharing …
William Gillick’s grandfather, Artie McGovern, trained Babe Ruth before and during his fabled 1927 season at McGovern’s Gym near Wall Street, so when his brother’s mother-in-law bought a pair of chairs at the Korvette’s on Glen Cove Road, he gladly and quickly accepted one of them. It now sits in the sports bar in his home in East Amherst, near Buffalo.
“I only use it when the Yankees are in the playoffs,” he says. “I certainly hope I get a chance to use the chair this year.”
The thing about the chairs that you can only hint at looking at pictures is just how heavy they are. Len Belvedere, for instance, has carried two around from residence to residence for 46 years, ever since his father bought two at the West Hempstead location and brought them home to Franklin Square.
“The metal base is no joke,” Len says, and jokes, “if I ever have to move them now, I’ll have to ask my kids.”
John Innocenti feels Belvedere’s ache.
“My Yankee Stadium chair sits in our den/office in Apollo Beach, Fla.,” he says. “I schlepped it on the D train from the Stadium to the West 4th Street subway station and then walked it home. My arms killed me for a week because the cast iron frame was so heavy.”
Some of the folks who own these sacred artifacts didn’t have to wait for Korvette’s to put them on sale, and didn’t have to blow through five packs of Winston heaters to close the transaction. Some of them were among the 32,238 fans on hand on Sept. 30, 1973, when the Yankees lost to the Tigers in the last game ever played at the original Stadium.
Many — though not all — of the security folks looked the other way at game’s end, when in a time before the memorabilia boon the Yankees were more than happy to have their fans haul their junk away.
“I was not one of the fans who brought tools to that game,” says Jerry Sella, who brought his sons with him, “but the usher in our Section 8, Mezzanine Box 38 did. As the game drew to a close, he asked if I wanted the plate marking the box. I said yes and he took it off with his screw driver and gave it to me for a small fee of $2. I have it sitting in front of me as I type.”
Says James Nollet, “I know a vendor who worked the final game at the Old Stadium. He too came prepared with a wrench. He walked off with the big metal sheet, ‘MEZZANINE SECTION 36 SIGN.’ ”
Michael Hess tried his best to get what he could. He’d taken a bus and a subway from Pearl River to the game and brought a wrench with him.
“I remember trying to take off one of the subway signs saying, ‘Yankee Stadium’ on it,” he says, “but it was stolen from me by much older boys. People were jumping over the concessions stands trying to take everything. I tried to unbolt the chairs, to no avail. I ended up breaking the chairs and carrying parts of them home.”
But Bob Mangels remembers a few not-quite-as-lucky fans, too: “I saw people trying to take the seats out, but they were stopped as stadium security had people add the seats to a mounting pile in right field.” Mangels later splurged for a $15 box seat he picked up at the stadium, a tad higher quality than the grandstand seats Korvette’s sold.
Still, the sentiment folks most wanted to share were just how precious these secular relics really are to them, how carefully they’ve cared for them through the years, how meaningful they are on an almost spiritual level.
“Well, I was one of the lucky ones who ran to Korvette’s with the empty carton of Winstons (I threw away the cigarettes) to validate my purchase of two seats,” says Mike Witkes, who gave one to a friend — who later threw it away (some friend!). “The other, together with a metal plate that says, ‘The House that Ruth Built,’ proudly sits in my Yankee Room as the center piece of all my memorabilia.”
By the time Richard Breest got to the Korvette’s in West Islip the inventory was down to a few broken chairs and slabs of bleacher seats. He opted for the bleachers.
“My dad cemented it under a tree where it stayed for about 20 years,” he says. “I now have it tucked away in the rafters in my shed. Of all my Yankees souvenirs, my bleacher seat from the original stadium is my favorite.”
The sod was a secondary target for a lot of fans. Hess remembers, “I took a large chunk of the grass, brought it up and grew it in my yard. I even roped it off so no one would ever mistake our house’s grass from the grass Yankees greats had once played on.”
James Sella’s sons had a similar inspiration: “On our way out we walked on the field and the boys ripped out a square foot of sod. We had that in our front yard for years, until unfortunately we had to get new sod.”
(And, of course, these things aren’t limited to Yankees fans. As Vinny Mooney recalls, “My family grew up in Washington Heights. My uncle eventually moved to Sayreville, N.J., but took a large swath of sod from the outfield after a game at the Polo Grounds one day, replanting it in his lawn down there.)
Mostly, though, it was the chairs. Hess was able to buy a few some years later for $50. They sat in storage for a while, Hess constantly telling anyone who would listen that one day he’d restore them to their original glory.
“Then,” he says, “a friend of mine that lived down the street was so tired of me telling him that he came to my house with one mission, to get those pieces and restore them for me — free — and so this guy, a sandhog by trade, redid everything for me. They now sit in my basement for all to see and for me to remember those summer days when I was 15.”
Mark Whalen understands. His family had season tickets and the Yankees invited them to bring their old seats home. Whalen and his father stuffed six of them in the family station wagon.
“My father installed them on the back deck in Nanuet,” he says. “My parents had six children and my father put an engraved nameplate on each seat. As we got married and had children more nameplates were added to each seat. My sister bought the house from my parents years ago. She moved to North Carolina last year and I took the seats and have them on my deck in Warwick, N.Y.”
Martin Carus actually has a friendly offer for his fellow aficionados: “If you drive up Gorge Road at the border of Edgewater and Cliffside Park, N.J., and look to your right in the second high-rise building you see and then, going slow, count up 13 floors, on the terrace you will see two stadium seats. Two weeks from tomorrow I will be sitting there and I’ll be waving.”
Andy Klein was luckier than most. He saw Jim Bouton’s nightly sports report on Channel 7 live from the Stadium, showing some of the trinkets that had gone unclaimed. His mother drove from Amityville to The Bronx to get him the best birthday presents ever: a chair, a stack of unused playoff tickets, restroom signs and a 30-yard-line marker.
“I know a lot of people refinished the chairs, but I left mine in its original condition,” he says. “You can see the different paint colors from over the years. The yard-line marker still has dried mud on it.”
Of course, there were plenty of people who had the same experience I did: they never did get what they wanted, for any number of reasons. For me, it was Mom outfoxing Dad, as usual, in an intra-family debate.
For Steve Giegerich, he got off one day at the 161st Street subway stop and had a look inside the construction site.
“And anything I wanted was available to me. The guard, said, ‘Lots of you guys have helped themselves’ — I assume he thought I was part of the crew. But who the hell wanted that old junk and how would I get it on the el anyway?”
For Bob Blashka: “My dad was a young accountant working in the real-estate field. He gets a job with Kratter Development — the company that knocks down Ebbets Field. We lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in Bed-Stuy. Dad was offered as many seats as he could take and … you guessed it. He took none. The apartment was too small.”
For Steve Biegelsen, a Dodgers fan and Brooklyn native, he saw in the paper that old Ebbets Field seats were going for $2.50 and $5.
“I asked my brother to take me to Ebbets Field so I could buy one,” Biegelsen said. “He said no and that Mom would never let us keep them in our two-bedroom apartment. Boy, do I wish he said yes.”
For those who did, the rewards have been many. Most of those chairs, in reasonably good condition, could fetch upwards of $3,000-$5,000. That wouldn’t even occur to an awful lot of the owners. The investment is visceral, not fiscal.
“If I won lotto and bought a big enough house,” Len Belvedere says. “I’d buy a velvet rope like the ones they have in museums and put it around the seats.”
“Other than my family,” says John Innocenti, “it is my most prized possession. I once was offered a free move for the chair from a moving company owner when we moved from Virginia. My oldest son has already claimed it when I die.”
Says Mike Witkes: “I’m not selling my childhood memories anytime soon — let my four kids and 10 grandchildren fight over them when I’m gone!”
We started this with William Gillick, and let’s end it with him, too, since he explains as well as anyone could why this may have affected readers like him as it did: “You gave us something to laugh about. We could use more of that right now.”